TY - GEN N1 - Target article for Special Issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies ID - cogprints2750 UR - http://cogprints.org/2750/ A1 - Velmans, Professor Max Y1 - 2002/11// N2 - In everyday life we take it for granted that we have conscious control of some of our actions and that the part of us that exercises control is the conscious mind. Psychosomatic medicine also assumes that the conscious mind can affect body states, and this is supported by evidence that the use of imagery, hypnosis, biofeedback and other ?mental interventions? can be therapeutic in a variety of medical conditions. However, there is no accepted theory of mind/body interaction and this has had a detrimental effect on the acceptance of mental causation in science, philosophy and in many areas of clinical practice. Biomedical accounts typically translate the effects of mind into the effects of brain functioning, for example, explaining mind/body interactions in terms of the interconnections and reciprocal control of cortical, neuroendocrine, autonomic and immune systems. While such accounts are instructive, they are implicitly reductionist, and beg the question of how conscious experiences could have bodily effects. On the other hand, non-reductionist accounts have to cope with three problems: 1) The physical world appears causally closed, which would seem to leave no room for conscious intervention. 2) One is not conscious of one?s own brain/body processing, so how could there be conscious control of such processing? 3) Conscious experiences appear to come too late to causally affect the processes to which they most obviously relate. This paper suggests a way of understanding mental causation that resolves these problems. It also suggests that ?conscious mental control? needs to be partly understood in terms of the voluntary operations of the preconscious mind, and that this allows an account of biological determinism that is compatible with experienced free will. KW - consciousness KW - causality KW - brains KW - reductionism KW - physicalism KW - dual-aspect theory KW - complementary perspectives KW - first-person KW - third-person KW - psychosomatic KW - psychophysical KW - psychoneuroimmunology KW - mind TI - HOW COULD CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES AFFECT BRAINS? SP - 3 AV - public EP - 29 ER -