ABSTRACT
E: You will remember that last night, Karl, when we were on our peripatetic discussion, you raised a very important criticism of the story I was there developing. Briefly my story was that we had to consider the brain events as giving a complete integrated response to the whole of the sensory input and of all the remembered past; and in this integrated complexity we had, as it were, the whole of the human performance. My next point was that the self-conscious mind was merely reading out from this neurally integrated ensemble. It was rather passive in this, not actively concerned in modifying it, but taking it as it was presented by the neuronal machinery in the spatio-tem poral patterned operation. This warning of yours that I would be trapped in parallelism by such a view really worried me because I could see that, if the self-conscious mind was doing no more than give a readout of the neuronal machinery’s performance, it would certainly be a parallelistic position. Of course I could save it a bit by saying that, in the action of voluntary will, one can have an action back from the self-conscious mind onto the neural machinery, but that seems to me to be a quite inadequate way out.
