Subjective antedating of a sensory experience and mind-brain theories: reply to Honderich (1984)

Honderich claims that our "delay-and-antedating" hypothesis, of a delay in cerebral production combined with a subjective antedating of a conscious sensory experience, involves self-contradiction which may cast doubt on some of our experimental findings and on the hypothesis. This claim misses the distinction between the phenomenological subjective mental content of an experience and the physical-neuronal configuration that elicits the experience; also, it cannot explain the experimentally observed discrepancy, between subjective timing and the empirically delayed time for cerebral adequacy for eliciting the experience, found when stimulating a subcortical sensory pathway. Honderich usefully distinguishes between our stated (delay-and-antedating) hypothesis and a different though unacceptable one which would have serious implications for mind-brain theories. The delay-and-antedating hypothesis does not provide a formally definitive contradiction of monist-identity theory (of the mind-brain relationship). However, our experimentally based hypothesis does dissociate subjective/mental timing from the actual physical/neuronal time of an experience. This phenomenon, though conceptually strange, must be encompassed by any mind-brain theory.