The book consists in ten original texts, followed by
many (shorter) pieces dubbed the peer commentaries and responses. It is perhaps
worthwhile to introduce the terminology for those who did not follow last
century’s debates on consciousness. Sciences (natural and human alike in this
respect) are often taken to be expressed and expressible only in third person,
in a fully objective fashion, open to inspection, as it were, for anybody
interested. Some, by no means all, mostly in philosophy take the view that the
phenomena of consciousness introduce a new kind of perspective, the first
person, or inherently subjective, or non reducible to anything but first person
experiences, etc. The further step taken by some states that even evidence
pertaining to consciousness is first person(al) in nature, i.e. what we get
“from without” is a report (possibly the report of introspective observation).
There remains however a “within”, a within reachable only by the subject of the
experience itself. To make this clear some use the idea that experiences have a
qualitative “feel’ to them (in philosophy those are even baptized in Latin
“qualia”) and the feel itself is, though under some conditions reportable and
expressible, something accessible only to the one person having the experience.
Examples of this kind are the particular feel of, say, the taste of coffee, or
the visual impression of a shade of color. In the philosophy of mind much has
been said about this divide. Opinions vary along the whole spectrum of
conceptual possibilities. As usual some philosophers take first person
perspectives and qualia to be so obviously there that discussion is beside the
point, others go all the way to a simple denial that any such thing even exist
or can exist.

Varela and Shear look in particular
at the methodological side of the debate. They take it for granted that first
person experiences do take place. While nobody denies experiences exist a
rather large set of positions denies that first person evidence is useful or
even available in any sense for theories.

The two editors set out to show
that two particular claims are correct.

1. There is a growing integration already possible
between first-person evidence and more general theories about minds with
respect to consciousness
2. Interestingly there is
particular tradition, Husserl’s philosophy, that can be profitably recruited
for insights about what kind of phenomena are to be investigated, as well as to
provide methodological and conceptual tools.

I shall concentrate only on some of
the issues raised. It is very difficult to assess the heritage of Husserl,
since I am not clear even on what his central thesis were, nor whether one can
track a precise continuity between his early anti-psychology and philosophy of
mathematics works and his later worries about the decay of the Europe of his
time. What is interesting for the philosophy of mind is that, at the very least
in Varela’s contribution (to my mind one of the most interesting in the volume)
one encounters a paradox. Varela presents and ably defends the view that some of
the, more or less, Huseerlian views on the constitution of internal time find
precise correlations with neurological evidence. Husserl is famous for his view
of “internal” time (or time as experienced by a subject) as showing a structure
of “nowness”, retention, and protentions, respectively as present, past, and
future. Varela doesn’t pretend to be a philologically faithful Husserl scholar.
Rather, he makes the much more interesting point that some of those insights
find confirmation in purely physical terms; to wit in the “clocks” that one can
assign reliably to the firings and structures of neural assemblies. And those
happen to be, up to a point, matched by Event Related Potentials (ERP)
observations. I urge readers to consult
the text since these remarks do not do justice to the wealth of data presented.
My point is rather that as soon as we accept all of this we face a sort of
paradox. The more evidence we collect and confirm on the correspondence between
what are by definition reports from subjects and a variety of independent data,
the more we produce a perfectly third person theory of the phenomena in
question. Varela, at least in conversation, was very much aware of this and I
think this is the reason he liked to think of his views as neurophenomenology.
Orthodox Husserlians find this repulsive since they take the heritage of
Husserl to be of a purely conceptual sort, or even more strongly, against any
theory of anything. Some take Husserl to have held views that are purely
prescriptive, and hence to have no scientific application of any kind: a sort
of late Buddhist invitation to “bracketing” the world and human experience of
it to achieve different states of awareness. Varela would have none of this. (See in particular his reaction to Owen
& Morris (in the commentaries.)) The two commentators hold the view that
Husserl was an “arch-anti-naturalist”, meaning that his theories or perhaps
philosophy in general ought to have no “circulation with natural sciences of
any kind at all” (p. 272)) In so doing,
I think, he was rejecting the stronger strains of the first person perspective
theorists. A neurophenomenological theory of consciousness, or of the fragments
to us available, is a perfectly kosher third person style theory. This opens,
even in the book under review, the way to the criticism (voiced, for example,
by B.J. Baars) that we already have a discipline that look also at first
person reports, that takes seriously and with some caution the introspective
capacities of subjects, and that tries to build theories on such basis. The
discipline is psychology, or at any rate the more cognitive oriented
psychologists take themselves to be doing exactly that and by no means all
refuse to take on board some result of introspective reports.

That said, it remains fairly
surprising that the purely a priori reflections by Husserl can find such an
astonishing confirmation in today’s research, assuming of course that we are
presented with hard evidence (it does look that way to me.)

Many of the papers here collected
have an interested even independently from one’s interest in the application of
Husserl’s phenomenology to current research. For instance David Galin argues
against the massive confusion (not invisible even in this very volume) between
a phenomenal experience (qualia and the like) and person’s point of view;
Pierre Vermersch and William Lyons debate the extent to which introspection is
(just) the absence of annoying distractions or not. Some of the papers
exaggerate the reliance on academic jargon (not everyone really cares about the
ever present threat of an hermeneutic circle) but on the whole the book can be
readable by an interdisciplinary audience. I fear it will upset the
Husserlians, or at least the strict ones, but it was Husserl who pushed to
return to “things themselves”. If consciousness is indeed part of the furniture
of the universe, there should be no difficulty in recognizing the value of
accessing it from many different angles. On a purely technical side (a
philosophical side), it seems to me that it remains rather unclear what
distinguishes Varela and Shear’s views from Daniel Dennett. Both appear to
countenance data from first person experience and both seek to integrate the
data within a single framework Dennett (in his Jean Nicod lectures, Paris 2001)
goes to great length in claiming that no matter what subjects say about their
experiences, the very reports are data to be explained. It remains to be
seen whether a finished and polished theory would take the reports to be
veridical or subject to the countless possibilities of self-deception of any
kind. Varela & Shear, not in jest, describe their stance in regards to first
person methodologies as: “don’t leave home without it, but do not forget to
bring along third-person accounts as well.” (p. 2) Possibly here the
differences are more a matter of style and tradition rather than hard
disagreement.

© 2002 Adriano Palma

A.
P. Palma, Univ. Paris-X and Inst. J Nicod, Paris

Categories: Philosophical

Tags: Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Sensation and Perception