Contents

Refereed Paper

Shahar Arzy, Moshe Idel, Theodor Landis & Olaf Blanke  abstract
Speaking with One’s Self: Autoscopic Phenomena in Writings from the Ecstatic Kabbalah
Christian Kaernbach  abstract
No Virtual Mind In the Chinese Room
Henry P. Stapp  abstract
Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism

Continuing Debate

P.M.S. Hacker  abstract
Goodbye To Qualia And All What? A Reply to David Hodgson

Conference Report

Helmut Reich  full text
Methodological and Conceptual Issues: TSC 2005

Poetry

Joseph Goguen  full text
November Qualia

Book Reviews  full text

Valerie Gray Hardcastle
Christina E. Erneling & David Martel Johnson (eds), The Mind as a Scientific Object
Alwyn Scott
Igor Aleksander, The World in my Mind, My Mind in the World
David W. Salt
Stefano Franchi & Güven Güzeldere (eds), Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds
Chris Nunn
Eva Jablonka & Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions
Dimitris Platchias
Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough
Stephan Schleim
Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain
Shannon Vallor
Peter J. Ludlow et al. (eds), There’s Something About Mary
Alwyn Scott
Rodrick Wallace, Consciousness: A Mathematical Treatment of the Global Neuronal Workspace

ABSTRACTS

Shahar Arzy, Moshe Idel, Theodor Landis & Olaf Blanke

Speaking With One’s Self: Autoscopic Phenomena in Writings from the Ecstatic Kabbalah

Abstract: Immediate experience localizes the self within the limits of the physical body. This spatial unity has been challenged by philosophical and mystical traditions aimed to isolate concepts of mind and body. A more direct challenge of the spatial unity comes from a well-defined group of experiences called ‘autoscopic phenomena’ (AP), in which the subject has the impression of seeing a second own body in an extrapersonal space. AP are known to occur in many human cultures and have been described in healthy, as well as neurological and psychiatric populations. In this article we investigate the phenomenology of AP as described in the writings of the ecstatic Kabbalah of the thirteenth century, and search for similarities and differences with respect to AP from these and other populations. The article discusses potential common research areas between cognitive science and the science of religious experience.
Key words: autoscopic phenomena, ecstatic Kabbalah, neurology, phenomenology, mystical experience, temporo-parietal junction.

Correspondence: Shahar Arzy, Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain-Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. Email: shahar.arzy@epfl.ch

P.M.S. Hacker

Goodbye To Qualia And All What? A Reply to David Hodgson

David Hodgson’s review article, ‘Goodbye To Qualia And All That?’ in the February issue of this journal (Hodgson, 2005) alleges that ‘some of the basic propositions’ of the book Max Bennett and I wrote together, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003), are fundamentally mistaken. He cites three issues: direct realism regarding perception; our insistence that it is wrong to suppose that a person has ‘access’, let alone ‘privileged access’, to his own experiences; and our contention that the subject of experience is not ‘a self’, but a human being. The reasoning behind his allegations is flawed, and the conclusion he draws from them, namely that ‘qualia’ are alive and well, does not follow.

Correspondence: P.M.S. Hacker, St John’s College, Oxford OX1 3JP, UK.

Christian Kaernbach

No Virtual Mind In the Chinese Room

Abstract: The Chinese room thought experiment of John Searle militates against strong artificial intelligence, illustrating his claim that syntactical knowledge by itself is neither constitutive nor sufficient for semantic understanding as found in human minds. This thought experiment was put to a behavioural test, concerning the syntax of a finite algebraic field. Input, rules and output were presented with letters instead of numbers. The set of rules was first presented as a table but finally internalized by the participants. Quite in line with Searle’s argument, uninformed participants mastered the syntax but did not explicitly report semantic knowledge. In order to test the virtual mind reply to the Chinese room argument, the reaction time pattern of the participants was compared to that of an informed control group. The correlation was quite high but could be traced back to memory load and response priming, i.e. to syntactical factors. No trace of tacit semantic knowledge of the task could be found in the experimental group.

Correspondence: Christian Kaernbach, Institut für Psychologie, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Schubertstr. 51a, 8010 Graz, Austria. www.kaernbach.de

Henry P. Stapp

Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism

Abstract: René Descartes proposed an interactive dualism that posits an interaction between the mind of a human being and some of the matter located in his or her brain. Isaac Newton subsequently formulated a physical theory based exclusively on the material/physical part of Descartes’ ontology. Newton’s theory enforced the principle of the causal closure of the physical, and the classical physics that grew out of it enforces this same principle. This classical theory purports to give, in principle, a complete deterministic account of the physically described properties of nature, expressed exclusively in terms of these physically described properties themselves. Orthodox contemporary physical theory violates this principle in two separate ways. First, it injects random elements into the dynamics. Second, it allows, and also requires, abrupt probing actions that disrupt the mechanistically described evolution of the physically described systems. These probing actions are called Process 1 interventions by von Neumann. They are psycho-physical events. Neither the content nor the timing of these events is determined either by any known law, or by the afore-mentioned random elements. Orthodox quantum mechanics considers these events to be instigated by choices made by conscious agents. In von Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory each such intervention acts upon the state of the brain of some conscious agent. Thus orthodox von Neumann contemporary physics posits an interactive dualism similar to that of Descartes. But in this quantum version the effects of the conscious choices upon our brains are controlled, in part, by the known basic rules of quantum physics. This theoretically specified mind–brain connection allows many basic psychological and neuropsychological findings associated with the apparent physical effectiveness of our conscious volitional efforts to be explained in a causal and practically useful way. The intent of this paper is to give an updated account of the author’s developing theory that is clearer than before, focused on the positive, and suitable for non-specialist readers.

Correspondence: Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. Email: hpstapp@lbl.gov

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