The Peripheral Mind Quotes

“Self-consciousness is, from a naturalistic point of view (in this case neurobiological), not more than a degree of sophistication of neural processes. The emergence of self-conscious states is not a drastic, extravagant, earth-shaking phenomenon.”
― István Aranyosi, The Peripheral Mind: Philosophy of Mind and the Peripheral Nervous System

“In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.”
― István Aranyosi, The Peripheral Mind: Philosophy of Mind and the Peripheral Nervous System

“The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or ‘de-minded’.”
― István Aranyosi, The Peripheral Mind: Philosophy of Mind and the Peripheral Nervous System

“(...) to think that worms and slugs are neurologically simple is another blunder of contemporary, scientifically uninformed philosophy. To take as an example the current “superstar” nematode worm --superstar, because it was the first multicellular organism to have its genome completely sequenced, by 1998, and is widely used as a model organism-- the 1 mm long Caenorhabditis elegans, it exhibits a nervous system of 302 neurons and a sensorimotor system with very complex connectivity patterns.”
― István Aranyosi, The Peripheral Mind: Philosophy of Mind and the Peripheral Nervous System

“Typically, one of the arguments against the ethicalness of chemical castration is that it affects the very core of personhood, part of which is sexual drive and sexual fantasizing, by indirectly acting on the CNS (…) But, I think, an equally good argument could be that it interferes with basic homeostatic processes of the organism, regulated by the autonomic PNS and the endocrine system. Maybe the public tends to agree with chemical castration of sexual offenders, especially of pedophiles, not only because of the terrible acts they have committed, but also because there is a hidden prejudice that the “real or genuine person” of such offenders is a mind that has been captured by hormones, and that there is nothing wrong in “killing off these hormones and liberate the person from their vicious influence” (…) I say it is a prejudice because part of what it means to be a mentally healthy and well adapted individual involves a huge influence of the hormonal component, not only testosterone, but all other hormones, and, as a matter of fact, sexual offenders do not have abnormally high levels of free testosterone.”
― István Aranyosi, The Peripheral Mind: Philosophy of Mind and the Peripheral Nervous System