Max Velmans

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Max Velmans (born 27 May 1942 in Amsterdam) is a British psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, principally known for the theory of consciousness called "reflexive monism".

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Reflexive monism bridges the materialist/dualist divide by noting that, in terms of their phenomenology, experiences of the external world are none other than the physical world-as-experienced, thereby placing aspects of human consciousness in the external phenomenal world, rather than exclusively within the head or brain. A similar point of departure is adopted in much of European phenomenology. The theory then explores the consequences of this point of departure for a different understanding of various conventional ways of distinguishing mental from physical phenomena, such as internal versus external phenomena, private versus public phenomena, subjective versus objective phenomena, and the world-as-experienced versus the world as described by physics. The theory also combines facets of realism (for the existence of reality per se), with idealism (for the existence of the phenomenal world), which falls short of avowing the necessity of perception to the existence of reality per se (the principle of "esse est percipi"). [1]

Velmans has around 100 publications in the area of consciousness studies in which he develops this basic point of departure into a general theory that addresses the many problems of consciousness, including Understanding Consciousness (2000, 2009), and Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness (2017). In his map of prominent theories of consciousness Francisco Varela categorises Velmans' work as non-reductionist, stressing the importance of first-person accounts of the phenomenology of consciousness, [2] as well as third-person accounts of brain states and functions, which in Velmans' work are thought of as complementary. [3] [4]

Biography

Born in Amsterdam, Velmans grew up in Sydney, Australia. After attending Sydney Boy's High School, he studied Electrical Engineering at St. Andrews College at the University of Sydney, where he received his B.Eng in 1963. In the evening he attended psychology classes at the University of Sydney for another two years, before moving to Europe. After several years of research and development he received his PhD in Psychology from Bedford College in 1974. [5]

After his graduation in 1963 Velmans had started his career designing electrical circuits at the electronics laboratory of the Australian engineering company EMAIL Ltd. After half a year he moved to systems analyses of business and industrial systems at the new information technology department. After touring through Europe in 1966 he became affiliated with Bedford College, University of London to pursue research for his PhD. In 1968 he was appointed to a lectureship in the new Psychology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, eventually to a personal chair in Psychology, and from 2006 to Emeritus Professor of Psychology. [5]

Velmans co-founded the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society in 1994, and served as its chair from 2003 to 2006. He was appointed National Visiting Professor for 2010–2011 by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, and in 2011 was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy of Social Sciences. [6]

Work

Understanding Consciousness

Velmans' Understanding Consciousness (2000, 2009) is a comprehensive summary of his theoretical work, and introduces the idea of "reflexive monism." [7] [8] [9] [10]

Reflexive monism presents itself as an alternative to both dualism and reductionism. It states that it does not make sense to speak of phenomenological experiences of reality as occurring solely within the brain, given that some of them quite clearly occur within the experienced world itself (for example, asked to point to an external light as-experienced, almost all rational subjects would point to the light that is experienced rather than to the brain, which is where, according to dualists and reductionists, the experience actually takes place). Thus, Velmans argues, the relationship between subjects and experienced reality is reflexive: some experiences apprehended by the subject are quite clearly placed "in the world" by the perceiving mind. The contents of consciousness are, thus, not exclusively in the brain, but often in the perceived physical world itself; in fact, in terms of phenomenology, there is no clear and distinct difference between what we normally think of as the "physical world", the "phenomenal world" and the "world as perceived". [11] [7] He writes:

This sketch of how consciousness fits into the wider universe supports a form of non-reductive, Reflexive Monism. Human minds, bodies and brains are embedded in a far greater universe. Individual conscious representations are perspectival. That is, the precise manner in which entities, events and processes are translated into experiences depends on the location in space and time of a given observer, and the exact mix of perceptual, cognitive, affective, social, cultural and historical influences which enter into the 'construction' of a given experience. In this sense, each conscious construction is private, subjective, and unique. Taken together, the contents of consciousness provide a view of the wider universe, giving it the appearance of a 3D phenomenal world. ... However, such conscious representations are not the thing-itself. In this vision, there is one universe (the thing-itself), with relatively differentiated parts in the form of conscious beings like ourselves, each with a unique, conscious view of the larger universe of which it is a part. In so far as we are parts of the universe that, in turn, experience the larger universe, we participate in a reflexive process whereby the universe experiences itself." [11]

Changing Places

The changing places thought experiment is one of many conceived by Velmans, discussed in Understanding Consciousness. The experiment was designed to demonstrate the difficulties in distinguishing phenomenologically between a "subjective" first-person experience of a given event or object and a third-person "objective" observation of the same event or object. It also throws doubt on the supposed contrast between the "subjectivity" of a subject's experience and the supposed "objectivity" of an external observer's observations of the neural correlates of that experience in the subject's brain.

Velmans conceives of a situation in which an experimenter ("E") is observing a subject ("S") exposed to a light stimulus. The differences between the two viewpoints, Velmans argues, is primarily derived from a difference in interest, reflected in a difference in their required activities. To explain, during the experiment S is required only to report on her experiences of the light, which she needs to communicate to E in an appropriate manner. E, on the other hand, is interested primarily in S's experience of the light, and thus E's focus is not just on the light (which he thinks of as a "stimulus") but also on the observable events in S's brain, and on S's reports concerning what she experiences. Thus, E is interested first and foremost in the subject's experience, and how these relate to the light stimulus and brain states of S that he can observe. In such a case, E's experience of events would be considered "objective" or "public", while S's experiences are "subjective" and "private"; while E's focus is on recording the neural causes and correlates of visual experiences, S is interested only in reporting about such experiences.

However, Velmans points out that all that would be required for S and E to exchange roles is for them to change their respective foci (as he puts it "S and E merely have to turn their heads"), so that E focuses exclusively on the light and reports his experiences, while S focuses her attention not just on the light, but on the events in E's brain and his reports of the experience. In such a situation, S becomes the experimenter and E becomes the subject; thus, following current conventions, "S would now be entitled to think of her observations (of the light and E's brain) as 'public and objective' and to regard E's experiences of the light as 'private and subjective'." [12]

Velmans points out that this outcome is patently absurd, as the phenomenology of the light (that is, the way it is experienced) remains the same from the perspective of S or E, whether it is thought of as being an observed stimulus or a subjective experience. Nothing has changed in the nature of the light that either party can observe, save in the contextualising focus of their interests. That is, Velmans concludes, there is no phenomenological difference between publicly observed phenomena and private, subjective experiences. This becomes a point of departure for a more nuanced analysis of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity, and ultimately for an epistemology for the study of consciousness that, according to Velmans, fits psychology smoothly into science. [13]

Selected publications

Velmans is the author and editor of numerous books and papers on consciousness, including the following: [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consciousness</span> Awareness of existence

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate by philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of it. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness, either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.

Epiphenomenalism is a position in the philosophy of mind on the mind–body problem. It holds that subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body, but do not themselves influence physical events. According to epiphenomenalism, the appearance that subjective mental states influence physical events is an illusion, with consciousness being a by-product of physical states of the world. For instance, fear seems to make the heart beat faster, but according to epiphenomenalism, the biochemical secretions of the brain and nervous system —not the experience of fear—is what raises the heartbeat. Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, yet have non-physical properties, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a form of property dualism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maurice Merleau-Ponty</span> French phenomenological philosopher (1908–1961)

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phenomenology (philosophy)</span> Philosophical method and schools of philosophy

Phenomenology is a philosophical study and movement largely associated with the early 20th century that seeks to objectively investigate the nature of subjective, conscious experience. It attempts to describe the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.

<i>Consciousness Explained</i> 1991 book by Daniel Dennett

Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. Dennett describes consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. He compares consciousness to an academic paper that is being developed or edited in the hands of multiple people at one time, the "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness. In this analogy, "the paper" exists even though there is no single, unified paper. When people report on their inner experiences, Dennett considers their reports to be more like theorizing than like describing. These reports may be informative, he says, but a psychologist is not to take them at face value. Dennett describes several phenomena that show that perception is more limited and less reliable than we perceive it to be.

Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. Hence, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who has actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.

Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard problem of consciousness</span> Philosophical concept

In the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.

In the thought of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, heterophenomenology is an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how subjects see the world themselves, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Libet</span> American neuroscientist (1916–2007)

Benjamin Libet was an American neuroscientist who was a pioneer in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco. In 2003, he was the first recipient of the Virtual Nobel Prize in Psychology from the University of Klagenfurt "for his pioneering achievements in the experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action, and free will".

<i>Understanding Consciousness</i> Book by Max Velmans

Understanding Consciousness (2000) is a book by Max Velmans, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, which combines an account of scientific studies of consciousness with a perspective from the philosophy of mind. The book was shortlisted for the British Psychological Society book of the year award in 2001 and 2002. Philip Pullman called it "one of the clearest and most elegant accounts" he had seen of the topic.

A mental representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality or its abstractions.

Antireductionism is the position in science and metaphysics that stands in contrast to reductionism (anti-holism) by advocating that not all properties of a system can be explained in terms of its constituent parts and their interactions.

The philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.

Phenomenology or phenomenological psychology, a sub-discipline of psychology, is the scientific study of subjective experiences. It is an approach to psychological subject matter that attempts to explain experiences from the point of view of the subject via the analysis of their written or spoken words. The approach has its roots in the phenomenological philosophical work of Edmund Husserl.

Reflexive monism is a philosophical position developed by Max Velmans, in his books Understanding Consciousness and Toward a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness (2017), to address the problems of consciousness. It is a modern version of an ancient view that the basic stuff of the universe manifests itself both physically and as conscious experience. The argument is that the mind and, ultimately, the universe is psycho-physical.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">What Is It Like to Be a Bat?</span> 1974 philosophy paper by Thomas Nagel

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animal consciousness</span> Quality or state of self-awareness within an animal

Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phenomenology (sociology)</span> Branch of sociology

Phenomenology within sociology, or phenomenological sociology, examines the concept of social reality as a product of intersubjectivity. Phenomenology analyses social reality in order to explain the formation and nature of social institutions. The application of phenomenological ideas in sociology, however, is not reduced to the notion of the "Lifeworld", nor to "grand" theoretical synthesis, such as that of phenomenological sociology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neural correlates of consciousness</span> Neuronal events sufficient for a specific conscious percept

The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the materialist assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components are necessary to produce it.

References

  1. ↑ Blackmore, S. (2003) Consciousness: An introduction. Hodder & Stoughton.
    • Blackmore, S. (2005) Conversations on Consciousness: Interviews with twenty minds. Oxford University Press.
    • Revonsuo, A. (2006) Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  2. ↑ Varela, F. J. (1999) Present time consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(2–3), 111–140.
  3. ↑ biem Graben, P. & Atmanspacher, H. (2009) Extending the philosophical significance of the idea of complementarity. In H. Atmanspacher and H. Primas (eds.) Recasting reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science. Springer, pp.99–113.
  4. ↑ Hoche, Hans-Ulrich (2007). "Reflexive monism versus complementarism: An analysis and criticism of the conceptual groundwork of Max Velmans's reflexive model of consciousness". Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 6 (3): 389–409. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.473.4036 . doi:10.1007/s11097-006-9045-8. S2CID   6523654.
  5. 1 2 Extracts from the Introduction to Velmans, M. (2017) Toward a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness: Selected works of Max Velmans. World Library of Psychologists Series, London: Routledge/Psychology Press, pp. 1-15 (of 22)
  6. ↑ "Academy of Social Sciences". Archived from the original on 23 July 2013. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
  7. 1 2 Harris, K. (2009) Review of Max Velmans Understanding Consciousness. Metapsychology, 13 (52) http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=5300&cn=396
  8. ↑ Faw, B. (2009) Book review of Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness (2nd ed.) Journal of Consciousness Studies. Vol. 16, No.9, pp103-108 http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/16-9_br.pdf Archived 10 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ↑ Zeman, Adam (2001). "The paradox of consciousness". The Lancet. 357 (9249): 77. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)71582-8. S2CID   54309186.
  10. ↑ Batthyany, A (2002) Consciousness in the natural world (a review of M.Velmans, 2000, Understanding Consciousness). Theory & Psychology 12(3), pp. 415–417. http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/thpsyc/Reviews12(3).pdf
  11. 1 2 Velmans, M. (2009) Understanding Consciousness, Edition 2. Routledge/Psychology Press, p. 298
  12. ↑ Velmans 2000 , p. 175
    • Harman, W. (1993) Towards an Adequate Epistemology for the Scientific Exploration of Consciousness Journal of Scientific Exploration, 7 (2), pp. 133–143. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 May 2012. Retrieved 9 May 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  13. ↑ Max, Velmans (2007). "An Epistemology for the Study of Consciousness". Velmans & Schneider (Eds.)The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Wiley-Blackwell.
  14. ↑ list of Velmans' publications on consciousness
  15. ↑ Velmans, Max, ed. (2018). "Consciousness (Critical Concepts in Psychology), Major Works Series (4 volumes), London: Routledge".
  16. ↑ "Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness: Selected works of Max Velmans (Hardback) - Routledge". Routledge.com. Retrieved 12 January 2017.
  17. ↑ "Understanding Consciousness: 2nd Edition (Paperback) - Routledge". Routledge.com. Retrieved 12 January 2017.
  18. ↑ Velmans and Schneider (eds). "The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness". Wiley-Blackwell.{{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  19. ↑ Schneider and Velmans (eds.) (2017). The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness Second Edition. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons. p. 823. ISBN   9780470674079.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  20. ↑ Velmans, Max (2003). "How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains?". Imprint Academic.
  21. ↑ Velmans, Max, ed. (2000). "Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness: New methodologies and maps". John Benjamins.
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