HOW TO UNDERSTAND MIND/BODY CAUSAL

INTERACTIONS IN THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE

Max Velmans, Goldsmiths, University of London

FOUR WAYS IN WHICH BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS/MIND MIGHT ENTER INTO

CAUSAL INTERACTIONS.

PHYSICAL PHYSICAL

PHYSICAL MENTAL

MENTAL MENTAL

MENTAL PHYSICAL

Modes of Causation within Alexander Technique

PHYSICAL PHYSICAL : where a practitioner physically guides a habitual movement into a more ‘natural’ response.

PHYSICAL MENTAL : e.g. in the suggestion that “By teaching how to respond to any stimulus with less (physical) tension, the Alexander Technique enables you to better handle life’s stresses” (American Society for the Alexander Technique)  

  MENTAL MENTAL : as part of the counselling process

MENTAL PHYSICAL : e.g. to prevent “misuse” by learning to change the associative thought process that triggers it.    

A general principle underlying AT

A typical AT procedure Focus attention on a habitual form of non-optimal bodily

response to a stimulus or situation (expressed for example in the way muscles are used)

Demonstrate a better way of using the body in that situation (e.g. in hands on fashion)

Identify the train of thought that leads to that original response

Choose to release that train of thought to allow a more optimal response

General principle: focusing attention on any habitual, non-optimal form of response (physical, cognitive, affective) provides the precondition for stopping it and generating a more creative, useful alternative.

The Alexander Technique and Consciousness

In his scientific papers Frank Pierce Jones (Institute for Applied Experimental Psychology at Tufts) discusses the links between AT and focused attention. But in his more general writings he also talks about the links between AT and consciousness, arguing for example that by learning to recognize and prevent previously learned habitual reactions, the student becomes able to

“be aware of his reactions as regular patterns and to control and direct them by releasing latent powers of consciousness. In the process, consciousness expands and as it does so becomes itself the instrument for further change.” (Jones, “A Mechanism for Change,” Forms and Techniques of Altruistic and Spiritual Growth,  1954, p. 2.)  

PROBLEMS OF MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS

What are the “latent powers of consciousness”?

What does it mean to say that “consciousness expands”?

In what way could such expansion make “consciousness the instrument for further change”?

How can we make sense of the four kinds of mental/physical causation?

WE NEED A THEORY OF MIND/BODY CAUSAL

INTERACTION

As McMahon and Sheikh (1989) noted, the absence of an acceptable theory of mind/body interaction within philosophy and science has had a detrimental effect on the acceptance of mental causation in many areas of clinical theory and practice.

20 years later, little has changed, in spite of extensive

evidence for mental causation within some clinical settings. For example Price et al. (2008) note that while powerful placebo effects reflect mind-brain-body relationships, there is still a need to resolve explanations of these relationships philosophically, without resorting to eliminative materialism or forms of dualism that completely divide the mind from the body.

LINKS BETWEEN ATTENTION, FLEXIBLE RESPONSE AND

CONSCIOUSNESSAccording to conventional cognitive psychology

Non attended processing. High capacity, parallel, modular (specialised), automatic , fast, relatively inflexible and preconscious.

Focal attentive processing. Limited capacity, serial, operates in a “global workspace”, voluntary, relatively slow, flexible, capable of novelty, and associated with consciousness.

Well learnt, highly practiced skills tend to operate without focal attention (preconscious)

Novel or complex tasks require focal attention in order that new resources can be brought to bear on the task (conscious)

WHY DOES MENTAL CAUSATION REMAIN A PROBLEM?

Conventional cognitive psychological explanatory accounts routinely translate mind-body or consciousness-body interactions into brain-body interactions, that are entirely expressed in third-person information processing terms, that could in principle be programmed into a nonconscious machine.

Biomedical accounts similarly translate mind-body or consciousness-body interactions into third-person accounts of the brain’s neurophysiology.

Unless one is prepared to accept that mind and consciousness

are nothing more than brain processes, how can information processing or neurophysiological processing release the latent powers of consciousness? And how can consciousness itself become the instrument for further change (as opposed to focal attentive information processing)?

CONSCIOUS CAUSALITY? Problem 1: The physical world

appears causally closed

From an external, third-person perspective one can, in principle, trace the effects of input stimuli on the CNS from input to output, without finding any “gaps” in the chain of causation that conscious experiences might fill.

If one inspects the brain from the outside, no subjective experience can be observed at work. Nor does one need to appeal to the existence of subjective experience to account for the neural activity that one can observe.

The same is true if one thinks of the brain as a functioning system. Once the processing within a system required to perform a given function is sufficiently well specified in procedural terms, one does not have to add an “inner conscious life” to make the system work.

PROBLEM 2: HOW CONSCIOUS IS CONSCIOUS CONTROL?

One is not conscious of one’s own brain/body processing. So how could there be conscious control of such processing?

How conscious is conscious speech?One isn’t even conscious of how to control the articulatory system in everyday “conscious speech”! In speech, the tongue may make as many as 12 adjustments of shape per second that need to be coordinated with other rapid, dynamic changes within the articulatory system. In one minute of discourse as many as 10 to 15 thousand neuromuscular events occur (Lenneberg, 1967), yet only the results of this activity (the overt speech) normally enters consciousness.

IN WHAT WAY IS CONSCIOUS THINKING CONSCIOUS?

 

● Decide how well you have followed the argument so far, and simply note what thoughts come to mind.

 ● You might have thought something like “I’m with it so

far”, “I’m not sure about some of this”, or even “I disagree with this”—but for the purpose of this exercise it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that once a verbal thought comes to mind it will be manifest in the form of inner speech (phonemic imagery).

 ● Now ask yourself “Where did that thought come from?”

IN WHAT WAY IS CONSCIOUS THINKING CONSCIOUS?

● One has little or no introspective access to the detailed processes that gave rise to the immediate thought, i.e. to the processes that somehow analyzed the meaning of the question, accessed the global memory system, made a judgment about how well the arguments presented fit in with one’s current understanding of the topic, and then expressed that judgment in the form of a verbal thought.

● Once one has a conscious verbal thought, in the form of phonemic imagery, the complex cognitive processes required to generate that thought, including the processes required to encode it into phonemic imagery have already operated.

● One is only conscious of what one is thinking after the conscious thought arises!

PROBLEM 2: HOW CONSCIOUS IS CONSCIOUS CONTROL?

The processing that enables conscious speech, conscious thinking and other conscious tasks operates preconsciously.

The consciousness associated with these processes follows the processing to which it most closely relates.

So what does consciousness do?

THE CASE FOR DUALIST-INTERACTIONISM

Body and brain seem to be very different from mind and consciousness, so perhaps they are different.

There is extensive evidence that the body and brain affect mind and consciousness (e.g. via the senses) and that mind and consciousness affect the body and brain (experiences affect actions, placebos, psychosomatic effects, etc.)

It is plausible therefore to suggest that mind and consciousness interact with body and brain.

Dualist-interactionism gives a natural account of how things seem to be

PROBLEMS WITH DUALIST-INTERACTIONISM

If conscious experience and neural material are fundamentally different, it is not easy to envisage how these might have causal influences on each other.

Nor does this deal with the evidence that

the physical world is causally closed

we are not conscious of the processes over which we are supposed to have conscious control or of how we exert that control.

PHYSICALIST REDUCTIONISM

Tries to heal the dualist split by reducing consciousness to a state or function of the brain. If this ontological reduction can be successfully achieved, the problem of the physical world being causally closed disappears

Consciousness would be one kind of brain state (or function), unconscious mind would be a different kind of brain state (or function) and the interaction of consciousness with (the rest of) the brain would be entirely a matter for neurophysiological research.

The four kinds of causal interaction are really nothing more than different kinds of PHYSICAL PHYSICAL interaction.

THE PROBLEMS OF PHYSICALIST REDUCTIONISM

Its still puzzling that

we are not conscious of the processes over which we are supposed to have conscious control or of how we exert that control.

But the main problem is

Given the extensive, apparent differences between conscious experiences and brain states how can they be shown to be ontologically identical to brain states?

HOW COULD CONSCIOUS STATES BE NOTHING MORE THAN BRAIN

STATES? A classical analogy is the way the "morning star" and the

"evening star" turned out to be identical (they were both found to be the planet Venus).

But from a third-person (external observer's) perspective one has no direct access to a subject's conscious experience. Consequently, one has no third-person data (about the experience itself) which can be compared to or contrasted with the subject's first-person data.

Neurophysiological investigations can find the neural correlates or antecedent causes of given experiences. But correlation and causation are not ontological identity.

IDENTITY, CORRELATION AND CAUSATION

Ontologicalidentity

Correlation Causation

Symmetrical Yes Yes No

ObeysLeibniz's law Yes No No

WHY PHYSICALIST REDUCTIONISM WON'T WORK

No information about consciousness other than its neural causes and correlates is available to neurophysiological investigation of the brain, so it is difficult to see how such research could decide what consciousness itself really is.

The only evidence about what conscious experiences are like comes from first-person sources, which consistently suggest consciousness to be something other or additional to neuronal activity.

CONCLUSION: THE REDUCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO A BRAIN STATE CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK.

How can one reconcile the evidence that conscious experiences are causally effective with the principle that the physical world is causally closed?

Ontological monism combined with epistemological dualism For each individual there is one "mental life" but two ways

of knowing it: first-person knowledge and third-person knowledge. From a first-person perspective conscious experiences appear causally effective. From a third-person perspective the same causal sequences can be explained in neural terms. It is not the case that the view from one perspective is right and the other wrong. These perspectives are complementary and mutually irreducible. The differences between how things appear from a first- versus a third-person perspective has to do with differences in the observational arrangements (the means by which a subject and an external observer access the subject's mental processes).

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF MIND?

We need your first-person story and my third-person story for a complete account of what is going on. First- and third-person accounts are complementary and mutually irreducible.

If so, the nature of the mind is revealed as much by how it appears from one perspective as the other. It is not either physical or conscious experience, it is at once physical and conscious experience (depending on the observational arrangements).

For lack of a better term we may describe this nature as psychophysical.

If we combine this with the representational features above, we can say that mind is a psychophysical process that encodes information, developing over time.

AN INITIAL WAY TO MAKE SENSE OF THE CAUSAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN

CONSCIOUSNESS AND BRAIN.

The mind is fundamentally psychophysical

Physical physical causal accounts describe events from an entirely third-person perspective (they are “pure third-person accounts”).

Mental mental causal accounts describe events entirely from a first-person perspective (they are “pure first-person accounts”).

Physical mental and mental physical causal accounts are mixed-perspective accounts employing perspectival switching (Velmans, 1996).

But these are all accounts of the same psychophysical process developing over time