Phenomenology Friendly Neurscience

Human Studies (2006) 29: 33–55

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-005-9010-5 C© Springer 2006

Phenomenology-Friendly Neuroscience: The Return ToMerleau-Ponty As Psychologist

RALPH D. ELLISClark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA 30314, (E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. This paper reports on the Kuhnian revolution now occurring in neuropsychology that

is finally supportive of and friendly to phenomenology – the “enactive” approach to the mind-

body relation, grounded in the notion of self-organization, which is consistent with Husserl

and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point. According to the enactive approach, human minds

understand the world by virtue of the ways our bodies can act relative to it, or the ways we

can imagine acting. This requires that action be distinguished from passivity, that the mental

be approached from a first person perspective, and that the cognitive capacities of the brain be

grounded in the emotional and motivational processes that guide action and anticipate action

affordances. It avoids the old intractable problems inherent in the computationalist approaches

of twentieth century atomism and radical empiricism, and again allows phenomenology to

bridge to neuropsychology in the way Merleau-Ponty was already doing over half a century

ago.

One of the most striking impressions of an initial reader of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early works, Phenomenology of Perception (1941/1962) or TheStructure of Behavior (1942/1967) is the careful attention both books give toneurophysiological and empirical psychological detail. Indeed, a glance at thereference list of the books just mentioned reveals that both cite considerablymore physiology and psychology than they do philosophy. Yet philosophicalcommentators have tended to neglect Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on psychol-ogy, especially neuropsychology, while neuroscientists until very recently hadtended to be unaware of Merleau-Ponty’s important contributions to their ownfield.

In fact, this neglect of Merleau-Ponty in neuropsychology was dueto a philosophical trend: both psychology and philosophy of mind afterMerleau-Ponty’s death became inclined to the view that mental processesare reducible to lower-level mechanistic processes, without reference to theself-organizational dimension stressed by Merleau-Ponty, and seemingly al-most to the exclusion of phenomenology altogether. But the good news isthat neuroscience is now swinging back the other way, and is again becom-ing phenomenology-friendly. Neuropsychologists during the past decade haverediscovered the importance of self-organization and self-energized move-ment in biology, and the philosophy of mind has again begun to recognize

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that the differences between consciousness and the unconscious information-processing of computers stem from the fact that conscious beings understandtheir world by initiating action and then taking note of environmental action-affordances; that is, we understand what kinds of actions could be “af-forded” by a given object, just as an infant understands when it finds anobject that “affords” sucking. This emphasis on imagined actions towardobjects is very different from an understanding of consciousness based onmerely passively responding to perceptual inputs in stimulus-response fash-ion. Francisco Varela et al. (1991/1993) dubbed this new turn the “enactive”approach to consciousness and cognition, specifically acknowledging theirdebt to Merleau-Ponty, and Varela along with Shaun Gallagher founded anew journal, Phenomenology and Cognition, whose purpose is to re-integratephenomenology with cognitive science by means of this enactive approach.Others, such as Andy Clark (1997) and Natika Newton (1996) have used theterm “embodied” – including the notion that our bodies grasp the world byacting on it rather than just by reacting to it–and others, for example, RalphEllis (1995, 2005), Stuart Kauffman (1993), and Ellis and Newton (2000),have used the term “self-organizational,” which emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’sidea that “psychophysical forms” maintain their pattern or structure whileactively replacing their own material constituents (1942/1967: 47). In short,neuroscientists are again recognizing that, just as Merleau-Ponty had sug-gested, conscious and mental processes are possible only because there is agenuine difference between the living and the non-living, between the activeand the merely reactive, and between Korper (the body as mere object forperception) and Leib (the animated body).

Thus the revolution now occurring in the neurosciences and cognitive the-ory has revived interest among psychologists in Merleau-Ponty’s understand-ing of consciousness and the mind-body relation. Consciousness is again con-sidered to be an important dimension of mind as opposed to a mere appendageor epiphenomenon. Consciousness is not just an extra layer superimposed overphysiological information processing, enabling us to be aware of what is goingon in a computer-like subconscious mechanism. Instead, it is now recognizedthat conscious, living beings process information very differently from non-conscious and non-living systems, and that consciousness drives and organizesthe process rather than being a mere causal by product or spinoff – for exam-ple, see Antonio Damasio (1994, 1999); Ellis (1996, 2005), Jaak Panksepp(1998), Ariel Mack and Irvin Rock (1998), Thomas Natsoulas (1993), andNewton (1996). This means that conscious processes again must be seenas self-organizing phenomena resembling Merleau-Ponty’s psychophysicalforms. So, in opposition to earlier mainstream Twentieth Century psychology,the mind-body relation is now increasingly thought to involve a priority of theprocess over its own substratum. This reverses the picture from the analyticand empiricist schools of the Twentieth Century, which regarded processes

PHENOMENOLOGY-FRIENDLY NEUROSCIENCE 35

as higher-level patterns of activity that were supposedly derivative from theproperties of their micro-level constituents. It was thought that all the “causal”work was done at the lower level of organization (the “micro”-level), and thatprocesses formed at higher levels of organization were mere epiphenomenaor causal spin-offs of the lower-level phenomena; the higher-level processeswere to have no real causal power of their own, so that the direction of cau-sation was always completely “bottom-up.” In the new “enactivist” approach– consistent with Merleau-Ponty – the living process is not merely driven bylower-level, mechanical events; on the contrary, it seeks out, appropriates, andreplaces the micro-constituents needed to keep the process going. There is atop-down rather than only a bottom-up causation at work, and correlatively,our minds again can have the power to move our bodies. As in Merleau-Ponty’s work, attempts are again underway to understand purposefulness asmore than merely an organism’s consciousness of its own internal billiard-ballreactions to linear causal mechanisms. For example, Kauffman (1993) andEarl Mac Cormack and Maxim Stamenov (1996) emphasize this point, andShaun Gallagher and Anthony Marcel (1999), Newton (1996) and Varela et al.(1991/1993) attempt to distinguish “intentions” from mere “tendencies,” and“actions” from mere “reactions.” The hottest topics in current neuroscienceare emotion, agency, the meaning of personhood, and consciousness. Influ-ential theorists who have directly acknowledged influence by Merleau-Pontyinclude Varela et al. (1991/1993), Esther Thelen and Linda Smith (1994), Eu-gene Gendlin (1962/1997, 1992), Natsoulas (1993), Newton (1996), KathleenWider (1997), and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1999). Moreover, the recenttrend toward “dynamical systems theory” traces through Kauffman (1993)back to the biochemist Jacques Monod (1971), who in turn was influenced byMerleau-Ponty on the issues discussed in the present paper. Interest in theseareas has now infiltrated almost all cognitive psychology and philosophy ofmind journals, and several have devoted themselves almost entirely to theintegration of phenomenology with cognitive science, notably Consciousness& Emotion, Phenomenology and Cognition, and Journal of ConsciousnessStudies.

We are thus reaching a point where neurophysiology is reconcilable withphenomenology. This was Merleau-Ponty’s early hope – not merely to rejectphysiological psychology, but to integrate it with the experience of the livingbody. Fred Wertz has well summarized Merleau-Ponty on this point: percep-tion “is possible only because the body, neither a thing closed within itselfnor an unextended idea, is sensitive to things as one among them in their veryorder” (1987: 120). The body as subject must be reconciled with the body aspart of the experienceable world.

Merleau-Ponty emphasized that the solution to the mind body problemhinged on a concept of “psychophysical forms” (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1967),which he defined in this way:

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‘Forms’. . . are defined as total processes whose properties are not the sumof those which the isolated parts would possess. . . . We will say that thereis form whenever the properties of a system are modified by every changebrought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conservedwhen they all change while maintaining the same relationship among them-selves. (1942/1967: 47)

For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is a further development of life, whichis self-organizing in the sense that it must appropriate the needed materialsubstrata to maintain its patterns of living, rather than merely having theirforms be caused by those substrata. This enables life and consciousness to havecausal powers that are not reducible to the sum total of the causal powers oftheir material constituents, and it reconciles scientific causality with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “The relations between the organism and its milieu arenot relations of linear causality but of circular causality” (1942/1967: 15).Philosophers of mind are now recognizing that the causal power of a process toorganize its own components does not conflict with what Jaegwon Kim (1992)calls the “causal closure” of the physical realm. Causal relations obtain onlyunder given background conditions, and self-organizing dynamical systemsexhibit tendencies to rearrange those background conditions so as to preservethe continuity of the overall process, as in the biological shunt mechanismsdiscussed by Monod (1971), Kauffman (1993), Ellis (1986, 1995), and Ellisand Newton (1998).

Merleau-Ponty was ahead of his time in wanting to integrate neuroscienceand phenomenology within one coherent understanding of consciousness.It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the brain sciences would also haveto take phenomenology seriously, because it was impossible to explain thephenomenon of consciousness from within a theoretical perspective so con-strained by the natural attitude that nothing can be seen but the objective, sothat the phenomenon of consciousness itself cannot enter the epistemologicalpicture. At the point where consciousness intersects with brain function, thedata of experience have remained incoherent with the fact of experience itself,and a reconciliation is necessary.

Neurophysiological studies by Carl Aurell (1989), Michael Posner andMary Rothbart (1992), Antonio Damasio (1994), and Alexander Luria in aneglected but important aspect of his work (1980), focusing on the attention-directing role of the emotionally-influenced frontal-limbic system, show in-creasingly that “information processing” takes place by means of completelydifferent brain activities depending on whether it occurs on a conscious ornon-conscious basis. Consciousness occurs only when efferent (outflowing)nervous activity takes the lead in selecting and directing afferent (inflowing)activity; conscious beings are self-organizing emotionally and motivationallydirected beings that actively direct their attention, and can imagine things withno afferent input (with neural substrates remarkably similar to the imaging


activities in perceptual consciousness – see John Richardson’s (1991) collec-tion of studies, for example). Consistent with Jean-Paul Sartre’s suggestion inThe Psychology of the Imagination (1966), subjects form perceptual imagerylargely as a result of formulating their own questions about reality rather thanjust passively reacting to “stimulus-response” mechanisms. This point is dis-cussed extensively by Ellis (1990, 1995), Christina Schues (1994), and Ellisand Newton (1998). These realizations about differences between purposefulconscious organisms and passive information-processing machines has ledto a new (very recent) emphasis on motivation and emotion as playing someas yet poorly understood role in directing attention, conjuring imagery, andfacilitating the unique features of conscious beings just listed. For example,Richard Cytowic (1993), Douglas Watt (1998), and Bill Faw (2000) haveexplored the neurophysiology of the way the emotional directing of the atten-tional process is a prerequisite for perceptual inputs to register as intentionalcontents.

Thus the traditional stimulus-response model, in which most of the causalwork is done by stimulus inputs and other mechanical computations, isbackward – again as Merleau-Ponty suggested in The Structure of Behav-ior (1942/1967). The organism must first act, and then consciousness of theenvironment results. This basic shift in the direction of causation can becalled the “enactive” view of the mind, to use the term coined by Varela et al.(1991/1993).

During the generation after Merleau-Ponty’s death, his self-organizationalapproach, with its emphasis on grounding cognition in the body’s motility,was largely abandoned by neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists in fa-vor of a mechanical and reductionistic framework. Information processingwas now viewed as a passive receiving of input from the environment ratherthan as an understanding based on the action affordances of the environ-ment. Consciousness was regarded as a final step in the processing stream,a causally irrelevant spinoff or byproduct, like the effluent waste given offby a chemical manufacturing plant. Philosophers of mind and cognitive the-orists became obsessed with the computer metaphor and with an insistenceon reducing “the mental” to something scientifically (and “physically”) ex-plainable. As is now well known, the resulting computational model of mindviewed consciousness as merely an epiphenomenon of unconscious com-putational processes in the brain. For a generation of traditionally orientedneurophilosophers and scientists, the attempt to understand those aspects ofexperiential systems such as human minds that are not analogous to computerfunctioning, or to billiard-ball mechanical systems, got swept under the rug.Importantly, the organic was reduced to the inorganic, and this was gener-ally taken to mean that the self-organizational was reduced to a mechanicaltype of causation, in which nothing moves unless acted upon by an externalforce.

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Phenomenologists were skeptical of the supposedly mechanical aspectsof the non-conscious substrates emphasized by computationalists, and there-fore shied away from neuroscience altogether. But the vast phenomenon ofconsciousness itself was too important for psychology to ignore, and thuswas bound to re-emerge sooner or later. In order to do so, it had to be un-derstood in a new way – a way not dominated by a mechanical billiard-ballconceptualization, with its clunky attempts to accommodate the problem ofintentional representation within a naive empiricist epistemology (and conse-quently incommensurable languages describing the subjective and objectivedimensions). So for the first time in over half a century, neurophysiology andcognitive psychology are again becoming phenomenology-friendly.

The new approach has arisen from a specific rejection of the old neo-modernist metaphysical assumptions that increasingly had led to the occlu-sion of consciousness from philosophy and science: the assumption thatobjects (which have real causal power) are clearly distinct from subjects(which are epiphenomenal readouts and can only observe the underlyingmechanisms); that the reality which ultimately must explain mental function-ing is at bottom an atomistic-reductionism; that representational consciousactivities (thoughts and perceptions) are clearly distinguishable from non-representational ones (feelings, volitions, intentional actions, and emotions);and, perhaps most important, that all reality is fundamentally reactive andpassive rather than active–i.e., that nothing does anything unless caused todo it by some external force acting on it, that there is no such thing as a pat-tern of activity that can organize its own substrata rather than the other wayaround. For the resulting ultra-modernist metaphysics, there was no importantor non-arbitrary distinction between non-living things and living ones (i.e.,those which appropriate, rearrange, and reproduce the needed substrata in or-der to maintain a higher-order pattern of activity); yet the difference betweenconscious beings and non-conscious ones (for example, computers) hingescrucially on this distinction.

The atomistic-reductionist project eventually led to Kuhnian anomalies thathave attracted a great deal of attention in recent mainstream neuroscientificand cognitive psychology discussions. I shall focus here on three anomaliesthat arise for modernist attempts to deal with consciousness, necessitating anew approach to consciousness – not merely a deletion of the concepts of con-sciousness and subjectivity from the philosophical and scientific vocabulary:

1. Consciousness is an enacting of rather than a passive reaction to the phys-ical events that serve as its substratum; neither is it the non-physical halfof an ontological dualism.

2. Mechanistic causes at the empirically observable level seem to underex-plain consciousness because, as David Chalmers (1995) points out, evenif we explain all the physical correlates of consciousness, we still would


not, at that point, have explained why those physical mechanisms couldnot have occurred in the absence of consciousness. This is Chalmers’snow-famous “hard problem” of consciousness.

3. Mechanistic causes also seem to overexplain consciousness, in the sensethat they provide necessary and sufficient physical antecedents for anygiven event, so that no causal power seems to be left for consciousness; yetwe know that conscious intentions do play a role in bringing about manymovements of our bodies. The mechanistic causes thus explain so muchthat there seems to be no room left for mental causation. Modernism’s bestattempt to avoid this anomaly was the thesis of psychophysical identity,which could have allowed consciousness to have the same causal powers asthe physical mechanisms with which it supposedly is equivalent. But thisaccount eventually faltered for a reason long understood by phenomenolo-gists: it is impossible to know what a state of consciousness is like merelyby knowing everything that can be known empirically about its underlyingphysical mechanisms. Yet, as Frank Jackson (1986) points out, if there issomething about consciousness that cannot be known through empiricalobservation, then this fact seems to raise doubts about how conscious-ness could be equivalent with something that is completely empiricallyobservable–the underlying brain mechanisms.

In the three sections that follow, I will outline the way these three anomalieshave played themselves out in recent neuroscientific and cognitive theorydiscussions. In each case, we can see not only why the anomalies in questionlead inexorably to a new approach that is perfectly compatible with the insightsof phenomenology, particularly those of Merleau-Ponty; we can also go sofar as to say that the new trend actually places great emphasis on the need forserious phenomenological work.

1. The Anomaly of the Non-passivity of Conscious Attention:“Enactivist” Analyses of Intentional Actions

In the mechanistic framework of Twentieth Century cognitive neuroscience,consciousness was supposed to be caused by, or to result from, something thathappened in the brain. Perceptual consciousness, for example, was supposedto result from stimulation of the occipital lobe visual areas, which in turnresulted from stimulation of the optic nerve by incoming sensory data (i.e.,patterns of light). But this “appendage” theory, as Thomas Natsoulas (1993)has called it – this notion that consciousness is a byproduct of a physical causeand effect mechanism (in which consciousness itself is an effect but does notact as one of the causes) – has led to certain anomalies. For example, whenthe occipital lobe is activated by incoming visual data, there is no perceptual

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consciousness of the object until the parietal and frontal lobes are active, asshown by Martha Farah (1989), Luria (1980), and Posner (1990). Yet CarlAurell (1989), Sverker Runeson (1974), Richard Srebro (1985), and McHughand Bahill (1985) show that the activation of the parietal and frontal lobes is notcaused by the activity of the occipital lobe. Instead, what happens is that, priorto occipital processing of the visual stimulus, the very act of paying attentionin order to see what is there has already been activated by the midbrain andlimbic system, which subserve emotional-motivational activity. Panksepp’s(1998) and Damasio’s (1999) neuropsychological studies strongly suggestthat this activity is self-generated and self-energizing, and can be triggeredby the stimulus only if the stimulus is already felt as possibly emotionallyimportant for the organism’s purposes.

The needs of the organism as a whole must first motivate the paying ofattention to kinds of environmental stimuli that might be important for theorganism’s purposes, before we have even visually processed the object. Atthis point, as Damasio et al. have now shown (2000), the frontal lobe becomesactive, and in turn prompts the parietal lobe to execute the activities that sub-serve vague images and/or concepts of the kinds of emotionally importantobjects that might be present in the environment. Aurell (1989) shows thatwhen a novel, completely unexpected stimulus is presented, complete acti-vation of the traditionally understood “sensory areas” of the occipital andtemporal lobes is not sufficient to produce consciousness of the visual ob-ject. According to Aurell, the subject is not conscious of the object until anevent-related electrical potential can be observed in the parietal lobe, at about300 ms. after presentation of the stimulus. We know that this parietal activ-ity correlates with imagistic consciousness because Aurell’s (1989) 300 ms.evoked potential occurs at the point when the subject is visually aware of theunexpectedly presented stimulus. This 300 ms. parietal activity, however, isnot activated in response to the occipital lobe’s prior activity; instead, the pre-viously activated emotional brain areas (which are activated as early as 20 ms.)have already directed the frontal and parietal lobes to seek out emotionallyimportant categories of objects. This “looking for” activity has already begun(including sensorimotor imagery associated with possible action affordances)prior to any occipital “perceptual area” having any effect on our perceptualconsciousness.

The overall picture of the perceptual process emerging from these obser-vations is not consistent with a simple stimulus-response framework. Instead,we must say that if and when the emotional and anticipatory brain activity,having first been developed prior to visual processing, then finds itself res-onating with patterns of activity in the occipital lobe (which reflects sensorystimulation) – only then does perceptual consciousness occur.

As noted above, Richardson (1991) and others have shown that the brainsubstrates of mental imagery are almost the same as for an actual perception.


The main difference is that, in the case of a mere mental image, the parietal andoccipital activity is intentionally activated by means of efferent activity (i.e.,nervous impulses that flow outward, away from the brain’s self-energizingaction centers). What is most remarkable, though, is that in the case of an ac-tual perception this same efferent activity must also take place, intentionallyactivated by the organism via motivated attentional activity. But in addition,the efferent activity is experienced as resonating with correlated afferent in-put. The important point for our purposes is that perceptual consciousnessrequires self-initiated efferent activity just as much as mere mental imagerydoes. So we cannot view perception as caused simply by afferent input fromthe environment. As Merleau-Ponty said, “we must [first] look in order to see”(1941/1962: 232, italics added). The looking is orchestrated by the organism’sself-organizational activity, motivated internally by its own organismic pur-poses, not linearly caused by the incoming perceptual signal. Those sameinternal processes can create vivid imagery in the absence of any input what-ever.

Perceptual imagery is a result of the organism gearing itself up for ananticipated input – not a result of stimulation by environmental objects. Thispoint is clearly illustrated in recent perceptual experiments by Mack and Rock(1998). In these experiments, a perceptual object is presented to the very cen-ter of the visual field, yet when the subjects’ attention is occupied with anunrelated task, they systematically fail to consciously see the presented stim-ulus. In most cases, they also lack even implicit knowledge of the presentedstimulus (i.e., the ability to answer questions about what they have seen on abetter-than-chance basis). Mack and Rock therefore conclude that attentionis a prerequisite for perception, not a result of it.

So the model of the mind as a passive receiver of causal work done bystimulus inputs and other mechanical computations places the cart before thehorse. The organism must first purposely act, and only then can consciousnessof the environment result. It is this fundamental shift in the direction of cau-sation which is now sometimes referred to as the “enactive” view of the mind.Rather than a stimulus causing a response, it is the response which must occurfirst, and then act on the incoming afferent signals to produce a stimulus.

Perhaps the clearest and most thoroughgoing expression of this kind oftheory has been developed by Natika Newton (1982, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993,1996, 2000, 2001). In Newton’s “action theory of understanding,” a percep-tual consciousness is always preceded by an act of imagination – similar toEdmund Husserl’s “meaning fulfillment” discussed in the fifth of the LogicalInvestigations (1913/1972) – which creates a subjunctive based on a moti-vated act of action planning. This plan of action creates expectations as toenvironmental feedback; in turn, the expectations – whether fulfilled or not– constitute mental images of a subjunctive nature. If the expectations arefulfilled as expected, the result is that rather than a mere mental image, we

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experience a perceptual image of something actually present. The interest-ing point for our purposes is that the expectation must precede the impact ofthe incoming sensory data. This means that subjunctive ideas (again, simi-lar to Husserl’s meaning intentions) are prior to perceptual input, and actionplanning guides the process of “looking for” instantiations of the subjunctivecategory (for example, the image) as actually instantiated in the environment.

Newton is a prime example of a vanguard of current cognitive theoristsand neuroscientists who believe that consciousness plays an active part–whatMarcelo Dascal (1987) calls a “pragmatic” part–in bringing about many kindsof information processing; consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon or ap-pendage to a basically non-conscious computational process. If we understandand identify objects by imagining how our bodies could act in relation to them,then action planning grounds our understanding of objects, and ultimately oflanguage, concepts, and even logical relations. For an infant, objects “affordsucking,” “afford throwing,” etc. Similarly, when adults anticipate how wemight act in relation to an object or situation, we execute the rudiments ofa subjunctive conceptualization. For example, to anticipate that “If I throw aball at something (under appropriate circumstances) it will knock it over,” isvery similar (linguistically, neurophysiologically, and phenomenologically) tobelieving that “If I were to throw a ball, it would knock something over.” An-ticipations of the future ground our understanding of subjunctives, and thus, ofabstract concepts. In Newton’s approach, the key to this “foundation of under-standing” is the process of action planning. To make this case, Newton relieson extensive neuroscientific evidence–for example, the finding discussed byMasao Ito (1993), by Damasio (1994), and by Jeremy Schmahmann (1997;see also Schmahmann et al., 2001) that the brain mechanisms underlying ab-stract thought are almost identical to those underlying action-planning in thecontext of body movement.

In this approach, each of the modernist biases mentioned above is avoided:

(1) Because the organism must anticipate actions toward its environment inorder for consciousness to occur, consciousness is not merely passivelycaused by incoming stimuli or unconscious computations performed onincoming stimuli. The body’s organization of stimuli occurs prior to thereception of the stimuli, and if the body does not actively seek to appropri-ate and rearrange the physiological substrata for its own desired patternsof conscious activity, this consciousness can never occur.

Since consciousness is a higher-order process that must actively seekto appropriate and rearrange lower-level processes which are needed assubstratum elements for its motivated pattern of activity, such a higher-order process cannot be explained as the causal result of the discreteactions of its own physiological substrates. It would be as misleadingto explain consciousness as passively caused by the discrete mechanical


interaction of particles of brain matter as it would be to explain a soundwave passing through a wooden door as being caused by the actions ofthe particles of wood in the door. Instead, it is the sound wave, originatingelsewhere, that causes the particles to vibrate in the pattern they do – afact we would overlook if we were to content ourselves with explainingthe pattern of the wave as being caused by the discrete movements of itssubstratum elements. Consciousness is disanalogous to the sound wave inthat it originates mainly internally; but the analogy is that, as in a soundwave, the wave can spread to affect the particles needed to transmit thewave.

(2) A second atomistic and ultimately ultra-modernist assumption that isrejected by the enactive approach is the notion that consciousness playsno significant role in information processing – i.e., the epiphenomenalistargument that consciousness is merely a causally-powerless “readout”of unconscious computational brain processes. In the enactivist view,consciousness directs much of this activity, even though consciousnessitself is embodied (not in computational cerebral processes, but ratherin emotional and motivational activities of the whole organism). Thisemotionally motivated process of action planning that determines thefocus of attention is not a computer-like computational process.

(3) This implies the rejection of still another set of modernist biases – thepresumption that representational states (thoughts and perceptions) areclearly distinguishable from non-representational ones (feelings and emo-tions), and the corollary presumption that subject and object are clearlydistinct. The emotional purposes of the whole embodied organism directconscious attention, which in turn influences in a necessary way whatwe perceive and think. We can be consciously aware of this whole pro-cess through “proprioception,” and much (if not all) rational processingresults from what Newton calls “proprioceptive imagery.” I.e., we propri-oceptively imagine what it would be like to throw a ball (when forminga subjunctive concept of such an event), or to move our bodies rhythmi-cally (for example, to the rhythm of a certain pattern of logical inference).But proprioceptive imagery is directed toward something that is neitherclearly subject nor clearly object – my embodied self.

An enactive approach to consciousness leads to very different analyses ofthe relation between physical causation and conscious intention from any thatwere possible in the ultra-mechanistic atomistic-reductionism of the recentpast, which viewed reality as fundamentally reactive rather than consisting ofpatterns of activity that appropriate their atomistic components. Beyond theone just discussed, the failure of the modernist conception of causation as com-pletely passive led to still another anomaly in the philosophy of mind, whosesolution also requires a rejection of this atomistic conception of the nature of

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causation. This is the anomaly expressed by Chalmers’s “hard problem,” asdiscussed in the following section.

2. The Anomaly of Physicalistic Underexplanation:Chalmers’ “Hard Problem”

The new self-organizational, enactive and embodied approach to cognitivetheory also attempts to offer a new perspective on Chalmers’s “hard problem”of consciousness (1995). The dilemma as formulated by Chalmers is very sim-ilar to G.E. Moore’s “open question argument” in ethical theory (1900/1956).According to Moore, if someone wants to define “morally right” to mean “pro-ductive of such and such consequences” (for example, pleasure or happiness),the question can meaningfully be posed, “Is it morally right to produce suchand such consequences?” The very fact that such a question can be mean-ingfully asked shows that “morally right” cannot be equivalent in meaningwith “productive of such and such consequences.” Similarly, against any givenphysical explanation of consciousness, Chalmers points out that the questioncan always be meaningfully asked, “But isn’t it conceivable that all the ele-ments in that explanation could occur, resulting in all the same informationprocessing outcomes that would be produced in a conscious process, but in theabsence of consciousness?” For example, computationalists have maintainedfor the past 30 years or so that consciousness can be explained either as anepiphenomenon of, or as identical with, a digital computer-like process thatuses the hardware of the brain to process its software. But, says Chalmers, wecan easily imagine such a computational process as occurring in the absenceof consciousness. Therefore, some further explanation is required in order tounderstand why consciousness does in fact accompany such computationalprocesses in certain cases (for example, in human organisms).

Just as in Moore’s “open question argument,” here too, the dilemma cannotbe escaped simply by defining consciousness as such-and-such by arbitraryfiat (any more than we can define “morally right” by arbitrary fiat as “produc-tive of pleasure”). For example, we cannot arbitrarily define consciousnessas “a linguistic processing system whose outputs resemble sentences in theEnglish language, and which follows the principles of logic as contained inCopi’s logic textbook.” The problem here would be the same as with Moore’sopen question: We could always ask, “Yes, but is it not conceivable that aphysical system could process information according to the rules of logic andthe English language, without being accompanied by consciousness?”

If consciousness is not to be defined by arbitrary fiat, then how do wedefine what it is that we are trying to explain when we try to explain con-sciousness? Before asking this question, we must have a notion of what wemean by “consciousness” as it occurs in our question. And, of course, anyone


capable of formulating such a question does know what is meant by conscious-ness, because, as Eugene Gendlin makes so clear, this person would have toexperience his or her own consciousness in order to know what question heor she is trying to formulate (1992). Other than assuming such direct experi-encing of one’s own consciousness, there would seem to be no way of lettinganyone know what we mean by the word “consciousness,” since the statingof any definition presupposes that the hearer of the definition knows what itis to be conscious of something (in this case, the meanings of the elements inthe proposed definition). Part of what we want to address in any explanationof consciousness, then, is the phenomenal experience of consciousness, asopposed to a definition by arbitrary fiat (for example, in terms of informationprocessing). Correlatively, part of what makes Chalmers’s “open question” sodifficult is that, if we were to arbitrarily stipulate some non-phenomenal (i.e.,physicalistic) definition of consciousness, it would be easy to imagine thatthe proposed physical process might have occurred without consciousness asphenomenally experienced, and therefore the latter is not really adequatelyexplained by the physical explanation being proposed. Some further expla-nation seems required as to why this particular physical process could nothave occurred without being accompanied by the phenomenal experience ofconsciousness.

At the same time, if there is to be any hope of seriously addressingChalmers’s open question, the definition of consciousness must not only beframed in phenomenally experienceable terms; it must also be broken downinto specific enough elements that these elements can be correlated with phys-iological substrata which, in the final analysis, will turn out to be unimaginablewithout being accompanied by the corresponding elements of consciousness.It cannot be enough merely to say that consciousness is simply indefinableexcept through a direct experience of it. If the dualism that plagued mod-ernism is to be avoided, we must identify elements which, on the one hand,are necessary for the phenomenal experience of consciousness, and on theother hand, can be bridged to the empirically observable world.

The enactive approach we have been discussing meets these requirements,because on the one hand it characterizes consciousness not by arbitrary fiat butas phenomenally experienceable; while on the other hand the elements of thedescription lend themselves to being correlated with empirically observablephysiological substrata, so that at the end of the day it should be impossibleto imagine this particular combination of physiological substrata as being un-accompanied by its conscious correlates. The enactive view of consciousnesshas been characterized by Ellis and Newton as follows:

Conscious experience (by contrast to unconscious information processing)entails an emotionally interested anticipation of possible sensory and pro-prioceptive input such that the pattern of the subject’s interest determines

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the modality, patterns, and emotional significance of the anticipated input.Specifically, the anticipation takes the form of a sensorimotor, propriocep-tive and affective ‘image’ of a state of affairs ‘looked for’ by the subject. . . .The content of consciousness is vivid to the extent that the activity consti-tutive of the interest in the future resonates (in terms of holistic patterns ofactivity) with the activity of incoming (afferent) imagistic data, and withthe activation of memories of past imagistic and conceptual data. (1998:432)

The central idea is that consciousness is an “anticipation” of a possibleinput. This point is illustrated by the experience of subjects in perceptualexperiments who are instructed to imagine an object prior to its appearanceon a screen, or to continue looking for the object while other objects are beingflashed intermittently: consistently, the result is that the subjects perceive theobject more readily when they are looking for it (Corbetta et al., 1990; Pardo etal., 1990; Logan, 1980; Hanze and Hesse, 1993; Legrenzi et al., 1993; Rhodesand Tremewan, 1993; Lavy and van den Hout, 1994). To imagine an object isto be “on the lookout” for it. Thus, to form a mental image of a wall as bluemeans to “look for” or to anticipate blue in the wall. If we imagine a pinkwall at which we are actually looking as blue, we are putting ourselves intoa state of readiness to see blue if it should occur. As Merleau-Ponty says, “Igive ear, or look, in the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensibletakes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, evenmy whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space knownas blue or red” (1941/1962: 212). Later he says, “The warmth which I feelwhen I read the word ‘warm’ is not an actual warmth. It is simply my bodywhich prepares itself for heat and which, so to speak, roughs out its outline”(1941/1962: 236).

We have already seen that abstract thought involves anticipation as muchas does consciousness of sensory or perceptual imagery. To anticipate that ifI throw a ball at something it will knock it over is similar to believing that if Iwere to throw a ball, it would knock something over. Interested anticipationsof the future ground our understanding of subjunctives and thus of abstractconcepts at the most basic level of phenomenal experiencing.

By “interested anticipation,” enactivists mean one that is emotionally mo-tivated. This is consistent with Richard Cytowic’s suggestion that the maindifference between conscious information processing and processing of nuts-and-bolts computers is this emotionally interested anticipation, which com-puters (and indeed all non-biological systems) lack (1993). We are consciousof incoming afferent data only to the extent that we actively “pay attention” tothem, and this process of directing attention is motivated by the needs of theorganism. From an empirical standpoint, afferent processing – for example, inthe occipital lobe – never results in conscious awareness of the object unlessaccompanied by frontal-limbic and parietal activity instigated by midbrain


motivational activity. In the enactive approach, the primary organismic needthat motivates consciousness of objects is the need to anticipate future datawhich are considered important for the organism’s purposes.

The above characterization of conscious experience emphasizes that theemotionally motivated anticipation of input leads to “imagery.” By “image,”of course, I do not mean a physical replica of some object, but rather thephenomenal sense that one is looking for (or listening for, tasting for, propri-oceptively feeling for, etc.) some object or state of affairs that would take theform of an intentional object.

The enactive characterization of consciousness, taken from our phenome-nal experience of it, can be broken down into elements which themselves canbe studied in empirical terms, but which, when they interact in a certain way,cannot be imagined as interacting in that way without also being accompaniedby consciousness. These elements, essentially, are (1) an emotional motivationwhich grounds an interest in anticipating the future; (2) sensory, sensorimo-tor or proprioceptive imagery activated by this emotional motivation; and (3)a resonating between the activity of emotionally-motivated imagery and theactivity stimulated by incoming sensory data and data reactivated throughmemory. If consciousness is characterizable as a certain kind of interaction ofthese elements, then the corresponding interaction of the patterns of activity inthe physiological correlates of these conscious processes will be unimaginablewithout being accompanied by those conscious processes themselves.

An enactive characterization of consciousness thus makes possible a res-olution of the “hard problem,” because it bridges from the phenomenal levelto the empirical-scientific level in such a way that the empirically observableelements could not imaginably relate in just that way without being accompa-nied by consciousness. But the way of relating at issue here is precisely onein which emotion and motivation actively drive the computational process,rather than arising as a passive reaction to it.

Consciousness, which inevitably includes an emotional element as part ofthe process of attentive awareness (an emotional element which is constitutiveof the very “felt” nature of conscious as opposed to unconscious processing),is a higher-order process which actively appropriates, replaces, and rearrangesthe physical substratum elements needed to maintain and enhance the patternof its own process. It therefore cannot be that the pattern which is conscious-ness is passively a causal result of the actions of those substratum elements.But this in turn requires rejecting the same modernist assumptions that werecalled into question above, and for analogous reasons: Consciousness (sub-jectivity) is not caused by micro-level billiard ball mechanisms, but also isnot separable from them. Neither dualism nor causal epiphenomenalism canresolve the “hard problem,” and psychophysical identity requires ignoring thedifference between the phenomenal content of experience and its empiricallyobservable correlates. Only an enactive approach can coherently account for

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consciousness as a process that is inseparable from its substrata, because con-sciousness is the pattern of the activity of its substrata, yet is not passivelycaused by the actions of those substrata.

If the process, consciousness, is inseparable from its embodiment, yet itscharacter is not passively caused by the nature of the bodily elements perse, then in more general terms there are processes in nature that activelyappropriate their substrata rather than being passive results of them. And thisrequires rejecting the modernist assumption that natural processes do not act,but only react – i.e., that nothing ever happens except as a passive reaction tosome external force, that all reality is fundamentally passive.

3. The Anomaly of Physical Overexplanation

Although Chalmers points out that explanations of empirical properties arenot sufficient to explain why the empirical properties are accompanied byphenomenal consciousness, it is equally true that the empirical properties asunderstood in mainstream cognitive psychology explain too much. I.e., if weaccept the notion that one set of neurophysiological properties is the necessaryand sufficient cause of some subsequent set of neurophysiological properties,then there can be no causal role for the corresponding conscious intentions.But we can easily observe that a conscious intention does play a causal role,because the conscious decision to raise my hand does play a part in bringingit about that the hand goes up. Given the modernist approach to mechanicalexplanation, in which the empirically-observed level constitutes a sufficientcausal chain, a process, such as consciousness, cannot appropriate and useits own substratum elements, so consciousness remains an irrelevant epiphe-nomenon that can play no causal role in physiological processes, including thecomputational processes of the brain. Physical explanations thus explain toomuch, in the sense that nothing is left to be explained by conscious intentions.

Without an enactive approach, in which consciousness is a process whichtakes physiological events as its substrata, there can be no solution to thisproblem of overexplanation. But if consciousness and physiology relate as ahigher-order process relates to its own substrata, and such that the higher-orderprocess is not merely caused by or equivalent to is own substratum elements,then physicalistic overexplanation ceases to be a problem. Suppose C1 and C2are two conscious states, and that P1 and P2 are the physiological correlatesof these conscious states.

C1 −→ C2

P1 −→ P2

In the modernist-mechanistic approach, if P1 was necessary and sufficient tobring about P2 (under the given circumstances), then nothing else could be


either necessary or sufficient to bring about P2. Thus C1 could have no causalpower to bring about P2. So, if C1 was the conscious intention to raise myhand, and P2 was the movement of the hand, it was necessary to say that theintention to raise the hand really played no role in the raising of the hand.Psychophysical identity could solve this problem only by creating a worseone. Of course, if C1 and P1 were the same thing as each other, then C1 andP1 could both be both necessary and sufficient to produce the same outcome.But C1 and P1 are not precisely the same thing as each other, because if theywere, then complete knowledge of P1 would yield complete knowledge ofC1, whereas it doesn’t. No amount of empirical knowledge and explanationof a headache can reveal to someone what it feels like to have a headache,unless that observer has also experienced something like a headache in his orher own consciousness.

Nor could causal epiphenomenalism solve the problem. Epiphenomenal-ism would simply say that C1 is caused by P1, and C2 is caused by P2, andneither C1 nor C2 causes anything. But, in the first place, if P1 causes C1,then P1 and C1 cannot be the same thing as each other; so the question arisesas to what sort of entity C1 is if it is to be distinguished from a physical en-tity. Epiphenomenalism seems inevitably to lead to a metaphysical dualism.Moreover, it does not solve the problem, but only bites the bullet; it does notexplain how my intention to raise my hand leads to the raising of the hand,but simply denies that it does lead to it.

Even this consequence could be avoided by an epiphenomenalist theoryif it were plausible to posit that there is some little bit of matter in the brainwhose only purpose is to serve as the substratum for consciousness, that thislittle bit of matter is caused to behave in the ways that correspond to con-scious experience, and that it does not in turn have any effect on any otherphysical processes in the brain. But this would be inconsistent with what wehave learned about the neurophysiology of consciousness. What the empiricalevidence points to is that processing occurs in a conscious way only when it isvery globally distributed in the brain. For example, I have already mentionedthat, when impulses caused by optic stimulation set up patterns of activity inthe occipital lobe, but without coordinated limbic and frontal-cortex activ-ity, no perceptual consciousness results from the occipital activity (Michael,Posner, 1990; Luria, 1980). Similarly, as summarized by Isaac Asimov (1965:193) and Ellis (1986: 46–52), the transition from sleep to waking conscious-ness requires that the activities of the hypothalamus and cortex achieve awidely-distributed pattern of synchronization or coordination that was notpresent during sleep. Jonathan Winson (1986: 46ff), Richard Restak (1984:315–333), Richardson (1991), and Jouvet (1967) show that, when we areconscious of dream images during sleep, both efferent and afferent activitythroughout the brain are detected, whereas during non-dreaming sleep boththe afferent activity and some of the efferent activity are comparatively much

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less pronounced. These examples suggest that consciousness requires globallydistributed processes in the brain, combining local mechanisms which underdifferent circumstances would be active in various non-conscious processes.

Consciousness, then, cannot be confined to some small bit of matter whichdoes not affect any other brain process involved in cognition. But if the phys-iological substratum of consciousness does affect further physiological andcognitive functioning, then consciousness itself also affects further physio-logical and cognitive functioning, unless we assume that consciousness issomehow separable from its physiological substratum – which again wouldentail a dualism of physical and non-physical occurrences.

Neither dualism, nor psychophysical identity theory, nor epiphenome-nalism works as an explanation of the relation between consciousness andits physiological correlates, because the modernist concept of atomistic-reductionism does not allow a process to affect the behavior of its own sub-stratum elements. It requires, instead, that a process must be caused by theinteraction of the discrete movements of its substratum elements, each ofwhich has a sufficient causal explanation of its own, so that the pattern ofconsciousness, paradoxically, can have no causal power.

But the enactive approach, with its return to Merleau-Ponty’s psychophys-ical forms, does avoid this problem of causal overexplanation. It avoids it byallowing that a process can have causal power. In the case of the consciousstates C1 and C2, and their physical correlates, P1 and P2, the enactive ap-proach can allow that P1 is necessary and sufficient for P2 (under the givencircumstances), while at the same time maintaining that C1 can also be neces-sary and/or sufficient for C2 and for P2. The reason is that, if C1 and P1 relateas process to substratum, then C1 and P1 are “inseparable” from each otherin the sense that they are necessary and sufficient for each other. If two eventsare necessary and sufficient for each other, then even if one does not causethe other, and even if one is not identical with the other, still, one of theseevents will be necessary and sufficient for whatever the other is necessary andsufficient for. Consider, for example, three dominos lined up in such a waythat if one domino falls, it will knock over the other two. Under these givencircumstances, the falling of the second domino is necessary and sufficientfor the third domino’s falling, but the two are by no means identical, nor is onecaused by the other. Instead, the two dominos falling are events that, under thegiven circumstances, are inseparable from each other. Whatever is necessaryand sufficient for one will be necessary and sufficient for the other.

The relation between a process and its substratum elements works out ina similar way. Since a process is inseparable, under the given circumstances,from the behavior of its substratum elements, then the process will also benecessary and sufficient for whatever its substratum elements are necessaryand sufficient for. Yet this does not necessarily imply that the process is causedby its substratum, or that it is identical with it. Many things are true of a


process that are not true of its substratum elements, even taken collectively.For example, a wave on the ocean may travel many miles in a horizontaldirection, while its substratum elements, the movements of particles of water,are very small vertical oscillations.

The process-substratum relation in the case of consciousness is differentfrom the relationship between a wave and the physical medium through whichthe wave passes in one crucial respect. Consciousness, unlike a sound wave or awave in the ocean, is a purpose-directed process. Merleau-Ponty, as mentionedearlier, defines a purposeful activity as one in which the organism’s overallpattern of activity acts in such a way as to rearrange and readjust its variousparts in order to maintain or enhance the overall pattern (1942/1967: 47ff).Purely mechanical processes do not seem to behave in this way. A thermostat,while it will adjust its overall pattern to feedback from the environment, doesnot seem to be a purpose-directed system because, when one of its partsceases to function or is removed, the thermostat does not act in such a wayas to replace the missing part or try to compensate for its absence; it simplyquits functioning. The thermostat does not “care,” in this non-conscious senseof “care,” whether it achieves its ultimate objective or not. It functions or notpurely as an additive juxtaposition of the functioning of its parts.

It becomes increasingly clear, as we study the brain, the ecosystem, andthe concept of “living organisms” in biology, that at least many patterns ofactivity maintain their organizational structure across replacements of theirown substrata. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, an organism will often rearrangethe overall configuration of its parts if an imbalance is created in one part whichdisrupts the functioning of the whole. One of Merleau-Ponty’s examples of this“top-down” organizational structure in organisms is the development of the“pseudo-fovea” in cases of hemianopsia. In these cases, the eyes change thefunctioning of the cones and rods from their original anatomical programming.In hemianopsia, the subject is rendered blind in half of each retina, so that heor she now has the use of only two half retinas.

Consequently one would expect that his field of vision would correspondto half of the normal field of vision, right or left according to the case, witha zone of clear peripheral vision. In reality this is not the case at all: thesubject has the impression of seeing poorly, but not of being reduced tohalf a visual field. The organism has adapted itself to the situation createdby the illness by reorganizing the functions of the eye. The eyeballs haveoscillated in such a way as to present a part of the retina which is intact tothe luminous excitations, whether they come from the right or the left; inother words, the preserved retinal sector has established itself in a centralposition in the orbit instead of remaining affected, as before the illness,by the reception of light rays coming from one half of the field. But thereorganization of muscular functioning, which is comparable to what weencountered in the fixation reflex, would be of no effect if it were notaccompanied by a redistribution of functions in the retinal and calcarine

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elements which certainly seem to correspond point for point to the latter.(1942/1967: 40–41)

Merleau-Ponty concludes that “if we adhere to the classical conceptions whichrelate the perceptual functions of each point of the retina to its anatomicalstructure – for example, to the proportion of cones and rods which are locatedthere – the functional reorganization in hemianopsia is not comprehensible”(41). In living organisms, the whole readjusts the functioning of some ofits parts when other parts are disrupted, in order to maintain the originalfunction of the whole. Other examples of self-directed neurophysiologicalreorganization following localized brain injury or trauma can be found inRestak (1984: 360ff). Eric Kandel and James Schwartz (1981) report similarfindings: they find that if brain cells of an embryo are transplanted to a differentregion of another embryo, they are transformed into cells appropriate to thatregion.

The Twentieth Century philosophy of mind, at least until very recently,had made every effort to remain tenaciously ‘bottom-up” (in the epipheno-malist sense discussed earlier). Cognitive functions had been explained as“responses” to incoming “stimuli,” with the stimuli combining in complexways to mechanically cause the response. The response supposedly was apurely passive change, brought about by the stimulus. As in the characteristicTwentieth Century approach to natural science, here too the only inertia wasto be an inertia of passivity; nothing would move or change unless acted uponby an outside force.

In order to overcome the problems I have just outlined, an adequate con-ception of the mind-body relation must reopen these questions with regard toontology and the theory of causation. We must develop a theory in which pur-poseful processes are able to appropriate their needed substratum elements,rather than merely being passive epiphenomena of them or ontologically iden-tical with them. This in turn will require the development of a workable ac-count of how it is that certain activities can be “purposeful” in a scientificallyintelligible universe. The Twentieth Century tried simply to turn its back onthis problem. Purposeful activity was explained away as a purely mechanicalprocess that only appeared, anthropomorphically, as if it were purposeful.The standard explanation was that we view a mechanical process as if it werepurposeful because we view it as if it were conscious, like ourselves, and weimagine that if we were to engage in that activity, we would be doing so withthe consciousness of some purpose in mind.

But to characterize a process as purposeful is not to anthropomorphize. Thehuman organism was purposeful before it was conscious. Consciousness is notnecessary to purposefulness, even in the human organism. So purposefulnesscannot be explained simply as the addition of consciousness to a process whichotherwise could be explained simply as one that displays certain “tendencies”


to accomplish certain results, as if the only difference between a purposeful anda non-purposeful process were that, in the latter, there is conscious awarenessof the “tendencies” that would be present in any purely mechanical system.

Developing such a conception will not be easy. Twentieth Century scienceprovided us with few tools or concepts to serve this kind of exploration. Butthe other alternative seems to be to eschew any hope of connecting psychologyto an adequate understanding of consciousness altogether; and that would betoo great a sacrifice.

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Phenomenology Friendly Neurscience

Documents

van den hout

real causal power

emotionally interested anticipation

pontys psychophysical forms

incoming sensory data

chalmerss hard problem

mere mental image

psychophysical identity