Consciousness: Problems wit Perspectives

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2007

Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems, 2012

The author discusses the problem of integration of first-and third-person approaches in studying the human mind. She critically evaluates and compares various methodologies for studying and explaining conscious experience. Common strategies that apply reductive explanation seem to be unsatisfied for explaining experience and its subjective character. There were attempts to explain experience from the first-person point of view (introspectionism, philosophical phenomenology) but the results were not intersubjectively verifiable. Dennett proposed heterophenomenology as a scientifically viable alternative which supposed to bridge the gap between first-and third-person perspectives. The author critically evaluates his proposal and compares it to contemporary attempts to provide first-person methods.

1990

This work takes a basic phenomenological distinction (between the object and the process of consciousness) and examines it both from a historical perspective, and as it applies to the social and political realm. Self-consciousness not only has a cognitive meaning but also constitutes the human subject according to the specific way in which consciousness is grasped. Historically, the author shows that many of the problems that have appeared in the history of the study of human consciousness and self consciousness could either have been avoided altogether or greatly clarified if only both sides of the situation had been seen in conjunction with one another. The author shows how this conceptual clarification can be applied to specific problems concerning the nature of consciousness and to the social and political realm.

Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2007

Phenomenology and analytical philosophy share a number of common concerns, and it seems obvious that analytical philosophy can learn from phenomenology, just as phenomenology can profit from an exchange with analytical philosophy. But although I think it would be a pity to miss the opportunity for dialogue that is currently at hand, I will in the following voice some caveats. More specifically, I wish to discuss two issues that complicate what might otherwise seem like rather straightforward interaction. The first issue concerns the question of whether the current focus on the first-person perspective might have a negative side-effect by giving us a slanted view of what subjectivity amounts to. The second issue concerns the question of whether superficial similarities in the descriptive findings might actually conceal some rather deep-rooted differences in the systematic use these findings serve.

2012

To keep in mind one case of the kind of problems raised by the status of de se beliefs, here is Castañeda's 1966 Editor of Soul case: "Smith has never seen his image (…) in photographs, mirrors, ponds, etc. Suppose that at time t Smith does not know that he has been appointed the editor of Soul and that at t he comes to know that the man whose photograph lies on a certain table is the new Editor of Soul, without Smith realizing that he himself is the man in the photograph." (Castañeda 1966: 130). essential for a (virtual) unification of the mind, as is the role of higher-order mental states for the global kind of access at the personal level we call 'consciousness'. Being a self thus has to do with appearing to oneself, or representing oneself, in a certain way. The way Dennett sees it, a self is made up of sub-personal parts, by exploring accesses among them ("I propose to construct a full-fledged 'I' from sub-personal parts, by exploiting the notion of access"-he says in Brainstorms, Dennett 1978). He agrees with Rosenthal in thinking of state-consciousness as consisting in reportings on one's own mental states by expressing higher-order mental states. Also, he proposes that only this is consciousness proper, in contrast with for instance behavior-guiding awareness; thus, consciousness proper is characteristic of linguistic creatures only. In such creatures if a self is in place and higherorder mental states are expressed, we may say that the illusion of the Cartesian Theater is perfectly real-in this sense there is a cartesian theater, i.e. there is self-presentation or self-appearing, even if there is no 'center' (in the brain). The fact that other animals are not like that is what makes them, in Dennett's words, unlike us: as he puts it, 'they are not beset by the illusion of the Cartesian Theater' (Miguens 2002). 10 B. Baars' conception of consciousness as global workspace is the idea that what is globally accessible in a cognitive system is 'publicly available', i.e. available for the system, in contrast to information processing in the subsystems, which although available for controlling behavior, is not 'centrally' available (Baars 1988). 11 A. R. Damasio himself wants to put forward a conception of self or consciousness according to which self or consciousness is 'having the body-body proper-in mind'. The mark of the fact that we are embodied conscious beings, and not cartesian souls, is the fact that our consciousness is such that we always have the self in mind-this is what 'subjectifies' consciouness, makes it mine. Understanding how this embodiment makes for mine-ness is, in Damasio's view, clearly important for thinking about self and emotion. Cf. Damásio 1992, Damásio 1999, Damásio 2010. 12 Chalmers 1996. The 'hard problem' is the problem of phenomenal consciousness (one could ask: 'why doesn't it all go on in the dark?'); 'easy problems' concern cognitive functions; control of behavior, discriminatory abilities, reporting mental states, etc. III. The Inner and the Outer-Excursus on Perception We suggested that perception proper, as having to do with acquaintance or givenness, was missing in the picture of thought-world relations of David

I review a number of approaches that attempt to deal with the gap that seems to exist between first-person and third-person accounts of consciousness, and some of the conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues that surround this distinction. I argue, with reference to Carnap and Schrödinger, that one cannot simply reduce data from the first-person perspective to third-person data, without remainder, especially when the very subject matter of the science includes the first-person perspective.

2008

Abstract: A number of recent publications have argued that a scien- tific approach to consciousness needs a rigorous approach to first-person data collection. As mainstream experimental psychology has long abandoned such introspective or phenomenological method, there is at present ...

Abstract There is a gap between the first-person and third-person perspectives resulting in a tension experienced between psychological science, ‘experimental psychology’, and applied consulting psychological practice, ‘clinical psychology’. This is an exploration of that ‘gap’ and its resulting tension. First-person perspective is proposed as an important aspect of psychological reality in conjunction with the related perspectival aspects of second- and third-person perspectives. These three aspects taken ‘wholistically’ constitute a perspectival diffusion grate through which psychological reality is discerned. The reductionistic naturalism of scientifically apprehended reality is examined for the powerful resistances that impedite utilizing perspective in psychological investigations with consequences for our understanding of psychological reality. The impediments constructed by Quine, Sellars, Dennett, Metzinger, and cognitive psychology are all examined for their robust intractability to first-person perspective or anything that might seem similar. The conclusion suggested is that they all result from a ‘scientific near-sightedness’ of a strict naturalism. The result is that any intentionally dependent objects that are real in the lives of persons are eliminated as not real with no ontological significance. The assertion is that ordinary things such as car keys and employment are real and are ontologically significant.

With his notion of absolute consciousness, Sartre tries to rethink the relation between consciousness and the self. What is the origin of subjectivity in relation to a consciousness that is characterized as impersonal and as a radical lucidity? In this article, I attempt to question that origin and the nature as such of the subject in its relation to a consciousness that in its essence is not yet subjective. On the contrary, it is characterized by a selfpresence that is so radical that it threatens every form of self-knowledge

Constructivist Foundations, 2011

> Context • There is a growing recognition in consciousness science of the need for rigorous methods for obtaining accurate and detailed phenomenological reports of lived experience, i.e., descriptions of experience provided by the subject living them in the “first-person.” > Problem • At the moment although introspection and debriefing interviews are sometimes used to guide the design of scientific studies of the mind, explicit description and evaluation of these methods and their results rarely appear in formal scientific discourse. > Method • The recent publication of an edited book of papers dedicated to the exploration of first-and second-person methods, Ten Years of Viewing from Within: The Legacy of Francisco Varela, serves as a starting point for a discussion of how these methods could be integrated into the growing discipline of consciousness science. We complement a brief review of the book with a critical analysis of the major pilot studies in Varela’s neurophenomenology, a research program that was explicitly devised to integrate disciplined experiential methods with the latest advances in neuroscience. > Results • The book is a valuable resource for those who are interested in impressive recent advances in first- and second person methods, as applied to the phenomenology of lived experience. However, our review of the neurophenomenology literature concludes that there is as yet no convincing example of these specialized techniques being used in combination with standard behavioral and neuroscientific approaches in consciousness science to produce results that could not have also been achieved by simpler methods of introspective reporting. > Implications • The end of behaviorism and the acceptance of verbal reports of conscious experience have already enabled the beginning of a science of consciousness. It can only be of benefit if new first- and second-person methods become well-known across disciplines. > Constructivist content • Constructivism has long been interested in the role of the observer in the constitution of our sense of reality, so these developments in the science of consciousness may open new avenues of constructivist research. More specifically, one of the ways in which the insights from first- and second person methods are being validated is by recursively applying the methods to themselves; a practical application of an epistemological move that will be familiar to constructivists from the second-order cybernetics tradition.

Presses Universitaires de France eBooks, 1998

In La transcendance de l'ego, Sartre distinguished reflective from non-reflective thinking, contended that the I and the me exist only in episodes of reflective thinking, and argued that a non-reflective selfconsciousness is a feature of every conscious episode. While it is widely agreed that the latter involves an awareness of the subjectivity of consciousness, descriptions of subjectivity in terms of "mine" or "for me" persist, compromising the confinement of the first-person to reflective consciousness. In defense of Sartre's initial position, I argue that (i) the first-person cannot be divorced from the indexical conceptualization, (ii) subjectivity is not essentially a first-person phenomenon, and (iii) the content of primitive self-consciousness can be understood in terms of perspectival structure.

The stipulation that a macro consciousness or universalized Being as a collective substance is comprised purely of exchange-value relations, presupposes a motility of ontological objects—where what in fact should be the case is that the noumenal will determines the quantum reality of the subjects based upon the universality present within the subject's positing of its legal identity at the point of contact where the conceptual status of subjects within the signifying chain achieve ontological self-awareness. This identity is based upon the unmediated empirical being of the subject as it posits the self to the general proximity where the object may be constituted (the inner space), and in connection with the substance of the subject as a member of a collective that aspires toward the same rational freedoms where concerns the necessary application of use-value. The particularization of this absolute subject will happen through its own work, yet it should remain unmediated where it first appears as a noumenal identity to the collective subjects' own phenomenal magnitudes or Objective Being. The speech act and ontological projections of the Other do mediate the noumenal identity of the subject as it becomes non-identical, and thus neither fully constituted through its universalization as a social interobjectivity, or resolute as an ontical and empirical conditionality.

Revista de Filosofia Aurora, 2019

In this paper, I present the difficulty in the phenomenology of explaining the constitution of objectivities in consciousness. In the context of phenomenological reduction, constitution has to be understood as unveiling the universal and necessary essences. Recognized by Husserl in Ideas I and named as functional problems, the constitution of objectivities refers at first to individual consciousness, and then to an intersubjective one. In Ideas II, the phenomenologist explains how the constitution of nature, psyche, and spirit occurs. This process begins by assuming three premises: the ontological realism, the regularity of nature, and the transcendental idealism. In this process, the ego, apart from constituting objects (the body, the psyche, and the others), constitutes itself. The objects of material reality are constituted through aesthetic synthesis which unifies singularities and contextualizes the lived experience. The body, as a perceptive organ, perceives the exterior, and the location of the sensory stimulus is the soul. The soul is a real and transcendent object, which is linked to physical things that are constituted in a solipsistic way or intersubjectively. Empathy allows the subject to recognize the consciousness of the alter ego as capable of spontaneous movements and actions, a co-presence sharing the same horizons. Thus, through the theoretical attitude, the physical world is perceived, and through the spiritual attitude the spiritual world is perceived, a living world shared by free intelligent beings. For this, intersubjectivity fulfills a fundamental role, because only in the relationship with the other does the identity of the objects, of the other, and of the self become evident.