In taking this viewpoint, Schwartz explicitly departs from Ayn Rand’s position that the self is identical to the mind. He sees this as contradictory to her ethical principle of rational self-interest.

“In Rand’s framework,” he states, “it surely does not mean to live for one’s mind;…” It means, instead, to live for the whole organism—mind and body. It is a fascinating thesis, although I have to take issue with his reference to Gilbert Ryle’s alleged “ghost in the machine.” By adopting this phrase, Schwartz opens himself to charges of reductionism.

[Schwartz] then adds more fuel to that fire. While distinguishing self from mind, he advocates discarding the whole notion of any “immaterial, ontologically independent” aspect of our being. He comes dangerously close to throwing out the baby with the bath water, discounting the mind in the process of differentiating it. Human consciousness is, in fact, not only immaterial, but—at least to some unknown extent—ontologically independent. This does not qualify it as in any sense a “ghost.”

Bill,

It is my view that consciousness not only does not exist independently of the brain, but also does not function independently of the brain -- that a mental action, an act of thought, is simultaneously a physical action of the brain. Otherwise, a person's ability to think and to reason would exist independently of the structure and function of his brain, which we know is false. One's ability to think and to reason crucially depends both on the kind of brain that one possesses and on its physical health and condition. So, when one chooses to think, one is simultaneously initiating both a mental and a physical action. The mental action is the brain's operation viewed introspectively, and the physical action is the mind's operation viewed extrospectively.

I am not really certain whether we have a disagreement here or not.  Here’s a comment about this issue I made on another thread:

Psycho-neural identity theories which posit a one-to-one correlation between mental events and neural events in the brain do not “prove” that the mental is equivalent to the physical—they establish the opposite conclusion.  To correlate phenomena is to establish the existence of separate phenomena, so they cannot be identical.  Psycho-neural parallelism may well have some scientific validity—but it is obviously only a step in the direction of acquiring a full understanding of the operations of consciousness.

…[Your] view of the brain does not account for the phenomenon of volition.  Unless there is something more than status quo physics and chemistry involved here, all mental events would require some type of antecedent stimulus.  Are you prepared to dispense with the concept of free will?  Because if you are, you will also need to dispense with any claim for the validity of your beliefs, since—based on present knowledge--all the contents of your thinking must be dictated by prior physical-neural events.  In other words, since your mind is not in your control, neither are any of your conclusions.

You say that “when one chooses to think, one is simultaneously initiating both a mental and a physical action…”    I think that conclusion requires some speculation on your part.  I would contend that we don’t know what precisely is going on when we initiate a mental act.  To say that something “physical” is going on strikes me as reductionist.  Something entirely beyond our present understanding of the physical world may be involved in the generation of thoughts, and that something needs to be able to account for volition. 

This relates to another comment (here) on the same thread:

David Kelley had some terrific insights on this in a lecture entitled “The Nature of Free Will.”  The following is my paraphrase of some of what he had to say:  

Consciousness emerges as a control mechanism at a certain stage of development within a biological nervous system, to preserve an organism’s ability to function as a unit—i.e., to deal with external factors by the standard of the organism’s survival needs.  With man, the same problem breaks out at the level of consciousness itself.  The conceptual mind is in danger of being pulled in numerous different directions at once, as man is confronted with the need to make choices in the light of an open-ended amount of knowledge.  To preserve his capacity to function as a unit—i.e., to survive—man was in need of a higher level control mechanism—the capacity to focus.  Within a complex system of neural organization, such as the human brain, an event could easily be the product both of antecedent factors (i.e., evolution) and other simultaneous factors operating at higher and lower levels of this organization.  The capacity to focus (“free will”) is a product of upward causation (evolution) and constrained by it, but the choice to focus is an instance of pure downward causation—of conscious activity directly affecting neural activity.

At this point, we know little or nothing about the factors involved in mediating "downward" causation.  I think that there is good basis for arguing that something nonphysical must have some limited capacity to control the physical if we are to make scientific sense of volition.