Neurophenomenology

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Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. [1] It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind. [2] The field is very much linked to fields such as neuropsychology, neuroanthropology and behavioral neuroscience (also known as biopsychology) and the study of phenomenology in psychology.

Contents

Overview

The label was coined by C. Laughlin, J. McManus and E. d'Aquili in 1990. [3] However, the term was appropriated and given a distinctive understanding by the cognitive neuroscientist Francisco Varela in the mid-1990s, [4] whose work has inspired many philosophers and neuroscientists to continue with this new direction of research.

Phenomenology is a philosophical method of inquiry of everyday experience. The focus in phenomenology is on the examination of different phenomena (from Greek, phainomenon, "that which shows itself") as they appear to consciousness, i.e. in a first-person perspective. Thus, phenomenology is a discipline particularly useful to understand how is it that appearances present themselves to us, and how is it that we attribute meaning to them. [5] [6]

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the brain, and deals with the third-person aspects of consciousness. [7] Some scientists studying consciousness believe that the exclusive utilization of either first- or third-person methods will not provide answers to the difficult questions of consciousness. [8]

Historically, Edmund Husserl is regarded as the philosopher whose work made phenomenology a coherent philosophical discipline with a concrete methodology in the study of consciousness, namely the epoche. Husserl, who was a former student of Franz Brentano, thought that in the study of mind it was extremely important to acknowledge that consciousness is characterized by intentionality, a concept often explained as "aboutness"; consciousness is always consciousness of something. A particular emphasis on the phenomenology of embodiment was developed by philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the mid-20th century.

Naturally, phenomenology and neuroscience find a convergence of common interests. However, primarily because of ontological disagreements between phenomenology and philosophy of mind, the dialogue between these two disciplines is still a very controversial subject. [9] Husserl himself was very critical towards any attempt to "naturalizing" philosophy, and his phenomenology was founded upon a criticism of empiricism, "psychologism", and "anthropologism" as contradictory standpoints in philosophy and logic. [10] [11] The influential critique of the ontological assumptions of computationalist and representationalist cognitive science, as well as artificial intelligence, made by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has marked new directions for integration of neurosciences with an embodied ontology. The work of Dreyfus has influenced cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to study phenomenology and embodied cognitive science and/or enactivism. One such case is neuroscientist Walter Freeman, whose neurodynamical analysis has a marked Merleau-Pontyian approach. [12]

See also

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Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology.

<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">Philosophy of perception</span> Branch of philosophy

The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision.

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francisco Varela</span> Chilean scientist and philosopher

Francisco Javier Varela García was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hubert Dreyfus</span> American philosopher

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".

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<i>Phenomenology of Perception</i> 1945 book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher known for his work on embodied cognition, social cognition, agency and the philosophy of psychopathology. Since 2011 he has held the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation (2012–2018). Since 2014 he has been Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He has held visiting positions at Keble College, Oxford; Humboldt University, Berlin; Ruhr Universität, Bochum; Husserl Archives, ENS (Paris); École Normale Supérieure, Lyon; University of Copenhagen; and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University. He is also known for his philosophical notes on the effects of solitary confinement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of mind</span> Branch of philosophy

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

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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 word. The approach has its roots in the phenomenological philosophical work of Edmund Husserl.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Zahavi</span> Danish philosopher (born 1967)

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Phenomenological description is a method of phenomenology that attempts to depict the structure of first person lived experience, rather than theoretically explain it. This method was first conceived of by Edmund Husserl. It was developed through the latter work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty — and others. It has also been developed with recent strands of modern psychology and cognitive science.

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References

  1. Rudrauf, David; Lutz, Antoine; Cosmelli, Diego; Lachaux, Jean-Philippe; Le Van Quyen, Michel (2003). "From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela's exploration of the biophysics of being". Biological Research. 36 (1): 27–65. doi: 10.4067/s0716-97602003000100005 . PMID   12795206.
  2. Gallagher, Shaun (2009). "Neurophenomenology". In Bayne, T.; Cleeremans, A.; Wilken, P. (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. pp. 470–472. ISBN   978-0-19-856951-0.
  3. Laughlin, Charles (1990). Brain, symbol & experience : toward a neurophenomenology of human consciousness. Boston, Mass: New Science Library. ISBN   978-0-87773-522-9. OCLC   20759009.
  4. Varela, F.J. (1 April 1996). "Neurophenomenology: a methodological remedy for the hard problem". Journal of Consciousness Studies. 3 (4): 330–349.
  5. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Phenomenology
  6. Gallagher, S. and Zahavi, D. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge, Chapter 2.
  7. "Neuroscience". c.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
  8. Engel, Andreas K.; Friston, Karl J.; Kragic, Danica, eds. (2016). The Pragmatic Turn: Toward Action-Oriented Views in Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
  9. Debate Between D. Chalmers and D. Dennett: The Fantasy of First-Person Science
  10. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Edmund Husserl
  11. Carel, Havi; Meachem, Darian, eds. (2013). Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9781107699052.
  12. "Hubert Dreyfus 'Intelligence Without Representation: Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Mental Representation'". Archived from the original on 2008-12-01. Retrieved 2008-11-06.

Further reading