{"agent_id":"titchener","agent_name":"Edward Bradford Titchener","slug":"mind-and-body","label":"Mind and body: do conscious and nervous processes run in parallel, or do they interact?","topic":"Mind and body","question":"Do conscious and nervous processes run in parallel, or do they interact?","position":"When I explain a conscious process by reference to the nervous system, I do not mean that the brain causes the mind or the mind the brain. Mind and body are two aspects, or two parallel series, that run in exact correspondence but never cross: for every conscious process there is a concurrent nervous process, and the two vary together, point for point, but neither acts upon the other. This is psychophysical parallelism, and I hold it because the alternatives fail. Interaction — the mind pushing the body, the body pushing the mind — violates the closed causal order of the physical world and explains nothing. What, then, does the nervous system give the psychologist? Not a cause of consciousness, but its systematic ground: the parallel physiological process supplies the connected, law-governed background against which the disconnected data of introspection may be arranged and explained. I invoke the nervous process not to reduce mind to matter but to give my descriptions a systematic order they could not have from introspection alone.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"When I explain a conscious process by reference to the nervous system, I do not mean that the brain causes the mind or the mind the brain.","n":[1]},{"t":"Mind and body are two aspects, or two parallel series, that run in exact correspondence but never cross: for every conscious process there is a concurrent nervous process, and the two vary together, point for point, but neither acts upon the other.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This is psychophysical parallelism, and I hold it because the alternatives fail.","n":[]},{"t":"Interaction — the mind pushing the body, the body pushing the mind — violates the closed causal order of the physical world and explains nothing.","n":[2,3]},{"t":"What, then, does the nervous system give the psychologist?","n":[]},{"t":"Not a cause of consciousness, but its systematic ground: the parallel physiological process supplies the connected, law-governed background against which the disconnected data of introspection may be arranged and explained.","n":[4]}],[{"t":"I invoke the nervous process not to reduce mind to matter but to give my descriptions a systematic order they could not have from introspection alone.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"A Text-book of Psychology (1910); An Outline of Psychology (1896); Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena (1929). Reception: the long history of the mind-body problem; the decline of psychophysical parallelism; the modern debates over identity theory, functionalism, and interaction in the philosophy of mind and neuroscience.","works":["A Text-book of Psychology (1910)","An Outline of Psychology (1896)","Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena (1929)"],"reception":"the long history of the mind-body problem; the decline of psychophysical parallelism; the modern debates over identity theory, functionalism, and interaction in the philosophy of mind and neuroscience.","status":"Psychophysical parallelism was the standard mind-body position of late-nineteenth-century experimental psychology and Titchener held it in a considered form, using the nervous process as the systematic ground of psychological explanation without reducing mind to it. The position has since been largely abandoned in the philosophy of mind in favor of identity theories, functionalism, and various forms of interaction and supervenience, and parallelism's clean two-series picture is generally rejected as both metaphysically extravagant and empirically idle. Titchener's use of parallelism was more methodological than metaphysical — a way of ordering psychological data — and in that limited role it prefigures the modern reliance on neural correlates of consciousness, even as his strict two-parallel- series metaphysics is not held today.","era":"1867-1927","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"An Outline of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Our three questions, therefore, must be handed over to the metaphysician. lOO. Mind and Body. — We have laid it down as a rule without exception that every mental process has as its condition a bodily process, some change in the central nervous system and, more particularly, in the cerebral cortex.","label":"An Outline of Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"A Text-book of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But there would be no unity or coherence in it; it would lack that single guiding principle which biology has, for instance, in the law of evolution, or physics in the law of the conservation of energy. In order to make psychology scientific we must not only describe, 9- The Problem of Psychology 39 we must also explain mind. We must answer the question 'why.' But here is a difficulty.","label":"A Text-book of Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"A Beginners Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"That is the first rough answer to our question. Much more must be said, if the answer is to be precise; but even as it is We have travelled a long way from the little man living inside the head! lo Psychology: What it Is and What it Does 3. Mind and Body* —The first thing to get clear about is the nature of the man left in the worldj the man whose presence is necessary for psychology and unneces- sary for physics.","label":"A Beginners Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"A Text-book of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The physical world, the world of inde- pendent experience, just because it is independent of the indi- vidual man, is complete and self-contained. All of the processes that make it up are bound together as cause and effect; nowhere is there a gap or break 'in their connection.","label":"A Text-book of Psychology"},{"n":5,"work":"A Primer of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It has been seriously argued by some psychologists that mind appears wherever life appears; not only in the animal kingdom, but in the vegetable as well. This is a question which we can- not stop to discuss here. At any rate the plant-mind, if there is such a thing, must be so extraordinarily rudimentary and so totally different from our own that it is hopeless to try to form any idea of it. 7.","label":"A Primer of Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"structuralism","label":"Structuralism: is the task of psychology to analyse consciousness into its elementary contents?"},{"slug":"introspection","label":"Introspection: can the trained observation of one's own consciousness be the method of a science?"},{"slug":"imageless-thought","label":"Imageless thought: is all thinking composed of sensations and images, or are there contentless acts of thought?"}]}