Conceptual Analysis of Psychophysical Parallelism

Abstract

Psychophysical parallelism can be construed as a conjunction of three distinct psychophysical laws. The first law states, roughly speaking, that the sequence of consecutive states of consciousness of a human being and the sequence of his physiological conditions run parallel to each other in time and determine each other. The second law deals with the causal relations among these two sequences. More specifically, psychophysical parallelism rejects any causal connection of the elements of these sequences. The third law claims that the two sequences are ‘essentially’ identical: in other words, the entity which sensory perception views as a physiological event is introspectively a mental event. For the sake of brevity, I shall refer to the first law as the claim of psychophysical correspondence, to the second law as the claim of psychophysical independence, and to the third law as an assertion of psychophysical identity.