Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness and the Self by Sangeetha Menon Anindya Sinha & B. V. Sreekantan

Author:Sangeetha Menon, Anindya Sinha & B. V. Sreekantan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer India, New Delhi

How do you perceive space? How is perception different from memory, or dreaming-consciousness, or fantasy?…Does consciousness have a formal structure independently of its contents?… How do [you] understand what another person is thinking? (Gallagher and Varela 2003: 99)1

Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness (Sutherland 2001).

Many of us writing for this volume are fascinated by these questions. But to what discipline should one turn to find the answers? Are they questions about neurology or about philosophy? To make progress, do you ask doctors and scientists, or philosophers and spiritual practitioners?

At the conference that gave rise to this volume, one repeatedly observed a de facto competition between two distinct camps. It’s the same de facto competition that has arisen at countless conferences over the last 15 years. One should not ignore this tension or pretend it does not exist, for it provides the key to important new insights.

In order to make progress on the unresolved questions of mind and consciousness, I will focus attention on one central topic: neurophenomenology. Clearly, the term seeks to draw together cognitive neuroscience and phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of the-mental-life-as-experienced: the thinker, the thinking and the content of thought (Latin: cogito, cogitans, cogitations). Other essays in this volume offer presentations of important phenomenological work in both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions.

Scientists frequently respond that phenomenology is exactly the wrong discipline to pair with cognitive neuroscience. For phenomenology is based on the essential nature of the first-person perspective. In Husserl’s classic formulation, phenomenology “brackets out” the “natural attitude” toward the world—and that includes bracketing out the theories of the natural sciences as well. Phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have argued that one is able to “see” the essential features of inner experience, i.e. generalizable features of thinkers and their thoughts (Husserl called this seeing “eidetic intuition”). And Indian meditators agree on many essential features of what is seen when we are “looking within”.

The neurosciences, by contrast, research brain structures and functions. Their goal is still to explain cognitive and affective experiences. But the explanations are usually given in terms of anatomical structures and patterns of neural firings. The only potential answers that are considered seriously are those that are determined by objective experimental methods, which produce results that can be verified by any other expert in the field. Given these differences, is it any wonder that there is frequently a massive gulf between these two approaches?

Many want this gulf to go away, and many are the proposals for a unity of the two sides. The sharpness of the differences has led numerous scholars to propose some sort of equivalence between the two sides—between phenomenological or spiritual descriptions of consciousness on the one side and scientific descriptions of cognition on the other. We should be sceptical of claims to have achieved unity, however. At

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