Hebb O Donald 1945

Hebb, D.O. (1949). Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological

Theory (New York: John Wiley and Sons).

Mind

If one is to be consistent, there is no room here for a mysterious agent that is defined as not physical and yet has physical effects (especially since many of the entities of physics are known only through their effects). “Mind” can only be regarded, for scientific purposes, as the activity of the brain…(introduction pp. xiii and xiv).

Thought

The central problem with which we must find a way to deal can be put in two different ways.  Psychologically, it is the problem of thought: some sort of process that is not fully controlled by environmental stimulation and yet cooperates closely with that stimulation. From another point of view, physiologically, the problem is that of the transmission of excitation from sensory to motor cortex. This statement may not be as much oversimplified as it seems, especially when one recognized that the “transmission” may be a very complex process indeed, with a considerable time lag between sensory stimulation and the final motor response. The failure of psychology to handle thought adequately (or the failure of neurophysiology to tell us how to conceive of cortical transmission) has been the essential weakness of modern psychological theory and the reason for a persistent difficulties in dealing with a wide range of experimental and clinical data, as the following chapters will try to show, from the data of perception and learning to those of hunger, sleep, an neurosis. In mammals even as low as the rat it has turned out to be impossible to describe behavior as an interaction directly between sensory and motor processes. Something like thinking, that is, intervenes. “Thought” undoubtedly has the connotation of a human degree of complexity in cerebral function and may mean too much to be applied to lower animals. But even in the rat there is evidence that behavior is not completely controlled by immediate sensory events: there are central processes operating also.  

What is the nature of such relatively autonomous activities in the cerebrum? Not even tentative answer is available. We know a good deal about the afferent pathways to the cortex, about the efferent pathways from it, and about many structures linking the two. But the links are complex, and we know practically nothing about what goes on between the arrival of an excitation at a sensory projection area and its later departure from the motor area of the cortex.  (introduction p. xvi)

James Williams

James Williams in his book The Principles of Psychology (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, 1890) does not define the word “mind”.

Psychology, the science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1)thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know. (preface  )

We quote their arguments only to show how they appeal to the principle that /

no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind.(p.11)

Phrenology hardly does more than restate the problem. To answer the question, Why do I like children? By saying, " Because you have a large organ of philoprogenitiveness, but renames the phenomenon to be explained. What is my philoprogenitiveness ? Of what mental elements does it consist ? And how can a part of the brain be its organ? A science of the mind must reduce such complex manifestations as philoprogenitiveness to their elements. A science of the brain must point out the functions of its elements. A science cf the relations of mind and brain must show how the elementary ingredients of the former correspond to the elementary functions of the latter. (p.28)

the elementary powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination, association, judgment, and volition.(p.29)

Modern Science conceives of the matter in a very different way. Brain and mind alike consist of simple elements, sensory and motor. “All nervous centres”; says Dr. Hughlings

Jackson, " from the lowest to the very highest (the substrata of consciousness), are made up of nothing else than nervous arrangements, representing impressions and movements. ... I do not see of what other materials the brain can be (p.29-30)

The muscles and the sensitive points are represented each by a cortical point, and the brain is nothing but the sum of all these cortical points, to which, on the mental side, as many ideas correspond. Ideas of sensation, ideas of motion are, on the other hand, the elementary factors out of which the mind is built up by the associationists in psychology.(p.30)

No psychosis without neurosis (p.129)

In a general theory of evolution the inorganic comes first, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, then forms of life that possess mentality, and finally those like ourselves that possess it in a high degree. As long as we keep to the consideration of purely outward facts, even the most complicated facts of biology, our task as evolutionists is comparatively easy. We are dealing all the time with matter and its aggregations and separations ; and although our treatment must perforce be hypothetical, this does not prevent it from being continuous.(p.146)

We cannot even (as we shall later see) have two feelings in our mind at once.(p.157)

The associationists say the mind is constituted by a multiplicity of distinct ideas associated into a unity.

Only human beings have consciousness

Only human beings have consciousness

Herbert Spencer. Principles of biology.

http://www.archive.org/stream/principlesbiolo03spengoog#page/n108/mode/2up

p.96. There is , indeed, another mode of grouping the facts of Biology, with which al are familiar. According as they are facts of animal or vegetal life, they may be classed under the heads of Zoology and Botany. But this division, though convenient and indeed necessary for practical purposes, is one that does not here concern us. Dealing with organic structure and functions in connexion with their causes, conditions, concomitants, and consequences, Biology cannot divide itself into Animal-Biology and Vegetal-Biology; since the same fundamental classes of phenomena are common to both.

p.100. Light is thrown on functions, as well as on structures, by comparing organisms of differents kinds. Comparative Physiology and Comparative Psychology, are the names given to those collections of facts respecting the homologies and analogies, bodily and mental, that are brought to light by this kind of inquiry. These classified observations concerning likenesses and differences of functions, are helpers to interpret functions in their essential natures and relations. Hence Comparative Physiology and Comparative Psychology are names of methods, rather than names of true subdivisions of Biology.