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The Nature and Purpose of Belief
Jonathan Leicester,
The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
This paper reviews intellectualistic, dispositional, and feeling or occurrent theories of
belief. The feeling theory is favored. The purpose of belief is to guide action, not to
indicate truth. Decisions about actions often have to be made quickly in the absence of
evidence. Belief gives speed and economy to inquiry and counterfactual thinking. The
feeling theory explains this role of belief and suggests mechanisms for overconfidence
of correctness, confirmation bias, wishful believing, vacillating belief, the difficulty
with multifactorial reasoning, the inability to withhold judgment, the delusions of mental
illness, and the relations between belief, opinion, and knowledge. The intellectualistic
theory of belief fails because it gives undue weight to evidence as the most salient
or available factor concerned with belief, which leads to the mistaken conclusion that
the purpose of belief is to indicate truth.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. Jonathan Leicester, 62 Rickard Street, Five Dock
2046, NSW, Australia. Email: jonleicester@westnet.com.au
Neurophysics of the Flow of Time
Ronald Gruber, Stanford University
Three physical theories explaining the flow of time are examined. One theory suggests
that “flow” is associated with the manner of information transfer between registers
(modules) within the brain. Different robotic systems are predicted to experience different
types of flow. Here, human examples (savants and amnesics) are found to support
the theory and the model is modified suggesting that flow is a cognitive illusion. A second
theory suggests that time is non-existent, that the universe is a complex quantum
state which, upon observation, the brain acquires “stills” and converts them to an illusion
of motion and flow. Accordingly the brain should be able to generate a physiological
illusion of temporality (the experiential phenomenon of before/after) from stills.
Experimental evidence is given that the temporality illusion so generated is not physiological;
it is cognitive, lending no support to that theory. A third theory suggesting
that the flow of time is really a myth is briefly reviewed.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Ronald Gruber, M.D., 3318 Elm Street, Oakland,
California 94609. Email: rgrubermd@hotmail.com
Characteristics of Consciousness in Collapse-Type
Quantum Mind Theories
Imants Barušs, King’s University College
at The University of Western Ontario
The purpose of this paper is to look at some of the apparent characteristics of consciousness
in theories in which consciousness is said to play a role in the collapse of the state
vector. In particular, these reflections are based primarily on the work of three theorists:
Amit Goswami, Henry Stapp, and Evan Harris Walker. Upon looking at such theories,
three characteristics of consciousness become apparent. The first is a volitional aspect
of the mind that needs to be distinguished from awareness or observation. The second
is the stratification of consciousness such that the experiential stream that goes on privately
for a given person can be distinguished from a universal deep consciousness, akin
to David Bohm’s implicate order, that might underlie ordinary consciousness. Having
done so, a question arises regarding the manner in which deliberately intentional acts
that occur within one’s experiential stream can apparently have their intended effects.
An indirect mechanism consistent with the M5 model of Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne
is proposed. Third, in transferring the notion of the collapse of the state vector from the
context of observation in experimental physics to manifestation of everyday life, the
temporal discontinuity of collapses implies that the experiential stream of ordinary waking
consciousness is also discontinuous. Furthermore, in some collapse-type quantum
mind theories, the subject–object distinction is thought to emerge with the collapse, so
that the physical universe itself, including its spatial features, could be arising from a
pre-physical substrate at the rate of once per Planck time. This idea can be modelled
using Jack Ng’s notion of a spacetime lattice with Planck time timelike separations and
Planck length spacelike separations. Furthermore, such modelling can be partially cast in
category-theoretic form by adapting a previous application of Grothendieck topoi to
Edmund Husserl’s conceptualization of conscious mental acts. Thus, a volitional aspect
of mind, the stratification of consciousness, and discontinuity of the ordinary waking
state are some of the characteristics of consciousness implicit in some collapse-type quantum
mind theories.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Imants Barus¡s, King’s University College,
Department of Psychology, 266 Epworth Avenue, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 2M3. Email:
baruss@uwo.ca
Why Private Events Are Associative:
Automatic Chaining and Associationism
Robert Epstein, University of California
San Diego
That every response is also a stimulus has important implications for how we characterize
the private experiences of both people and non-human animals. Acting as stimuli,
responses, whether covert or overt, change the probability of subsequent responses.
Hence, all behavior, covert and overt, is necessarily associative in some sense, and
thinking may be characterized as “covert autochaining.” According to this view, animals
capable of responding to temporally remote stimuli and to characteristics of their
own bodies necessarily engage in some form of associative thinking. This characterization
of thinking necessarily presumes that private behavioral events adhere to at least
some processes that occur in — and have been extensively studied in — overt behavior.
To assume otherwise, as do Daniel Dennett, Robert Nozick, and others, is to be
unnecessarily pessimistic both about the robustness of evolutionary processes and about
our ability to explain complex human phenomena in rigorous empirical terms.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert Epstein, Ph.D., 1035 East Vista Way, Vista,
California 92084. Email: repstein@post.harvard.edu
Proper Names and Local Information
Osamu Kiritani, Kyushu University
Evolutionary theory has recently been applied to language. The aim of this paper is to
contribute to such an evolutionary approach to language. I argue that Kripke’s causal
account of proper names, from an ecological point of view, captures the information
carried by uses of a proper name, which is that a certain object is referred to. My argument
appeals to Millikan’s concept of local information, which captures information
about the environment useful for an organism.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Osamu Kiritani, Ph.D., User Science Institute, Kyushu
University, 4-9-1 Shiobaru, Minami-ku, Fukuoka 815–8540, Japan. Email: okiritan@nifty.com
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