Ralph Pred in Onflow: Dynamics
of Consciousness and Experience, through his exploration of questions
concerning consciousness and experience joins a new generation of philosophers,
psychologists, and neuroscientists who are trying to bring back what is
essential to the human mind: the subjective experience of the human mind. In Onflow,
Pred provides the reader with an interesting
way to address concerns from phenomenology, epistemology, action theory,
theory of intentionality, and neurobiology in a text that is directed mostly to
scholars or very careful readers.

Pred is situated within a context
that was deeply influence by the seventeenth century philosopher Descartes, who
gave a description of the mind that separated mind and body, creating what
would later be known as Cartesian dualism. Within this same definition he
defined the mind in terms of an individual who just by the act of being able to
thinks can be sure of his own existence. This starting point gave future
generations an important task to work on. They have to define the mind and over
come dualism; that is, they have to explain the existence of two separate
substances that interact. This challenge was assumed by Cognitive Science, a
scientific research program that integrates psychology, neuroscience,
linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence (AI). Through the
unity of these disciplines, Cognitive Science assumed the challenge of
understanding the mind beyond the dualism by providing a new array of concepts,
models, and experimental techniques which claim to provide a rigorous
scientific knowledge of the mind.  However, in this path, Cognitive Science
lost the scientific concern with consciousness and the subjective experience.
Since the 1980s philosopher, neurologists, and psychologists have attempted to
recover the subjective experience of the mind.

Pred joins this last group and
starts his account by criticizing Cognitive Science for reducing the stream of
consciousness to series of substantive parts, perceptions, or intentional
states. He claims that in order to give an adequate account of consciousness it
is necessary to focus on experience as a flow and on how the subject moves from
one experience to the next. Pred suggests that this change will show how
experience is a continuous phenomena or what he calls the "onflow of
experience". This approach to experience is done from within experience
itself; Pred calls it the "concrescual terms of experience," where
the subject is attentive to how thoughts are formed, how perception and action
are intertwined, and how all of this works in the "onflowing experience". 
Since there is no longer a subject whose mind can act as an external subject that
can describe experience in way that is depersonalized, disembodied and detached
from action, he claims that his approach is free of the Cartesian framework of mind-body
dualism. The subject, within this approach, is not longer the Cartesian subject
whose mind is separated from his body, the subject in Pred’s account is always embedded
within the flow of experience, continuously in formation, and continuously undergoing
"buds" of experience –buds are a Jamesian term for the way humans
make the transition from one experience to the other one. Through these "buds"
within the experience of the present, the past is still present as an activated
memory and extends into the future in the form of an affective tone.  

To achieve this description of
consciousness, Pred, being consistent with his approach, writes each chapter in
a way that tries to bring the reader closer to the concept of the "onflow"
of experience through an "onflow" of psychology-philosophers. He
first reviews William James’s account of the stream of consciousness. James’s
theories are used to describe how consciousness is personal, changing,
continuous, intentional, and selective. Later, he uses John Searle’s theory of
intentionality to show how intentional states are embedded into the flow of
consciousness and experienced as flow of intentionality. Pred interweaves these
two authors to create what he calls the "processual approximation"
where he focuses in the bodily and valuational activities associated with
perception in action. Pred argues that this approximation will finally bring
the reader inside the moment and the stream of experience. Finally, Pred
focuses on Alfred North Whithead who created one of the most controversial
metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. As Pred acknowledges, Whithead’s
philosophy is loaded with an abstruse terminology. Pred suggests that he solves
this problem by providing the "processual  approximation" as a
context to introduce Whitehead’s metaphysics. However, the use of James’s and
Searle’s and Pred’s own terminology and categories makes Pred’s "processual
approximation" a highly technical description given mostly for academics (or
lay people who enjoy watching Film Noir where the characters and their
relationship to each other, as the concepts of "buds", "concrescual"
or "onflow" in this description, have to be carefully remembered).

In his final chapter he attempts to
correlate the concrescual approach to consciousness with Edelman’s description
of the neurobiological phenomena. Pred does not embrace or dispute Edelman’s
elaboration of how the neurobiological process explains Jamesian properties.
His aim is to suggest an "equivalence" of some concrescual terms with
neurobiological and psychological terms in Edelman’s account. To do so, Pred
first criticizes Edelman for using what he calls "middle-voice-based
language"; a language that includes few active verbs or any other symbolic
representation that show the self as an acting agent. Pred claims that the "active-voice
withdraw" in our current use of language, together with the development of
a subject-predicate form of discourse, can be linked to the adoption of the
Cartesian dualism that abstracts and disconnects the subject from the object
and causes the subject’s withdrawal from the onflowing experience. Second, Pred
argues that is necessary to add emphasis to the notion of concrescence
involving an integration of feelings with the subjective aim that undergoes
transitions through different "buds" of experience. With this
equivalence Pred hopes to achieve the basis of a "thorough- going experiential-neurological"
synthesis; from a concrescual approach, he expects to specify the
neurobiological interpretation of concrescual phenomena.

Pred’s view presents two immediate
problems. First, he should be more critical about some of Edelman’s account
because some of Edelman’s basic assumptions have been subjected to long
debates. Only to mention one example, Edelman claims that there is a difference
between "images" associated with primary consciousness. Pred does not
acknowledges the existence of a 30 year old debate about the existence of
images in consciousness. Second, when Pred explores this ‘equivalence" and
claims that the Edelman-based approach could account for some of the principal
concepts of the concrescual approximation, he is limiting himself to show how
the first person concrescual approach and the third-person neurological
description are isomorphic structures, but he does not explain how these two
structures relate to each other. Although this last points need to be examined,
this last chapter seems to be the most innovative part of the book because at
this point he is attempting to provide a rigorous scientific explanation of the
mind that is not dualist and recaptures the subjective experience of being conscious.
It would be very interesting if Pred could devote more time to explore more
carefully how it is possible within the neurobiological framework, to overcome
a dualist approach to consciousness and replace it with an approach where the mental
and the physical are different aspects of the same unit.

In general, Onflow: Dynamics of
Consciousness and Experience, provides several provocative questions that
future researchers may consider in understanding the presupposition in their research:
the relevance of language for understanding experience and subjectivity; the
possibility of understanding the subject, not as a supervising agent, but as subject
forming in experience; and the possibility of approaching experience as a
plastic phenomena, as an "onflow", where consciousness is created. Moreover,
this book remains as very brave attempt to
go to "the inside" of the raw experience, a book that
acknowledges the necessity of dealing with one of the essential characteristics
of the mind: how to describe the experience of having a mind.

© 2006 Maria Botero

Maria Botero, M.A in Arts, York University, PhD candidate in Philosophy, York University Canada. My main interests are
Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Psychology.
Currently, all of those interests are intertwined in my PhD work on the
emotional development of eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii
).

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology