First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Autism: Mind and Brain provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research on autism and highlights new techniques that will progress future understanding. With contributions from leaders in autism research, the book describes the latest advances, discusses ways forward for future research, and presents new techniques for understanding this complex disorder.

Mind and Brain was originally published as the first two parts of a single-volume hardback edition. In this volume, Ted Honderich sets a new agenda for thinking about determinism. He expounds in detail a distinctive philosophy of mind, then defends it on the basis of contemporary neuroscience. He advances the proposition that philosophy cannot deal effectively with freewill if it stands aside from science.

In this introductory work, Mind and Brain: A Dialogue on the Mind-Body Problem, 2nd edition, Gennaro updates and expands the work to reflect current topics and discussions. The dialogue provides a clear and compelling overview of the mind-body problem suitable for both introductory students and those who have some background in the philosophy of mind. Topics include: Immortality, Materialism, Descartes' "Divisibility Argument" for substance dualism, The "Argument from Introspection" for substance dualism, The main objections to (...) dualism, The interaction between mind and brain, The relation between brain damage and the prospect of an afterlife, Parallelism and epiphenomenalism, The type/token distinction within materialism and the problem of multiple realizability, Arguments against materialism and its ability to explain consciousness, Property dualism and panpsychism, The epistemological problem of other minds, The nature of inductive knowledge, Evidence for animal consciousness, The problem of machine or robot minds, The inverted spectrum argument. Also included are a brief Introduction, a list of Study Questions designed to enhance classroom discussion and serve as a resource for the development of paper topics, a Glossary, and an Index of Key Terms. (shrink)

A post-Newtonian understanding of matter includes immaterial forces; thus, the concept of ‘physical’ has lost what usefulness it previously had and Cartesian dualism has, consequently, ceased to support a divide between the mental and the physical. A contemporary scientific understanding of mind that goes back at least as far as Priestley in the 18th century, not only includes immaterial components but identifies brain parts in which these components correlate with neural activity. What are we left with? The challenge (...) is no longer to figure out how a physical brain interacts with a nonphysical mind, but to try to unify theories of mind and theories of brain that to date do not share a single property. The challenge is enormous, but at least we can be quite clear about what its nature is, as there is no reason to be distracted by the idea of two distinct substances. In the present volume, many historical perspectives on the mind-body problem are discussed. In what follows, we follow major currents of thought regarding the mind-body problem so that it can be seen how we arrived at the modern conception that it makes sense only to talk about theory unification. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s Gestalt-inspired “field theory of consciousness” was introduced in the same period as Wolfgang Köhler’s theory of “electrical brain fields.” I consider parallels between these theories, drawing on results that have emerged in the last five years. First, I consider the claim that fields of consciousness supervene on electromagnetic fields in the brain, then I outline Gurwitsch’s field theory of consciousness, and finally I consider how the structures described by Gurwitsch might relate to structures in the (...) class='Hi'>brain’s electro-magnetic field. Along the way, I expose a dogma (that qualia are paradigmatic conscious states) and develop an interpretation of Gurwitsch’s field theory. (shrink)

Preeminent psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostow believes that early childhood emotional attachments form the cognitive underpinnings of spiritual experience and religious motivation. His hypothesis, which is verifiable, relies on psychological and neurobiological evidence but is respectful of the human need for spiritual value. Ostow begins by classifying the three parts of the spiritual experience: awe, Spirituality proper, and mysticism. After he pinpoints the psychological origins of these feelings in infancy, he discusses the foundations of religious sentiment and practice and the brain (...) processes associated with spiritual experience. He then focuses on spirituality's relationship to mood regulation, and the role of negative spirituality in fostering religious fundamentalism and demonic possession. Ostow concludes with an analysis of an essay by the psychoanalyst Donald M. Marcus, who recounts his own spiritual experience during a Native American-style "vision quest" in the woods. Marcus's account demonstrates the constructive potential of spirituality and the way in which spirituality retrieves and recapitulates feelings of attachment to the mother. Persuasively and brilliantly argued, _Spirit, Mind, and Brain_ brings the disciplines of religion, behavorial neuroscience, and philosophy to bear on a groundbreaking new method for understanding religious ritual and belief. (shrink)

In everyday parlance, "inhibition" suggests repression, tight control, the opposite of freedom. In medicine and psychotherapy the term is commonplace, its definition understood. Relating how inhibition—the word and the concept—became a bridge between society at large and the natural sciences of mind and brain, Smith constructs an engagingly original history of our view of ourselves. Not until the late nineteenth century did the term "inhibition" become common in English, connoting the dependency of reason and of civilization itself on (...) the repression of "the beast within." This usage followed a century of Enlightenment thought about human nature and the nature of the human mind. Smith traces theories of inhibitory control from the moralistic psychologies of the early nineteenth century to the famous twentieth-century schools of Sherrington, Pavlov, and Freud. He finds that the meanings of "inhibition" cross disciplinary boundaries and outline the growth of our belief in the self-regulated person. (shrink)

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, (...) and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world. (shrink)

Life Science Library now claims to examine ‘the most complex of all biological organs: the human mind’, and scientists quite commonly make no distinction between mind and brain — they delight in talking about the brain classifying, decoding, perceiving, deciding or giving orders. And while resisting the conceptual muddle involved in talking of the brain doing what persons do, the identity hypothesis tries to provide a philosophically respectable basis for the equation of mind and (...) brain, maintaining that ‘mind’ is just a term for a group of activities and dispositions, and that these in turn are in some sense to be identified with brain activities or traces. On the other hand, from the point of view of religion and traditional philosophy the suggestion is completely unplausible — creative or inventive thought, and aesthetic, moral or religious experiences seem so far removed from mechanical or physiological processes that a good deal of softening up is necessary if any kind of identity theory is to get a fair hearing. This softening up is best carried out by considering the difficulties in the main rival philosophical view, interactionism. (shrink)

Life Science Library now claims to examine ‘the most complex of all biological organs: the human mind’, and scientists quite commonly make no distinction between mind and brain — they delight in talking about the brain classifying, decoding, perceiving, deciding or giving orders. And while resisting the conceptual muddle involved in talking of the brain doing what persons do, the identity hypothesis tries to provide a philosophically respectable basis for the equation of mind and (...) brain, maintaining that ‘mind’ is just a term for a group of activities and dispositions, and that these in turn are in some sense to be identified with brain activities or traces. On the other hand, from the point of view of religion and traditional philosophy the suggestion is completely unplausible — creative or inventive thought, and aesthetic, moral or religious experiences seem so far removed from mechanical or physiological processes that a good deal of softening up is necessary if any kind of identity theory is to get a fair hearing. This softening up is best carried out by considering the difficulties in the main rival philosophical view, interactionism. (shrink)

How do our thoughts, feelings, choices and actions come about? In what follows here, the two kinds of traditional and still orthodox explanations are considered. The fundamental proposition of a defined and developed theory of determinism is laid out and compared with various ideas of free will or origination. This is Ch. 3 of Ted Honderich's large work A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes -- which is also Ch. 3 of the paperback Mind and (...) class='Hi'>Brain . In a nutshell, the determinist line of thought is that events of consciousness go together with brain events to make up psychoneural pairs, which pairs are effects of certain causal sequences. This is different from supposed explanations of mental events considered earlier, including the common view that there is something called interaction between mind and brain. The determinist line of thought is fundamentally different from those explanations of our existence considered after it -- indeterminism, free will, origination. The determinist explanation derives from and depends on a preceding partial account of the relation of mind and brain, Mind Brain Connection. Also an earlier account of causal and lawlike connection in general, Causality or Causation, the Fundamental Fact Plainly Explained. For details of the books and other writings referred to, go to References. The sections of the inquiry below are as follows. (shrink)

With neurons emergence, life alters itself in a remarkable way. This embodied neurons become carriers of signals, and processing devices: it begins an inexorable progression of functional complexity, from increasingly drawn behaviors to the mind and eventually to consciousness [Damasio, 2010]. In which moment has awareness arisen in the history of life? The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior and mind, which ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty (...) in natural history. It is in this context of biological evolution of conscious brains that we raise the question: how conscious brains connect with each other? In order to answer it, I will explore how brain states and conscious states each participate in dynamic interactive processes involving the whole organism. I will argue that a possible way to overcome the hard problem of consciousness might be based on the notion of embodiment as a process of embedding the mental in the living organism relating dynamically with the environment through the sensorymotor experience. In order to do so, I will provide an assembly between an anthropologic perspective of consciousness with contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Interaction Theory [Gallagher 2001, 2008; Zahavi 2001, 2008; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009]. (shrink)

This text examines the exact nature of the relation between mental and neural events; how both sorts of events come about; and their relation to actions. The answers that Honderich provides in Volume I constitute a new determinist philosophy of mind.

Christians are not immune to psychological and psychiatric illness. Yet, Christians should also be careful not to permit popular cultural trends to shape the way that they think about the use of psychiatric treatment with medication. In this essay, I suggest that the tendencies for default usage of psychiatric medication can be problematic for Christians in contemporary culture where a technological imaginary exists. Modern scientific studies of psychiatric medication are partly constructive of how we imagine ourselves. The typical justification for (...) the usage of technology in contemporary culture is the theme of cocreation with God, where Christians see any usage of technology as equivalent to our participating in God’s ongoing creative activity. I challenge these ideas in the foregoing paper, noting that the modern technological imaginary that animates modern psychiatry is as constricting as it is enabling. I conclude with a different take on what it might mean for Christians to be cocreators with God. (shrink)

In these essays, all but one written for this book, many of those who have helped to shape the fields of neurocognition, cognitive science, and psychology give...

Descartes bequeathed to his successors what he and they thought to be a sharp, deep split between the mental and the material. He thought it was a split between things, with every thing belonging to one of the two kinds and no thing belonging to both. According to him, a human being is a pair, a duo, a mind and a body; or, more strictly, a human being is a mind that is tightly related to an animal body. (...) The exact nature of that relation was one of the problems that Descartes never solved to his own satisfaction, let alone to anyone else’s. Not all of those who took over the split thought that it was a split through things. It was possible to hold - as I am sometimes inclined to - that material properties are radically different from mental properties, neither being reducible to the other, and yet there are single things, not pairs or duos or small committees, that have properties of both kinds. In the language of the 17th century, that is the belief that matter can think, i.e. that an item that bumps and shoves its way through space can also be the subject of thoughts and experiences and perceptions. In that century an impressive amount of intellectual energy went into debating whether matter could think. I’m going to pick out of that debate certain strands that I hope are still of interest today. They certainly interest me. Such understanding as I have of the philosophy of mind - I mean of what is actually true about mentality, not merely of the history of men’s opinions about it - has come from tracking some of the 17th century writers as they beat their way through the undergrowth. I don’t mean that they eventually led me to true conclusions, which I gratefully swallowed. They got most things wrong, I believe; but there is a lot to be learned from working out where they were wrong and why. (shrink)

Report on the 11th Mind & Brain Symposium at King's College London, Institute of Psychiatry.

The dominant assumption about the causal architecture of the mind is, that it is composed of a stable set of components that contribute independently to relevant observables that are employed to measure cognitive activity. This view has been called component-dominant dynamics. An alternative has been proposed, according to which the different components are not independent, but fundamentally interdependent, and are not stable basic properties of the mind, but rather an emergent feature of the mind given a particular (...) task context. This view has been called interaction-dominant dynamics. In this paper, we review evidence for interaction-dominant dynamics as the causal architecture of the mind. We point out, that such an architecture is consistent with problems of convergence in research on the level of results and theorizing. Moreover, we point out that if interaction-dominant dynamics as the causal architecture of the mind were to be true, this would naturally lead to problems with generalization and replicability in sciences of the mind and brain, and would probably warrant changes in the scientific practice with regard to study-design and data analysis. (shrink)

The article by D. I. Dubrovskii, "Brain and Mind" [Mozg i psikhika], published in Voprosy filosofii, No. 8, produced in me not only the desire to debate but also the desire to refrain, in that debate, from employing the tone he used. For that reason it seems necessary to me to list the points on which neither I nor, as I understand it, F. T. Mikhailov desires to take issue with the author of "Brain and Mind," (...) because on these matters we are entirely in agreement with him. To proceed in this fashion is necessary not for the sake of academic courtesy, but precisely in order to denote more clearly the actual points of difference between our positions, and then to let the reader decide which path he prefers. (shrink)

Materialism is the view that mental states are one and the same as physical states. (This is different from saying they are caused by physical states, or eliminated by physical states.) Dualism in the view that mental states are extra to the physical realm. Kripke’s metaphor: if materialism were true, not even God could make a world physically just like ours but with no sensations, feelings or thoughts.

Study of symptoms with focal brain lesions reveals a microtemporal transition that elaborates the mind/brain state. The pattern of this transition corresponds with that of developmental growth , which can be characterized in terms of whole-part relations. This correspondence is interpreted as indicating that the cognitive process is an extension of growth trends in pre- and post-natal life. The continuum of ontogenetic growth into the cognitive process is a transition from exuberance of form to specificity or from (...) generality to precision, and conforms with the trajectory of the mind/brain state from categorical primitives at onset to definiteness at termination. A patterned sequence of brain activity corresponds to a patterned sequence of mental activity over the full processing sequence. This sustained whole-part transition begins in early brain structures and carries through to a neocortical end point. The process is epochal and modular, with overlapping replacement of mind/brain states. The specification of configurations in the brain is accompanied by the specification of categorical wholes: drive-categories partition to conceptual-feelings, then to images , finally to acts, words, and objects. A description of the process underlying the brain state is a description of the process underlying the mental state. This paper argues against a causal step from brain to mind, or the reverse, i.e. no one-way or two-way causation. (shrink)

Topics include immortality; materlialism; Descartes's 'Divisibility Argument' for dualism; the Argument from introspection'; the problems with..

Tall tales presents a sweeping survey of common myths about the mind and brain. In a lighthearted and accessible style, it exposes the truth behind these beliefs, how they are perpetuated, why people believe them, and why they might even exist in the first place.

The subtitle of this essay can be misleading; the author devotes only one preliminary chapter and a brief part of another chapter to discussing issues of scientific language and method. The book is primarily an essay in the philosophy of mind. Rosenblueth is a well-known neurophysiologist who has considerable background in the philosophy of science. His purpose is to articulate a general philosophical position that is consistent with the results of science as well as with the attitudes and activities (...) of experimental scientists; and to develop from this basis an answer to the question of how mind and brain are related. He spends four chapters summarizing the biological and neurophysiological research that shows the nature of the correlation between mental and neurophysiological events. He concludes from this that our knowledge of the material world is limited to those structures that can be coded by the afferent fibers. He then articulates four unprovable "postulates" which scientists must assume. One of these is a probabilistic statement of causal determinism. This postulate is the basis for his rejecting the idea that the mind can causally influence the brain through volitions. Moreover, he argues for the converse statement as well; the brain cannot cause conscious events since the latter are mental and not material. But this denial of causal interaction does not lead Rosenblueth to conclude that mind/body dualism must be rejected. He considers and rejects the monist views of Feigl, Russell and Eddington, and thus comes up with a dualist view that denies causal interaction. Although the scientific material cited by Rosenblueth is up to date, he does not consider the current philosophical discussions on the mind/body problem.--J. M. B. (shrink)