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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the emergence of a neuromolecular vision of the brain. This means a new scale at which the brain and nervous system was conceptualized, and a new way in which their activities were understood. At this molecular level, the structure and processes of the brain and central nervous system were made understandable as material processes of interaction among molecules in neurons and the synapses between them. These were conceived in terms of the biophysical, chemical, and electrical properties of their constituent parts. At this scale, in a profoundly reductionist approach, despite the recognition that there was much that could not yet be explained, there seemed nothing mysterious about the operations of the nervous system. Indeed, mental processes—cognition, emotion, volition—could be explained in entirely material ways, as the outcome of biological processes in the brain.

Research on implicit processes has become increasingly popular during the past two decades. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been given to clarifying the meaning of the concept implicit. This chapter proposes that implicit processes are processes that possess features of automaticity. Because different automaticity features do not necessarily co-occur, the chapter recommends specifying the automaticity features one has in mind when using the term “implicit.” An overview is provided of the definitions of the various automaticity features that are used in the cognitive decompositional approach of automaticity. Because it is difficult to diagnose the cognitive automaticity features of mental processes, the chapter explores for the first time a functional decompositional approach to automaticity in which automaticity features are defined in nonmental terms and used to describe effects. The chapter ends with discussion of implications of the analysis for research on the role of implicit processes in scientific behavior.

This chapter considers the view that we are literally brains. It argues that the view is best supported by the claim that brains are the primary subjects of mental properties, giving a “thinking‐brain problem” analogous to the thinking‐animal problem that supports animalism. The brain view is shown to have implausible consequences about our identity through time, and to presuppose that something is a part of a thinking being if and only if it is directly involved in that being's mental processes. It is then argued that the notion of direct involvement is too interest‐relative to give this principle any useful content, and that the principle is in any case unfounded.

Are there some mental phenomena for which insight is necessarily inexistent? The Freudian ‘Id’, and Schopenhauerian ‘Will’, have been joined in latter days by certain cerebral phenomena, all of which have been claimed to be both necessarily inaccessible and mental. General principles of insight are sought whereby we may assess such claims. The main truth emerging is that all known mental phenomenal types are normally immediately insightable in states of proper waking consciousness, and that the only phenomenon that defies the rule is constituted out of insightables. While many mental causal relations are naturally and even necessarily inaccessible, it seems unlikely that any mental phenomenal processes could be. As a test case, the formation of the visual experience is investigated, to discover whether it includes such a mental process. No evidence for such is encountered. All mental processes seem in principle to be accessible to their owner, whether immediately qua experience or inferentially through their constituting state. The conditional‐Cartesian thesis seems intact.

This chapter focuses on the interrelated roles of intuition, hunches, common sense, and the unconscious. It presents several examples from both science and folk psychology, some consisting of the author's personal social experiences and their implied lessons. These experiences also provide metaphors demonstrating challenges to common assumptions, including the perceived unity of consciousness and the widely assumed confinement of consciousness to brain boundaries.

Building on the pioneering work of Bowlby on attachment theory, social psychological researchers have broadened the original focus of the theory to include more of an emphasis on adult relationships. In this chapter, the authors describe the reciprocal association between mental processes and behavior within attachment theory. Just as mental states of an individual guide behavioral enactment toward others, behaviors often give rise to changes in mental processes. The authors review Bowlby's notion of behavioral system, including its evolutionary roots and biological function. They also describe both normative features of the attachment system and individual differences in the functioning of the system that arise in response to exposure to differing experiences with others. The authors argue that relational experience can be characterized as a chain of mental states and observable behaviors, linked with reciprocal causal arrows. Viewed in this way, behavior can be seen as a vehicle between motivational states.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about animal rationality and mental processing in animals. This book discusses the theoretical issues and distinctions that bear on attributions of rationality to animals and draws some contrasts between rationality and certain other traits of animals to determine the relationships between them. It explores the relations between behaviour and the processes that explain behaviour, and the senses in which animal behaviour might be rational in virtue of features other than classical reasoning processes on the human model.

This chapter reinterprets Libet's results in light of a distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 mental processing. It uses this framework to explain why we have a conscious experience of our own free will, and discusses potential moral consequences of seeing apparent free will as an illusion.

This chapter explores the experimental studies investigating motor imagery through the recording of autonomic nervous system activity. It outlines the goals and methods of such peripheral recordings in studying mental processes. It also discusses how the motor commands sent to the autonomic effectors are facilitated during motor imagery, whereas the direct voluntary commands transmitted through the pyramidal tract are at least partially inhibited.

This chapter compares the psychoanalytical and sensorimotor control theories of action and the psychodynamic and sensorimotor models of mental functioning. It examines Sigmund Freud's concept of ‘indication of reality’, which he used to characterize the function of the secondary process of mental processing, and suggests that this concept parallels the modern notion of ‘efference copy’. This chapter suggests that Freud's model of secondary process functioning has an inhibiting effect on primary processes.

This chapter discusses a new way of thinking about the mind that will bring forth a new “science of the mind.” This new way of thinking is not exactly “new;” it is an old way of thinking that has evolved and taken on a new form. The steady rise of its credibility is due to the fact that it emerges from a convergence of various disciplines in cognitive science, namely, situated robotics and artificial intelligence, perceptual psychology, dynamical approaches to developmental and cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. The new science of the mind will employ different methods for studying the mind, and will supply explanations of mental processes that are reasonably different from traditional accounts.

This chapter studies experimental and speech error approaches to normal adults' production and perception of language. It introduces the concepts of ‘mental chronometry’ and ‘mental processing speed’ and studies experimental and phonetic approaches to the production and perception of verbal materials. It then examines the initial experimental studies of verbal memory, association, and analogy. It also explores the first process model of speaking, which is based on the analysis of spontaneous speech errors. This chapter includes a discussion of the nineteenth-century beginnings of experimentation and research into speech error and the psychology of language and speech.

This chapter evaluates the mental time estimation hypothesis which proposes that timing might be subject to a discrete central attentional bottleneck and timing cannot take place until certain operations have finished. The chapter reviews the evidence for a central attentional bottleneck and discusses its relevance to the study of timing under conditions of divided attention. The findings refute the suggestion that timing is wholly subject to the same discrete central bottleneck as other types of effortful mental processes.

Action tendencies can be activated and put into motion without the need for the individual's conscious intervention; even complex social behavior can unfold without an act of will or awareness of its sources. Behavioral evidence from patients with frontal lobe lesions, behavior and goal-priming studies in social psychology, the dissociated behavior of deeply hypnotized subjects, findings from the study of human brain evolution, cognitive neuroscience studies of the structure and function of the frontal lobes as well as the separate actional and semantic visual pathways, cognitive psychological research on the components of working memory and on the degree of conscious access to motoric behavior—all of these converge on the conclusion that complex behavior and other higher mental processes can proceed independently of the conscious will. Indeed, the brain evolution and neuropsychological evidence suggests that the human brain is designed for such independence. This chapter compares and contrasts lines of research relevant to the nonconscious control of individual social behavior—that is, behavior induced to occur by environmental factors and not by the individual's conscious awareness and intentions.

This chapter talks about how the experience of will could be a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally—this can be referred to as the theory of apparent mental causation. This means that people experience conscious will quite independently of any actual causal connection between their thoughts and their actions. Reductions in the impression that there is a link between thought and action may explain why people get a sense of involuntariness even for actions that are voluntary. Whereas inflated perceptions of the link between thought and action may, in turn, explain why people experience an illusion of conscious will at all.

Here Sidgwick examines the nature of unreasonable action, that is, action (or inaction) that is contrary to reason or the subjective practical judgment of the agent. He undertakes his discussion from a psychological as opposed to an ethical standpoint, seeking to pin down the nature of the mental process involved in unreasonable action by a sane person in apparently normal conditions. Sidgwick notes that, on the one hand, an action may oppose the individual's moral sentiment without being unreasonable, and, on the other hand, it may be unreasonable and yet align with her moral sentiments about what ought to be done.