Feelings of anger, shame, pride, and fear are all described in terms of body temperature. Many common descriptions of our inner states are in terms of the behavior they dispose us to display: “I could have jumped over the moon,” “I could have bitten off my tongue,” “You could have knocked me down with a feather,” “I was ready to give up.” All these ways of talking fit the suggested account of inner states. A somewhat parallel claim in made concerning inner awareness of mental states which are not sensations. For awareness of mental states which are not sensations. It becomes the compulsion of custom and tradition and finally the law. However, the commandment concealed behind taboo prohibitions which differ materially according to place and time, had originally the meaning: Beware of the wrath of demons. Primitive races believe in demonic powers, and has remained in power simply because it was one by virtue of a kind of a psychic persistence and in this manner it became the root of their customs and laws. However, neither fear nor demons can be accepted in psychology as finalities defying any further deduction.   It would be different if demons really existed; but we know that, like gods, they are only the product of the psychic powers of man; they have been created from and out of something. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Genetically, the asocial nature of the neurosis springs from its original tendency to flee from a dissatisfying reality to a more pleasurable World of phantasy. Neurosis is a relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress (depression anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality.  This real World which neurotics shun is dominated by the society of human beings and by the institutions created by them; the estrangement from reality is at the same time a with draw from human companionship. However, the greater social differentiation of these people suffering from neurosis manifests itself in the fact that they exercise an especially effective intense sense and the understanding turns inwards upon itself, reflects on its own operations, and makes them the object of their own contemplation. They begin where the most primitive and at the same time the most enduring human impulses have their origin, namely in the fear of the effect of demonic powers. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

The triumphant progress in the twenty-first century has almost completely eliminated vitalist notions and supernatural views of life.  The rise of cybernetics (the abstract theory of machines) and its applications in computing machinery and objects which simulate some of the performances of living things are beginning to threaten the idea of a special status for mental activity. The gathering and interpretation of information, the employment of stored information, successful and spectacular problem solving, even analogues of fatigue, overload, and confusion, hitherto all monopolies of the animate, are now displayed by organizations of matter whose operations can be explained in terms of physical properties alone. And on the other hand, experimental study of the nervous systems of animals and men is showing, in ever increasing detail, how artificially induced changes in the electrochemical state of the nervous system issue in changes in the subject’s “mental” activity. Displays of emotion, performance in perception and recall, and anxiety and tension are being tied down to brain function in this way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Furthermore, many psychologists of this century have become disheartened by the difficulties of investigating hypothetical mental states and have turned to the study of behavior, relying on publicly observable and physical phenomena in their analyses and explanation of human activities. Indeed, there have been three distinct movements of a materialistic stamp in recent philosophizing about minds. Those meaningful statements about minds which do not deal with hypothetical constructs must refer to such physical properties and entities, even though we cannot yet give their physical translation. Paranormal phenomena are a serious embarrassment to materialism. At some times some people have access to information in ways not explicable within current scientific theory.  The quantity of this dangerous property is also taken into consideration. Some persons of things have more of it than others and the danger is precisely in accordance with the charge. The most peculiar part of it is that anyone who has violated such a prohibition assumes the nature of the forbidden object as if he has absorbed the whole dangerous charge. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

This concept and the system corresponding to it express a fragment of psychic life which is really not comprehensible to us. And indeed it would seem that no understanding of it could be possible without entering into the study of the beliefs in spirits and demons. Every psychological problem is well worth the effort of investigation for its own sake, but for other reasons as well. A fortiori, these phenomena are not explicable within physics alone. It is not merely that the faculties dubbed telepathy, or clairvoyance cannot yet be accommodated but that they seem to be positively excluded by our present understanding of the physical World. The same can be said of the very striking but less well controlled feats of trance mediums. Although paranormal phenomena cannot be discounted, the spiritual constructions commonly put on them are altogether too hasty. Some revisions of scientific theory will be necessary, but it is not at all clear that we must credit the paranormally gifted with extraordinary souls capable of magic performance which explains this or that striking event. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

It is possible that the paranormal phenomena is indicative of some property of the fundamental physical particles undetected or even undetectable in studies of simpler systems than the human being. However, to admit that paranormal capacities cannot be predicted to arise from concatenation of physical particles is not to admit that ghosts come into play at a certain level of complexity. For instance, even before we could explain the macroscopic phenomena of ferromagnetism as arising from juxtaposition of molecular magnetism was at work. The suggestion that resonances among complex systems could explain extrasensory perception. It is plausible in the cases of information passing from mind to mind without an intermediary. However, clairvoyant success and trance medium reports of the dead involve action at a distance without medium in both temporal directions. There is something in common to the various mental states, there is an element of consciousness where most everyone can tell the sensation of blue differs from green. We have then in every sensation two distinct terms, consciousness, in respect of which all sensation are alike; and come thing else [the object], in respect of which one sensation differs from another. #RanolphHarris 6 of 7

There is no reason to think that these emergent capacities of complex systems will ever be predictable from knowledge of their physical elements. This does not mean that they are not physical emergences or that we could never learn that they were. To deviate into science fiction, we could reasonably claim to know that they were merely physical emergences if it were possible to assemble an electronic machine which demonstrated paranormal powers or to synthesize an organism which grew into something which could demonstrate them. Until then, materialism remains unproven. What promised to be a supernatural manifestation was thus easily explained on a normal basis, but there are still something that seem to be quite usual, and it is impossible to exclude the mysterious. To the category of the wonderful and uncanny, we may also add that strange feeling we perceive in certain moments and situations when it seems as if we had already had exactly the same experience, or hard previously found ourselves in the same situation. Yet we are never successful in our efforts to recall clearly those former experiences and situation. #RanolphHarris 7 of 7