Well, there is probably no single view that can be attributed to all scientists. And of course, being in a debative (is that a word?) frame of mind I was choosing my rhetoric accordingly; however there are a number of very vociferous proponents of the pure-chemistry-explains-all school of thought, notably the late Francis Crick of DNA Helix fame, who authored a tome called The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul in I think 1994, in which he insisted that the cortex and its correlative parts in the brain must be able to account for everything human including thought, intuition, and so on. To me this is like worshiping a telephone because -- although noone understands how it is possible -- it is capable of an infinite number of conversations about anything! Crick has spent extensive effort on seeking the neurological component of consciousness.

Anyway, I am well aware that there are many who have earned the right to be called scientists who are nevertheless still able to accept a borader phenomenological set than their current theory can describe, and have the integrity to acknowledge the delta between the two.

Skinnerian theory -- operant conditioning and strict reliance on behavior as data unimpeded by unmeasurable things like thought and feeling, etc. -- has probably waned from its heyday; but its defense against the difficulty of describing language acquisition in terms of stimuli and responses was merely to postulate that it really IS just S=>R links, only a great many more of them than we have imagined hitherto and therefore not clearly explicable until we have mastered the complexity. This is a typical retreat -- the argument of unfathomed complexity -- for some kinds of scientific thought. Evolutionary theoreticians use it to account for some of the anomalies in classic Darwinian theory -- billions of years with very small changes.

My own conviction in all this borrows from a number of sources, and pays due respect to those who burrow among the molecules and nerves for the discoveries they make, but also borrows from people like Bergson and Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine). My sense is that there are two interconnected domains, each witht heir own peculiar propertiees and dynamics, one comprising the apparent physical universe of energy in space generating apparent time; and the other comprising knowing, intention, abilities that are beyond easy explanation of the six senses, and qualities like mercy, justice, aesthetic and intuition. The problem -- and the core structure of the human condition -- is that the domains become so tightly enmeshed with each other that the power of the spiritual domain is reduced toward the entropic and constraining limits of the physical side; and the plastic and creative ability of the spiritual side becomes entrained in merely promulgating pictures and values of physical experience as its own unique nature is gradually pressed down by a long series of collisions with distress, compromise, dishonesty, pain and loss while trying to acheive survival through the medium of spacetime. That's the short version,anyway.

Regards,

A