Contents

REFEREED ARTICLES

Peter J. Snow   abstract
Charting the Domains of Human Thought: A New Theory on the Operational Basis of the Mind
Bernard J. Baars  abstract
I.P. Pavlov and the Freedom Reflex
Victoria Grace  abstract
Embodiment and Meaning: Understanding Chronic Pelvic Pain
Jing Zhu  abstract
Reclaiming Volition: An Alternative Interpretation of Libet’s Experiment

Conference Reports

Nigel J.T. Thomas  full text
Imagining Minds: Bradshaw Seminar, February 2003
Robert Pepperell  full text
 Between Phenomenology and Neuroscience: TSC Conference at Prague, July 2003

Book Review Article

Josh Weisberg  full text
Being All That We Can Be: A Critical Review of Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One
ABSTRACTS

Bernard J. Baars

I.P. Pavlov and the Freedom Reflex

Why was Ivan Pavlevich Pavlov so widely celebrated in the decades after 1900? As his story of the ‘freedom reflex’ illustrates, Pavlov often overstated his observations. By calling all innate behaviour a reflex and all learned behaviour a conditional reflex, he meant to eliminate consciousness and volition from science. Pavlov’s universal reflex explanation became the prototype for behaviourism.

Other scientists did not accept the universal reflex explanation. It was not Pavlov’s experiments but his utopian promises that led to his meteoric public rise. Pavlov’s dream attracted new, rising elites, particularly social reformers like H.G. Wells and the Fabians in Britain. In the Soviet Union he gave credence to efforts to fashion a New Soviet Man. And in the United States, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner rose to public fame in his footsteps, using extremely limited evidence to make utopian promises of human perfectibility.

Pavlov’s vision lent credibility to the behaviourist attack on consciousness. While radical behaviourists were always a small minority, they successfully enforced a scientific boycott of the ‘mentalistic’ concepts of everyday psychology. After Karl Lashley pointed out in 1930 that Pavlov’s ideas contradicted the known brain evidence, B.F. Skinner changed the term ‘reflex’ to ‘stimulus– response relationship’. For another fifty years Skinner convinced the world that consciousness and volition could be ignored.

Pavlov’s method is still useful, but none of his utopian promises have been fulfilled. Today, no scientist believes that reflex arcs are basic units of learning. The evidence suggests that Pavlovian association itself requires consciousness.

I.P. Pavlov was a man of great personal integrity. Yet he led the way to an era of taboo against consciousness and voluntary control. Pavlov was a founding hero of the behaviouristic myth of the origins of psychology, which erased the first great age of consciousness science. Most alarming was the immense popularity of Pavlov’s dream, which stripped away the most essential elements of human nature.

Correspondence: B.J. Baars, 3616 Chestnut St. Apt. 3, Lafayette, CA 94549, USA.
Bernard Baars is an Affiliated Research Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego.  Email: baars@nsi.edu

Victoria M. Grace

Embodiment and Meaning: Understanding Chronic Pelvic Pain

The case of chronic pelvic pain in women is presented as an example to explore firstly, the problem of medical knowledge on, and interventions for, chronic pain; secondly, current new developments at the intersection of neuroscience and phenomenology, in particular Varela’s proposal for a ‘neurophenomenology’; and thirdly, methodological issues of significance for social interpretive sciences to enable their active contribution to this research programme. This paper argues that a non-dualistic concept of embodiment is fundamental to developing understandings of chronic pain, and that contributions from critical phenomenology need to be augmented with analyses from socio-political and cultural research. The social interpretive sciences, to contribute to a fully interdisciplinary neurophenomenology, need a methodology for analysing meanings (particularly narrative) within a theorization of language that is commensurate with critical phenomenological accounts of embodiment.

Correspondence: Dr Victoria Grace, Social Sciences, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. Email: victoria.grace@canterbury.ac.nz

P.J. Snow

Charting the Domains of Human Thought: A New Theory on the Operational Basis of the Mind

The article presents a new theory for the subdivision of human thought into four domains that are experientially and operationally discrete and are elaborated by activity in four anatomically definable areas of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. I propose that these areas constitute the Social, Material, Temporal and Abstract divisions of the mind and that their sequential maturation accounts for the cognitive stages of childhood. The Social Mind (Brodmann’s area 9 (BA9)) is responsible for our emotional intelligence. The Temporal Mind (BA10) enables us to contemplate the future in terms of a sequence of manageable sub-goals. The Material Mind (BA47 and BA45) is responsible for our practicality. The Abstract Mind (BA46) enables us to comprehend possibility and generate hypotheses. Because recent neurogenetical studies show the powerful influence of genes in controlling the size of the areas of Brodmann, I suggest further that variation in the size of these areas provides an explanation for (a) the genetic basis of personality and (b) many of the so-called cultural differences apparent between long-isolated human populations.

Correspondence: P.J. Snow, Wilson Laboratories, Department of Human Biology, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2360, Australia. Email: premramoda@Yahoo.com

Jing Zhu

Reclaiming Volition: An Alternative Interpretation of Libet’s Experiment

 Based on his experimental studies, Libet claims that voluntary actions are initiated by unconscious brain activities well before intentions or decisions to act are consciously experienced by people. This account conflicts with our common-sense conception of human agency, in which people consciously and intentionally exert volitions or acts of will to initiate voluntary actions. This paper offers an alternative interpretation of Libet’s experiment. The cause of the intentional acts performed by the subjects in Libet’s experiment should not be exclusively attributed to special cerebral processes; conscious intentions formed at the beginning of the experiment, when the subjects received experimental instructions, must be taken into account. In addition, what the subjects were required to report was not a conscious intention or decision to act that conventionally figures in the etiology of voluntary action, but rather a perceived effective urge to move induced by specific experimental instructions. According to the alternative interpretation, the most suitable mental term correlated with the specific brain activity that precedes conscious, self-initiated voluntary bodily movements is volition. This account is supported by recent theories of function of the supplementary motor area (SMA). Therefore, the notion that we are the authors or originators of our own actions, which is fundamental to our common understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human dignity, can be preserved.

Correspondence: Jing Zhu, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19(A) Yu Quan Road, Beijing, 100039, China.  Email: humanwill@yahoo.ca

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