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hello everyone in this talk i want to describe some very basic principles about how to understand the causal relationships between consciousness and the brain
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um and in doing that i'm going to be drawing on my main book understanding consciousness that's its second edition there published in 2009 but in particular
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um i'm also going to be referring to the treatment of this subject in a special issue of the journal of consciousness studies which was published in 2002 on how could conscious experiences
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affect brains and that was accompanied by in the end 12 commentaries and and two responses and my contributions to that are available online
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so that's the target article that i wrote for the journal and that's available on researchgate there were eight commentaries in that issue on it and that's my reply to the
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commentaries and then in the following year there were a further five commentaries and my reply all available on researchgate now in the western tradition uh
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theories about how conscious experiences might relate to brains have their roots in more ancient theorizing about how minds relate to bodies which go back to the ancient greeks
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and it's generally recognized that the modern formulation of of that relationship has its roots in the work of rene descartes in the
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17th century who proposed perhaps the first more precise formulation of that relationship and according to him minds in
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consciousness were one kind of substance which he called rey's cogitans literally thinking stuff and the staff of the material world subject to the laws of physics
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had the property of raised extensor or literally being extended out in space whereas in contrast raising cogitans had no extension in space and was outside of the material world
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and then the interaction uh could be described in a very simple model of perception and here we have a figure from descartes in which there is an object in the
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material world and light rays project from the object onto the left and right eye of the observer and because the projections onto the
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left and the right eye respectively are a little bit different they can't recognize that the image received by these eyes also
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must be different and somehow or other something must happen to unify these in order to provide a universe visual experience and basically in his
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theory the brain projects these onto the pineal gland which provides the unification and another notable feature of this model is that
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uh within this model of perception the race cogitans or the conscious mental experience doesn't appear for the simple reason that it's outside of the material world and this figure is a
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material of what goes on in the material world now it's important to realize that in descartes formulation this was thought of as a two-way interaction so raise extensor the
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extended stuff of the material world can have causal effects on race conjutants or the stuff that thinks via the organs of perception uh conversely raise conscious hands um the
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stuff that things can have causal effects on the material world or race extensor through the exercise of free will and so this position became known as dualist
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interactionism it's also important to note that like the ancient greeks descartes made no clear distinction between mind consciousness and soul and in
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subsequent western thought this splitting of what exists if you like into to incommensured substances really forms the background
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for the classical mind body problem how could substances as different as extended stuff and thinking stuff causally interact now problematic though that might be
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it's important to realize that in modern psychology we do take mental physical interactions for granted and use many different combinations of them in our psychological explanations
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so to start off with what we take for granted and we would take it for granted that the body and brain or aspects of body and brain can have causal influences on other aspects of
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body and brain so physical things can have causal effects on other physical things but equally we take it as perfectly meaningful to say that the body and
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brain can affect mind and consciousness so for example in ordinary perception aspects of bodily functioning are going to have different effects on what we consequently experience
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or in the practice of psychiatry say um psychoactive drugs or can have effects on conscious experiences or states of mind and so on if for example we turn
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to counseling practices then we would take it for granted that aspects of mind and consciousness say in as they've operated in the past can have
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effects on mind and consciousness in the present and the very practice of say counseling or psychotherapy um assumes
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that for example talking cures which involve the operations of mind or recall of past experiences might have effects on uh current experiences and current states of mind
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and finally we also take it as perfectly sensible to say that it is possible for the mind and conscious experiences to have effects on the body and the brain
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and an entire literature exists to do with that for example under the heading of psychogenesis nevertheless if we think of mining consciousness in this classical dualist
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way then within the current materialist reductionist paradigm within science many of the interactions that we take for granted in psychology no longer make
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explanatory sense so it does make sense to talk about how some aspects of body and brain might have causal effects on other aspects of body and brain
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but it's puzzling how body and brain might produce or have causal effects on mind and consciousness and equally how mind and consciousness might have causal effects on other aspects of mind and consciousness
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and even perhaps the most problematic is how mining consciousness could affect body and brain if one thinks of mind consciousness is somehow outside of the physical world
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it's important to realize however that in the classical literature following descartes the terms mind and consciousness are often used interchangeably as
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distinct from say body and brain and that still persists in much of philosophy of mind which is why the causal interaction of mind consciousness and body brain is
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still often thought of as a problem but with the emergence of cognitive psychology in the early 1960s um we began to think of the operations of mind in a
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very different sort of way so in the process of working out how for instance mental operations operate for instance thinking problem solving use of language
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and so on we began to think of the operations of mind as a form of human information processing which is embodied in the brain which enabled
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these operations to be carried out and it also was a major discovery of psychology coming both from psychodynamics and cognitive psychology
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that many of these processes operate unconsciously or pre-consciously and that gives this problem a different if you like
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flavor given that the operations of mind may or may not be accompanied by conscious experiences how does mind relate to consciousness and that's for example a topic about
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which i've done quite a lot of work myself for example in a target article in the behavioral and brain sciences on that particular issue in 1991 and we'll come back to some of these
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things a little bit later on the talk but for the moment um we can say if we think of mind in that way as as distinct from consciousness in certain ways that changes the nature of the mind-body
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problem and basically if the mind is thought of as a form of information processing that's embodied in the brain then mind becomes physical in a subtle
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way and there simply isn't a problem about how brain and mind or if you like the brain's mind interacts
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causally with other aspects of the brain and mind however um if the mind is thought of in this physical sort of way there still is a problem
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of how brain and mind produce consciousness or causally interacts with consciousness and there's still a problem of how conscious states
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if they're entirely non-physical interact with other conscious states or indeed how conscious states could affect brain and mind
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that said there's experimental and clinical evidence of many kinds for the causal efficacy of conscious states in in different therapeutic areas and here i've listed three distinct
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areas which have very good reviews of the literature which are worth following up if you're interested in these things so to begin with the use of imagery and
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visualization for example in hypnosis and meditation as well as biofeedback has been shown to be therapeutic in many different medical conditions and the placebo effect is one of the
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best established therapeutic effects in medicine for example the way one experiences a therapeutic intervention can itself have healing effects with
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with physiological consequences on the body and the brain um psycho immunology is another major area of interest where at one time the immune system was thought to be completely
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autonomic can now be shown to be subject to psychological influences of many kinds so feeling stressed for example can lower the effectiveness of the immune system and its functioning
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and just overall the particularly puzzling part of a lot of this is that under certain conditions a range of different autonomic body functions including heart rate blood pressure
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vasomotor activity blood glucose levels pupil dilation electrodermal activity and immune system functioning can be influenced by conscious states
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and the effects of mind and consciousness on body and brain is also very evident in a range of neurological syndromes which are for that reason called
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functional and dissociative neurological syndromes and here i've drawn on an online resource a very good one uh called a patient's guide by john stone
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which is also very good for introducing clinical approaches to these syndromes and he lists the range of symptom categories
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which you'd describe as as as functional so for example uh one can have functional limb weaknesses where an ability to move an armor or a leg
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is is very weak even though there's nothing really wrong with the musculature and the associated nerve supply one can have what appear to be epileptic epileptic
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attacks even though there's no um discernible lesion in the brain one can have functional sensory disorders um in a range of senses um audition
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vision and so on uh there may be inability to move one's limbs or properly even though again the musculature is functional and
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and there doesn't seem to be an obvious biomedical reason for it and then there are more general syndromes for instance um chronic fatigue syndrome
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functional chronic pain and so on and then to explain what's going on to patients uh john stone gives a a simple but very useful
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guide to what's going on in their bodies and brains so as he says patients with functional symptoms do not have damage to their nervous systems so it's not surprising you can't see it
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on a scan instead the nervous system is not functioning properly and then he gives three examples for symptoms like weakness and movement disorder
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there is a problem with the way the brain is sending messages to the body for symptoms like numbness and pain there's a problem with the way the brain is receiving messages from the body
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and during dissociative seizures dissociative symptoms the brain is in a trance-like state a bit like hypnosis or the dissociations that you can get in
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hypnosis and then as he goes on to explain if you were a computer it's like having a software problem rather than a hardware problem if you have a software bug on your
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computer it might keep crashing or work really slowly you wouldn't solve that problem by opening up the computer and looking at the components you wouldn't see anything if you did an x-ray of that computer
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you'd have to solve it by reprogramming the computer working out which programs were causing the problem and then he says something which lies at the heart of the philosophy he's trying to develop here
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he says our thoughts behavior sensation and emotions are our programs now it's worth noticing that that's a position within philosophy of
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mind known as functionalist reductionism or psycho-functionalism and that's a point to which we're going to have to return and then to begin to get an understanding of what
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causes such conditions he divides the relevant factors into predisposing factors precipitating factors and perpetuating factors so the predisposing factors are conditions
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that might have contributed to the formation of the symptoms in the first place the precipitating factors would be those that actually trigger the onset of the symptoms on any particular occasion
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and the perpetuating factors are factors that contribute to the continuation of those symptoms once triggered and then he makes the interesting and important point that these factors might be biological
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psychological or social so for example you might have a genetic vulnerability um which predisposes you to those particular symptoms
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that might be aggravating psychological factors for example anxiety or fear but there might indeed be social factors as well for example stress at work
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and then he makes the important general point that these factors don't only operate in functional disorders in neurology or illness can have a psychological and a social dimension but with
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the neurological functional disorders the basic aims of treatment are identify in order to ameliorate or avoid the precipitating factors and
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modify the perpetuating factors and because these conditions are very complex and because they involve biological psychological and social factors
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you need treatment teams to actually carry all that out and that can include a neuropsychiatrist a psychologist a physiotherapist and other professionals as relevant
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and overall if we sum all that up conceptually the approach combines two things a software hardware analogy for the nature of mind with a bio-psychosocial
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model of illness now it should be clear that that's a long way from a purely reductionist biomedical model of illness um so is there
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any problem does that explain conscious causation in the various kinds of causal interaction that we were discussing at the beginning of the talk well the first thing to note is just a
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reminder that the software hardware accounts routinely translate conscious causation into mind brain body causal interactions
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and that does involve an assumption unless one is prepared to accept that conscious thoughts emotions and other conscious states are nothing more than information
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processing in the brain this does finesse the classical mind-body problems that are already actually posed by normal conscious voluntary control
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not just clinical syndromes so how conscious expectations about getting better or not or how negative emotional stress fear anxiety and so on might affect
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autonomic or immune system functioning is mysterious but how a conscious wish say to lift a finger actually makes that finger move is equally mysterious
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so how could our conscious thoughts sensations and emotions just be our programs now as you might expect there's been an enormous
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uh intellectual effort devoted to trying to establish that conscious states are nothing more than states are functions of the brain or that perhaps science in the future will show that that's the case
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but physicalist reductionism does face a very basic problem and that is that individual conscious experiences are only viewable from a first-person perspective
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while brain states in their operations are only viewable from a third person perspective and if you take any conscious experience and its associated
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brain states they appear to be very different so if you pick for for example thought and the qualitative properties of a thought
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it doesn't seem to resemble anything that looks like the operation of a set of neuronal circuits or neurochemistry so given these apparent differences
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between brain states and their associated experiences how could they possibly be shown to be ontologically identical now there are cases in the history of
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science where entities thought perhaps for hundreds of years to be different entities turned out to be one and the same as a fact of scientific discovery
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for example the way the morning star and the evening star turned out to be the identical heavenly body because they were both the planet venus it's important to realize however that
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that situation doesn't apply in the same way to conscious experiences and their associated neural states for the simple reason that from a third person external
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observer's perspective one has no direct access to a subject's conscious experience consequently when there's no third person data about the experience itself which can be
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compared to or contrasted with the subject's first person data about that experience in principle neurophysiological investigations can find the neural correlates of a given
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experience or the antecedent causes that given experience but correlation and causation are not ontological identity and it's very easy
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to establish the relationships between correlation causation and ontological identity terms of two properties the property of symmetry and whether or
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not the particular relationship obeys liveness is law now ontological identity is symmetrical so if we say that a is identical to b it
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follows that b is identical to a ontological identity also obeys leibniz's law which simply states that if a is identical to b then all the
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properties of a are also identical to all the properties of b correlation again is symmetrical so if a correlates with b
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by a certain amount it follows that b also correlates with a by the same amount however correlation of two apparently dissimilar properties
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such as for example conscious experiences and their neural coral notes do not obey leibniz's law in other words on the face of it um
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the properties of conscious experiences are not exactly the same as the properties as we understand them of neural states and causation is even more different to
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ontological identity so if we say that a causes effect b then we can't say that effect b causes
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a because that would reverse the arrow of causation likewise it wouldn't make any sense to say that all the properties of cause are the same as all the properties of
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the effect otherwise the effect wouldn't relate to the cause via the property of causation now here's the basic point
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no information about consciousness other than its neural causes and correlates is even in principle available to neurophysiological investigation of the brain so it's really difficult to see how such
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research could ever decide what consciousness itself really is the only evidence about what conscious experiences are like comes from first-person sources which
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consistently suggests consciousness to be something other than or additional to neural activity and if that's the case the reduction of consciousness to a
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brain state or program can't really be made to work but in a way that simply deepens the problems surrounding conscious causation and these problems come in
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a number of categories so so the first kind of problem has to do with the fact that the physical world as such appears to be causally closed what that means is that
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from an external third person perspective one can in principle trace the effects of input stimulus on the central nervous system all the way from input to output without finding any gaps in the chain of
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causation the consciousness might fill equally if one inspects the brain from the outside one can inspect it as much as one likes for as long as one likes
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but no subjective experience can be observed at work and nor does one need to appeal to the existence of such a subjective experience to account for the neural activity
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that one can observe and the same is true if one thinks of the brain as a functioning system for example in the way thought of in cognitive psychology once the
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processing within a given system required to perform a given function is sufficiently well specified in information processing or procedural terms one doesn't have to add an inner
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conscious life to make that system work a second type problem surrounding conscious causation is that one actually isn't conscious of one's own
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brain or body processing so in what sense could there be conscious control of such processing so to just take a few simple examples one might be able to use imagery say
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of a very relaxing kind maybe lying at a beach uh imagining the lapping of the sea as a method to lower one stress or heart rate
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but the fact that we are able to do it or realize that that might be effective gives no insight into the detailed mechanisms which actually control the beating of
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the heart or how these might be lowered an even simpler case would apply to most processes that we normally think of as being completely conscious processes
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so for example what i'm doing now which is speaking to you and a little bit of study of what's involved in speech production makes it obvious that that's very complicated so
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to begin with i need to have some idea of what i want to say i need some english language knowledge in other words knowledge of syntax and so on in order to express what i want to say
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in sentences and so on somehow or other once i have all the words assembled in a sentence mentally if you like and i'm ready to
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start to produce the speech neuromuscular signals have to travel down from the central nervous system to the articulatory system in order to make it all work
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and even that last bit the last stage turns out to be very complex so for example in speech the tongue may make as many as 12 adjustments of shape per second these need to be coordinated with other
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rapid dynamic changes within within the articulatory system and in one minute of discourse according to eric leneberg in 1967 as many as 10 to 15 000 euro muscular
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events occur and then i need to ask myself well to what extent am i conscious of all this going on and the truth is i'm really only conscious of what i hear myself say
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or my hands moving about and so on so only the results of this activity the overt speech normally enters consciousness
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and that example introduces a third general problem which is that conscious experiences actually appear to come too late to causally affect the processes to
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which they must obviously relate so in the case of conscious speeches i've just demonstrated there is a sentence in which one is only conscious of what one wants to say
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after one has actually said it and let's take something even more counter-intuitive consider if you like the epitome of what is often thought of as an example
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of a conscious experience for example in the work of descartes a conscious thought now within psychology conscious thoughts are sometimes
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referred to as inner speech or they take the form of phonemic imagery and it's very instructive to observe what one actually experiences while one
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has a conscious thought consider for example your understanding of the lecture so far and just decide for yourself how well you followed it did you
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understand it did you not understand it and so on did you agree with it or maybe you didn't agree with some of it um just take a few seconds to note what
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actually comes to mind now something presumably did come to mind and for the purposes of this demonstration it doesn't really matter exactly what that was what
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really matters is that once the thought did come to mind it just came to mind fully formed in the form of phonemic imagery but one had no if you like
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intimation or insight into the complex processes that must have been involved in order to form that thought so in order to actually form the thought
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you would have had to take the information which i'm presenting to you verbally and work out the meaning of what i'm asking you to do you would have had to access your
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general knowledge store to make a judgment about how well the new information i've been presenting in this lecture fits into your already
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existing information the extent to which the new information assimilates with the existing information would determine whether you thought i'm more or less following it so far i
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disagree with some of it and so on but it's self-evident that once the thought came to mind all those judgments had been already made
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and all the processes required to encode the actual conscious experience into phonemic imagery just as all the processes were required to
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form articulatory system movements into conscious speech have already operated and so the actual thought like the
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actual speech follows the processing to which it most closely relates and then of course there are other many other areas which can uh be demonstrated to follow the same pattern
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and there is all the work for example on what the brain is doing prior to actually having a conscious wish which was originally stimulated by the work of benjamin libert in 1985 and the question of
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what is the state of of conscious free will and so on um actually um back in 1991 in that target article that i mentioned earlier on in is human information processing conscious
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in the behavioral and brain sciences i i went through all the stages of human information processing to make this general point so let's just take stock of the argument
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so far if the mind is thought of as a form of third-person observable human information processing mental causation becomes a subtle form of physical
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activity and that can be seen to interact with other physical activities which doesn't present a theoretical problem for third-person science however the causal efficacy of
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first-person observable conscious experiences does remain a problem and we've gone through the different categories of problem so the physical world appears to be causally closed
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so how can conscious experiences not part of that activity enter into those activities we're not even aware of the details of our mental processes so how could we consciously control them
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conscious experiences actually seem to come too late to follow the processes to which they most closely relate and so on on the other side of the equation the actual evidence for the causal efficacy and
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importance of conscious experiences on our everyday lives is extensive for example in effects on our bodies brains and the way we behave and that applies also to many clinical
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situations so the question we need to address in the rest of this talk is how can we resolve all this now to begin to make sense of all this i
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think we have to go back to what i think is a very basic question which is what is the nature of mind and we've seen that in the history of thinking about this
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subject in the west and the term mind has often been used interchangeably with the term consciousness and that actually still persists uh in modern philosophy of mind and on the other hand within
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psychological science we now take it as standard the mind or mental processes can be thought of as a form of human information processing so how are we going to relate these two
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different views to each other and a very simple way i think to do that is to just go back to a standard psychophysical experimental arrangement we're asking if you like the question of
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what is it that the experimenter on the one hand and a subject on the other hand can say about what's going on in the subject's mind so
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from the experimenter's point of view as the subject looks at the stimulus the light he would be able to in principle observe all the events taking place in the subject's brain
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and that would include neural representations of the stimulus forming in her brain and in principle at any rate in some future form of neuroscience the neural
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causes and finally the precise neural correlates of what it was that she experiences so in summary everything going on in essence mind
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from e's point of view would be a range of activities in the subject's brain and that would be from his point of view what's going on
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in the subject's mind but if we then ask the subject what's going on in her mind the only thing that she can report going on in her mind relating to this situation is her
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experience of an entity out there in the world that looks like a light bulb and the question we have to ask in more detail is how those two descriptions
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relate to each other now there are arguably three plausible assumptions that we can make about how conscious experiences relate to their neural correlates so uh to begin with conscious
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experiences are always of something at least for phenomenal conscious states and so we can say that the conscious experiences are representations
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of in the in the case of the light bulb for example of something going on and on in the world so the physical correlates of such experiences
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must also be representational states likewise for a given state to be the correlate of a given experience it must represent the same thing so the subject experience is a light
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bulb in the world and the experimenter can discern representations of the same light bulb out there in the world and if that wasn't the case that
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wouldn't be the correlate to what the subject is actually experiencing and then a further assumption about the the grain if you like of the physical
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states that relate to given experiences it's generally assumed within the field that for every discriminable attribute of experience there will be a
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distinct correlated physical state and if we take those three assumptions together each experience and its physical correlate encodes the same information
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about what is experienced in other words there are two different ways a phenomenal way and an embodied way of encoding information about an event in
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the world that in this case is experienced as a light bulb and if that's the case we can conclude that in these situations first person
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accounts of experience and third person accounts of their neural core nerves can in principle be accounts of the same information
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viewed in two different ways and it's worth adding to that that first person accounts of conscious experience and third-person accounts of their neural or other physical correlates
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are complementary and mutually irreducible for the reason that they each supply knowledge of the operations of mind that the other cannot supply so one could in principle have complete third
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person knowledge of the operations of the brain without knowing that some of those operations were accompanied by conscious experiences and certainly knowledge with the operations of
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brains and even the neural correlates of conscious experience wouldn't tell you what those experiences were like conversely one could in principle have complete first-person knowledge of the
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operations of one's own mind insofar as those are manifest in one's conscious experience without knowing in any way that those mental processes are also embodied in brain states and
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one might not even know that one had a brain so for a complete account of the embodied mind one needs both perspectives and that was first developed in a more
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detailed way in a reply to commentaries on my target article in behavior and brain sciences in 1991 so if you want to have a quick look at
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psychological complementarity more detail you can find it online with those principles in place we're now in a position to suggest something more fundamental about the nature of mind
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so if first and third person knowledge of the nature of mind is complementary its nature is revealed as much by how it appears from one perspective as the other and if
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that's the case it's not either physical or conscious experience it is it once physical and conscious experience depending on the observational arrangements and for lack of a better
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term we could describe that nature as psychophysical and then if we combine that with its informational processing features we can say in a more general way that
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mind is a psychophysical process that encodes information that develops over time and within formal philosophy of mind terms
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that would be described as dual aspect monism combined with epistemological dualism now with all those principles in place we're finally in a position
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to address one of the most puzzling aspects of consciousness how can one reconcile the evidence that conscious experiences appear to be causally effective in many
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different situations with the principle that the physical world is causally closed well according to the analysis so far conscious experiences reveal the
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operations of mind viewed from a first-person perspective consequently conscious experiences themselves appear to be causally effective because they represent the operations of mind
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and for everyday purposes we can treat them as being causally effective conversely from a third person perspective the same causal operations can be explained in neural
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or other physical terms and then again following the analysis so far it isn't the case that the view from one perspective is right and the other one is wrong as these
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perspectives are complementary and it's also important to say that the information available about what's going on in the mind from either perspective is not incorrigible in other words
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one can get it wrong from both perspective as well as right the difference between how things appear from a first versus a third person perspective simply have to do with the difference in
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the observational arrangements in other words the means by which a subject and an external observer can observe the subject's mental processes
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and now we can also explain why conscious experiences follow the processing to which they most closely relate basically conscious experiences represent
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the current state of both external and internal entities events and processes and representations necessarily follow the formation of the things they represent
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so extra receptive experiences represent the current state of the external world and interceptive experiences represent the current state of one's own body brain and mind
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so when i actually experience a thought i know the current state of my cognitive system and when i experience a feeling i know the state of my affective system when i experience a
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wish or a decision to act i know the state of my voluntary system and that's why first-person causal accounts of why i acted on the basis of my internal thoughts and feelings do make
00:46:03
perfect sense now if we take on board the self-evident fact that viewed from an external observer's perspective the workings of somebody else's mind simply looked like the
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workings of their brain whereas viewed from their perspective their subjective perspective the operations of their mind simply manifest themselves as conscious experiences
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and then we add to that the unifying idea that the nature of mind must be something that underlies both these manifestations of it
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and one simple way of describing that is to say that the the underlying nature of mind is psychophysical then we're in a position to make sense
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in an initial way of the various cause and interactions that takes place between consciousness and brain so to begin with as before there isn't a problem about various aspects of brain and mind viewed
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as processes within the brain having causal effects on other aspects of processes within the brain as this simply views what's going on from a
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purely third person perspective in terms of the physical manifestations of of mind and brain and so on likewise um if we switch to
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the effects of conscious experiences on other conscious experiences for example in the way that one might do in a counseling practice then following this analysis all that's
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happening is that the individual who's describing these effects is doing so from a purely first-person perspective but as again they're giving an account of what's
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going on in their minds viewed from that perspective and then there are two shall we say mixed perspective cases where
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for example we start off viewing the nature of brain and mind and then discover that this has particular effects on conscious experiences and if we're doing that we're switching
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from what starts off as a third person account of what's going on in the brain and it's and the mind viewed viewed in terms of information processing
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to the effects on conscious experiences observed from a first person point of view by the person whose brain were examining and conversely if we're looking at the effects of
00:48:52
consciousness as such from a viewed from a first person perspective on what else might be going on for example in the brain the body and the mind thought
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of as a form of human information processing then we're switching from a first-person account of what's going on to a third-person account of what's going on so in summary those two are next
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perspective accounts employing perspectival switching but the bottom line is this that all these interactions between consciousness and brain can be thought
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of as accounts of the same underlying psychophysical mental processes developing over time and that's just a brief summary and a brief introduction to that case
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if you want to have a closer look at that you might start off with um a paper i published in 1996 in the behavioral and brain sciences which is online
00:49:54
or for a fuller account of chapter 13 of understanding consciousness and so by way of summary we can say that there are three explanatory principles for an understanding of body brain mind
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and consciousness causal interactions so to begin with we have the software hardware analogy which turns out to be very useful in understanding functional disorders in neurology that there was the
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bio psychosocial or complex systems approach that simply accepts that minds and brains are embodied and the bodies are embedded in
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surrounding physical and social contexts all of which can affect them and then this relatively newer principle which is that the mind is a psychophysical process with both
00:50:49
physical and psychological or experiential manifestations that can be known in complementary third-person and first-person ways and this third principle for example has
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immediate consequences for how one thinks about treatment in various situations so if the mind is fundamentally psychophysical then physical interventions will have psychological consequences
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and conversely psychological interventions will have physical consequences in roughly analogous way to the way in which for example changes in electrical currents have consequences for the
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surrounding magnetic fields and vice versa so in any given situation either a physical or a psychological intervention or both might be appropriate depending on the precise
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etiology of the condition and the available treatments and at that point i should end it so thank you for your attention
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