A Reply to Jaak Panksepp

Let me begin by thanking Oliver Turnbull for inviting me to address Panksepp's review of my book, and Jaak Panksepp for writing a serious review in the first place. Given the admiration I have for his thinking, I regard his review as a privilege. Still, the time I was given to respond to his long text was short and not quite adequate to deal with all the issues it raised. Accordingly, this reply deals only with what I regard as the main issues in the review. Hopefully, brevity will make the important points all the more salient.

It should be clear to readers that Panksepp's thinking and mine are in considerable agreement, on the matter of how the brain generates feelings and sentience at systems/network level (in this reply I do not address the cellular level of the process, nor does he in his review). In a number of passages of his text, however, a reader unacquainted with our work might guess otherwise. This is because Panksepp seems reluctant to agree with my positions except when they are expressed with virtually the same words and nuances that he uses to express his own. For example, there can be no doubt that I believe that nonhuman species—with brains far, far different from ours—are endowed with both feelings and sentience. On p. 26 of Self Comes to Mind, I write:

I am ready to believe that whenever brains begin to generate primordial feelings—and that could be quite early in evolutionary history—organisms acquire an early form of sentience.

Yet Panksepp persists in portraying me as a latecomer to this notion, perhaps even tentative about it. He interprets any word of scientific qualification as hesitation, if not heresy. When I say that all the evidence indicates that animals have feelings and sentience but I add that they have no way of telling it to us, I am not equivocating on my interpretation of the evidence or on my conviction. I am simply alluding to the fact that we must rely on an inference, no matter how well founded the inference is.

Much the same di