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
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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, nonoptimal 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 CONSCIOUSNESS
According 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 consciousnessbody 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 DUALISTINTERACTIONISM
 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 DUALISTINTERACTIONISM
 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
Ontological Correlation
identity
Causation
Symmetrical
Yes
Yes
No
Obeys
Leibniz'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