Ted Honderich - Mind and Brain

Mind and Brain

Honderich's Union Theory of mind and brain is defended in A Theory of Determinism. The Union Theory takes it as possible that conscious events like our choices and decisions are in a way subjective but are nevertheless physical rather than near-physical events. They stand in a kind of lawlike connection with neural events, sometimes called the supervenience of mental events on neural events. These psychoneural pairs, as Honderich calls them, are just effects of certain causal sequences, and are causes of our actions. This sort of physicalism, a predecessor to the notion of supervenience, has since been succeeded in Honderich's writings by the near-physicalism of Radical Externalism. Radical Externalism holds that perceptual consciousness does not have a nomic sufficient condition in a head but only a necessary one. Honderich argues that reflective and affective consciousness are different again. He also argues that this is consistent with contemporary neuroscience, rescues us from the argument from illusion or brain in a vat, and also from the dubious conclusions of sense-data theory and phenomenalism.