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Science and Moral Priority
Roger Sperry
A Nobel laureate's attempt to reconcile hard neuroscience with human values. Roger Sperry, who won the 1981 Nobel Prize for his split-brain experiments, argues here that consciousness is a real, causally potent feature of the brain, not an illusion or mere byproduct, and that recognizing this reframes how science should treat mind, free will, and morality. The essays collected under *Science and Moral Priority: Merging Mind, Brain, and Human Values* press a bold claim: that a properly updated science can and should ground ethics rather than banish it. Written in accessible, argumentative prose for educated general readers, it is the philosophical testament of a major experimentalist reaching beyond the lab toward questions of meaning and value.
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The author
Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) was an American neuropsychologist whose split-brain research, severing the corpus callosum and studying the results, revealed that the two hemispheres can process information independently. It earned him a share of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Late in his career he turned increasingly to the philosophical implications of his findings.
The book
Science and Moral Priority argues for what Sperry called "emergent" or "mentalist" causation: consciousness arises from brain activity yet exerts genuine top-down influence over it. From that premise he builds toward a naturalistic case that human values deserve scientific priority, and that mind cannot be reduced away without losing something real.
How it reads
Sperry's position was ambitious and contested. Reductionist philosophers of mind disputed his claim that emergent consciousness escapes physical determinism, and some found the leap from neuroscience to a science-grounded ethics too quick. Yet his emphasis on consciousness as causally efficacious anticipated debates that are still live, and the book reads as a thoughtful, if optimistic, bridge-building effort by a scientist unwilling to leave values to others.
For more context
Pair with John Searle's work on consciousness and with Sperry's Nobel lecture for the experimental foundation of these claims.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Roger Sperry
- Publisher
- Columbia University Press
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1983
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Science
- Location
- Colorado