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Ullin Place
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A Pilgrim's Progress?
From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness
with editorial introduction by Anthony Freeman abstract
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Semir Zeki
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Neural Concept Formation and Art: Dante, Michelangelo, Wagner abstract
REVIEW ARTICLES
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Stanley Krippner and Allan Combs
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The Neurophenomenology of Shamanism
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Review of Michael Winkelman’s Shamanism full
text
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Derek J. Smith
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A Work of Cryptology: Review of S.J. Newton’s
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Painting, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality
BOOK REVIEWS
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Burton Voorhees
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Sunny Y. Auyang, Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Science
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Chris Nunn
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Jason W. Brown, Mind and Nature
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Bruno Deschenes
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Rold Inge Godøy and Harald Jørgensen (ed.), Musical Imagery
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David Hodgson
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Nicholas Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe
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Rahull Banerjee
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Charles Tart (ed.), Body, Mind, Spirit
ABSTRACTS
Paul Livingston
Experience and Structure. Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness
Investigation and analysis of the history of the concepts employed in contemporary
philosophy of mind could significantly change the contemporary debate about
the explainability of consciousness. Philosophical investigation of the
history of the concept of qualia and the concept of scientific explanation
most often presupposed in contemporary discussions of consciousness reveals
the origin of both concepts in some of the most interesting philosophical
debates of the twentieth century. In particular, a historical investigation
of the inheritance of concepts of the elements of experience and the nature
of scientific explanation from C. I. Lewis and Rudolf Carnap to contemporary
theorists like David Chalmers shows the profound continuity of these concepts
throughout the analytic tradition, despite important changes in the dimensions
of philosophical relevance and significance that have characterized the
emerging debate.
I argue that, despite the significant methodological shift from
the foundation- alist epistemology of the 1920s to today’s functionalist
explanations of the mind, the problem of explaining consciousness has remained
the problem of analysing or describing the logical and relational structure
of immediate, given experience. Appreciation of this historical continuity
of form recommends a more explicit discussion of the philosophical reasons
for the underlying distinction between structure and content, reasons that
trace to Lewis and Carnap’s influential but seldom-discussed understanding
of the relationship between subjectivity, conceived as the realm of private,
ineffable contents, and objectivity, understood as public, linguistic expressibility.
With this historical background in mind, the contemporary debate about
the explanation of consciousness can be re-interpreted as a debate about
the relationship between ineffable experience and structurally conceived
meaning.
Correspondence: Paul Livingston, Department of Philosophy, University
of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Email: plivingston@uci.edu
W. L. Miranker
A Quantum State Model of Consciousness
We introduce a quantum state representation of the information being processed
in neuronal structures. The movement of information from one such structure
to a second is characterized as a (quantum) measurement of the first structure
by the second. The value of such a measurement is an observable (external)
property of matter. The associated collapsed quantum state, a dual encoding
of that measurement, is a non-observable (internal) property of matter.
The quantum measurement collapse process itself is shown to be a form of
experience of the measurement process in terms of which a model and explanation
of consciousness is formulated. Using model neurons we show how neuronal
information processing effects may be given a quantum characterization.
The techniques developed are employed to frame a model of qualia.
Correspondence: W. L. Miranker, Computer Science Department, Yale University
PO Box 208285, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. Email: miranker@cs.yale.edu
Ullin T. Place
A Pilgrim’s Progress? From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness
From the editorial introduction by Anthony Freeman:
Ullin Thomas Place died on 2nd January 2000 at the age of seventy-five.
I had met him a little over three years earlier, in November 1996, during
the annual ‘Mind and Brain’ symposium organized by Peter Fenwick and held
at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. At that meeting Professor Place
delivered a slightly shortened version of the paper reproduced here, in
which he told his personal story — a pilgrim’s progress? — recounting,
as he put it, ‘the history of a thought process leading from an adolescent
interest in mystical experience to an article entitled “Is consciousness
a brain process?” [Place, 1956] in which I argued for an affirmative answer
to that question’.
Forty years after its publication, the author of that 1956 paper was
reflecting on this unlikely development. Here was the materialist thesis,
presented for the first time in recent history in a form able to withstand
what had previously been regarded as decisive philosophical objections
(or so he believed). Yet the heart of the paper, a critique showing how
little we can really say about the properties of our private experiences,
had drawn its inspiration from the mystics, and their insistence of on
the inadequacy of words to describe their experiences.
Like Ullin Place, I have been influenced from my youth by the Christian
mystical tradition, and now find myself exploring a materialist, or at
least naturalist and nondualist, understanding of consciousness, although
unlike him I have maintained throughout an adherence to public worship
and church membership. The degree of similarity and dissimilarity between
our ‘pilgrimages’ offered the possibility of a fruitful dialogue, and we
agreed to meet for a discussion focused on his talk, with a view to publication
in this journal. In the event, first my own preoccupations and pressure
of work, and then Professor Place’s illness and death, meant that our conversation
never took place. Rather than lose the whole benefit of the project, his
paper is being published here, in a somewhat fuller version that he supplied
to me subsequent to the meeting 1996. My own contribution is limited to
this brief introduction, together with explanatory footnotes at points
where he assumes a knowledge of religious and social life in pre-war Britain
that many JCS readers will not share.
Semir Zeki
Neural Concept Formation & Art. Dante, Michelangelo, Wagner
What is art? What constitutes great art? Why do we value art so much and
why has it been such a conspicuous feature of all human societies? These
questions have been discussed at length though without satisfactory resolution.
This is not surprising. Such discussions are usually held without reference
to the brain, through which all art is conceived, executed and appreciated.
Art has a biological basis. It is a human activity and, like all human
activities, including morality, law and religion, depends upon, and obeys,
the laws of the brain. To understand the biological foundations of art,
we must enquire into the biological foundations of knowledge, for art constitutes
a form of knowledge; indeed is knowledge. We are still far from knowing
the neural basis of the laws that dictate artistic creativity, achievement
and appreciation, but spectacular advances in our knowledge of the visual
brain allow us to make a beginning in trying to formulate neural laws of
art and aesthetics; in short, to study neuroaesthetics. In this essay,
I try to discuss the art of three Titanic figures in Western culture —
Dante, Michelangelo and Wagner — in neurological terms. I try to show that
we can trace the origins of their art to a fundamental characteristic of
the brain, namely its capacity to form concepts. This capacity is itself
the by-product of an essential characteristic of the brain. That characteristic
is abstraction, and is imposed upon the brain by one of its chief functions,
namely the acquisition of knowledge.
Correspondence: Semir Zeki, University College London, Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT.
Email: zeki.pa@ucl.ac.uk
