Place, U. T. (1997c). From mystical experience to biological consciousness: a pilgrim's progress? [Conference presentation abstract]. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, 5, 117.
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Place, U. T. (1998a). From mystical experience to biological consciousness: a pilgrim's progress? In Man Cheung Chung (Ed.), Current Trends in History and Philosophy of Psychology, (Vol. 1, 1998, chapter 8, pp. 43-48). British Psychological Society.
[Abstract]I recount the history of a thought process leading from an adolescent interest in mystical experience to an article entitled 'Is consciousness a brain process?' (Place 1956) in which I gave an affirmative answer to that question. A psychological research project designed to demonstrate the adaptive function of a personality transformation brought about through mystical experience becomes an attempt to resolve the mind-body problem through an empirical evaluation of the hypothesis that consciousness is a behaviour-controlling process in the brain. The mystic's insistence on the inadequacy of words to describe such experiences leads through the logical positivist's claim that religious language is nonsense, to the view that nothing that introspecting subjects say about their experiences is inconsistent with anything the physiologist might say about the brain processes in which on this view they consist.
Note:
This is a shortened version of Place (2004).
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Download: 1998a From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness.pdf

Place, U. T. (2004). From mystical experience to biological consciousness. A pilgrim's progress? In G. Graham, & E.R. Valentine (Eds.), Identifying the mind: Selected papers of U. T. Place (pp. 14-29). Oxford University Press.
[Abstract]I recount the history of a thought process leading from an adolescent interest in mystical experience to an article entitled 'Is consciousness a brain process?' in which I argued for an affirmative answer to that question. For the first time in recent history the materialist thesis was presented in a form in which it could withstand what had previously been regarded as decisive philosophical objections. The paper contains a critique of the "phenomenological fallacy" in which I draw attention to how little we can really say about the properties of our private experiences. This argument owes much to the insistence of the mystics on the inadequacy of words to describe their experiences.
Keywords: consciousness
Note:
This paper is published with minor editorial changes and without the abstract and the appendix in G. Graham and E. R. Valentine (Eds.) (2004). Identifying the Mind: Selected Papers of U. T. Place (pp. 14-29). Oxford University Press,. The paper was already finished in 1996. A shortened version was presented to the Mind and Brain symposium, organized by Dr. Peter Fenwick at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, in November 1996 and to the Eleventh Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society, History and Philosophy Section, York, March 1997. It was published under a different title and edited by Anthony Freeman including an editorial introduction and footnotes as Place, U. T. (2002). A pilgrim’s progress? Journal of Consciousness Studies. 9(3), 34-52.
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Download: 2004 From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness.pdf