Mind, brain and time: Rejoinder to Libet

Abstract

Libet in his reply misunderstands my claims against his interpretation of certain experimental findings. I may be partly responsible for the misunderstanding. His reply does not convince me. His interpretation of the findings, taken over and taken further by Popper & Eccles, has involved two inconsistent hypotheses having to do with the time or times of a conscious experience and the associated neural events. The fact of two hypotheses rather than one carries certain corollaries, but they are less significant than I previously supposed. The preferred “delay-and-antedating” hypothesis unpersuasively assigns self-contradictory beliefs, ideas or the like to subjects. This hypothesis has been thought to have consequences for general mind-brain theories (those that make mind and brain identical, those that assert they are in nomic or lawlike connection, and the theory of “the Self-Conscious Mind”) because it has not been distinguished from the other hypothesis, the “no-delay” hypothesis. The delay-and-antedating hypothesis has no such consequences. The no-delay hypothesis, which would have the consequences, is wholly unacceptable.