The Escape of the Mind
Howard Rachlin
Abstract
This book calls into question what is perhaps our most basic, most cherished, and universally accepted belief—that our minds are inside our bodies. Where else, you ask, can your mind possibly be? The counterintuitive position of the book is that our minds, conscious and unconscious, lie not where our firmest (yet unsupported) introspections tell us they are, but rather in how we actually behave over the long run. The book argues that our apparent introspections, no matter how positive we are about them, tell us absolutely nothing about our minds. The name of this approach to the mind is “teleo ... More
This book calls into question what is perhaps our most basic, most cherished, and universally accepted belief—that our minds are inside our bodies. Where else, you ask, can your mind possibly be? The counterintuitive position of the book is that our minds, conscious and unconscious, lie not where our firmest (yet unsupported) introspections tell us they are, but rather in how we actually behave over the long run. The book argues that our apparent introspections, no matter how positive we are about them, tell us absolutely nothing about our minds. The name of this approach to the mind is “teleological behaviorism.” Without in any way denigrating the many contributions of neuroscience to human welfare, the book argues that neuroscience, like introspection, is not a royal road to the understanding of the mind. Where then should you look to explain an act that is clearly caused by a persons mind? Teleological behaviorism says to look not inward to the spatial recesses of her nervous system but outward to the temporal recesses of her past and future overt behavior (to the temporally extended patterns that her act fits into). This approach leads to a coherent science of self-control and social cooperation. But scientific usefulness is not the only reason for adopting teleological behaviorism. The final two chapters provide a framework for a secular morality based on teleological behaviorism.
Keywords:
introspection,
mind,
neuroscience,
behavior,
secular morality,
self-control,
social cooperation,
teleological behaviorism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199322350 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199322350.001.0001 |
