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ABSTRACT: Johannes Müller's law of specific nerve energies (LOSNE) states that the mind has access not to objects in the world but only to our nerves. This law implies that the contents of the mind have no qualities in common with environmental objects but serve only as arbitrary signs or markers of those objects. The present article traces the implications of LOSNE for non-physical theories of mind and for modern neural identity theory (that mental events are identical with their neurological representations) and argues that these theories are essentially inconsistent with LOSNE. Teleological behaviorism, a behavioral identity theory of the mind, identifies a person's mind with the correlation over time between that person's overt behavior and environmental objects; this behavioral conception is consistent with a revised form of LOSNE in which the mind is conceived to exist not within the body but at the borderline between the body and the world.
Key words: behaviorism, identity theory, mind, Müller, sensation, specific nerve energies
According to Boring (1957, p. 34) Johannes Millier (1801-1858) was ". . .the foremost authority on physiology of his day, and his Handbuch, translated immediately into English, as the primary systematic treatise." In that book Millier formulated what later came to be known as "The Law of Specific Nerve Energies" (LOSNE). It is not really a law nor was it original with Miiller. Something very much like it had previously been stated by the Scottish physiologist, Sir Charles Bell; it is at least implicit in the writings of earlier physiologists and philosophers including Descartes and, to a degree, Aristotle. "The central and fundamental principle of the doctrine," according to Boring (1957, p. 82), "is that we are directly aware, not of objects, but of our nerves themselves; that is to say, the nerves are intermediaries between perceived objects and the mind and thus impose their own characteristics on the mind."
This raises the question: How do the nerves impose anything but their own characteristics on the mind? That is, how do the nerves tell us anything about the world? Descartes' had claimed that they don't; we already know all there is to know about the world; all the ideas we are ever going to have are already latent in our minds....