Embodying the unconscious: A new paradigm for the study of consciousness
Abstract
Within cognitivist reflection a heated debate is centered today between those who consider legitimate to adopt a fundamentalism that returns to the neurobiological dimension and those who instead assume the non-reducibility of the phenomenological explanation to the physiological one. In the present contribution, an alternative perspective is outlined, which we have termed “hermeneutics of the living”. The research motivates the overcoming of fundamentalist assumptions in favor of an epistemological and ontological pluralism that enhances the continuity between the phenomenon of life, which can be investigated from its physiological components, and that of consciousness, which can instead be described with the methods and languages of phenomenology, anthropology, psychology, and the existential dimension. The moment of methodological reductionism, then, prepares for a holistic return in which the various perspectives are integrated into a description that is optimal and complete. The object of such an inquiry is the living-being understood as a whole, a radically embodied subjectivity that entertains an intentional relationship with its world-environment. The contribution presents the phenomenon of consciousness as the integral that encompasses the multiple activities of a living body in continuous resonance with the various affordances of the world-environment. The nature of this relationship can be investigated from a careful consideration of the genetic modes through which conscious experience is temporally constituted. Finally, we have attempted to demonstrate why the phenomenological method is the most appropriate epistemological tool to enrich neurobiological research within a renewed scientific enterprise that is, by its very nature, interdisciplinary.
References
Bermúdez, Jose Luis (2005), Philosophy of psychology: A contemporary introduction, Routledge, London.
Bitbol, Michel (2020), «A phenomenological ontology for physics: Merleau-Ponty and QBism», in Phenomenological approaches to physics, ed. by H. Wiltsche, P. Berghofer, pp. 227-242.
Bitbol, Michel (2022) The roles ascribed to consciousness in quantum physics: a revelator of dualist (or quasi-dualist) prejudice in Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Bizzarri, Valeria, Vanacore, Raffaele, (2021), Il corpo vivo nel mondo. Introduzione al pensiero di Thomas Fuchs, Giovanni Fioriti Editore, Roma.
Bonini, Rotunno, Arcuri, Gallese (2022), «Mirror neurons 30 years later: implications and applications», in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, n. 26, 9, pp. 767-781.
Busacchi, Vinicio, Iapoce Angiola, Sözer Önay (2021), L'inconscio a più voci. Percorsi multidisciplinari tra psicoanalisi, ermeneutica, fenomenologia, Fattore Umano Edizioni, Roma.
Cappuccio, Massimiliano (2006), (a cura di) Neurofenomenologia. La scienza della mente e la sfida dell’esperienza cosciente, Mondadori, Milano.
Chalmers, David (1995), «Facing up to the problem of consciousness», in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, pp. 200-19.
Colelli, Jacopo, Di Bernardo, Mirko (2023), «Le dimensioni del significato tra fenomenologia e neuroscienze. Un approccio interdisciplinare», in Rivista online di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica.
26350/001050_000373
Deacon, Terrence (2006), Emergence: the whole at the weel’s hub in The re-emergence of emergence: The emergentist hypothesis from science to religion, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Dehaene, Stanislas, Changeux, Jean-Pierre, Naccache, Lionel et. al (2006), «Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy», in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, n.10, 5, pp. 204-211.
Dehaene, Stanislas (2014), Consciousness and the brain: Deciphering how the brain codes our thoughts, Penguin Books, London.
Di Bernardo, Mirko, (2016) Le precondizioni dell’etica: il dispiegarsi genealogico delle radici intenzionali e teleologiche nei processi di auto-organizzazione dei sistemi viventi, in I. Poma, (a cura di), I fondamenti dell’etica, Morcelliana, Brescia.
Di Bernardo, Mirko (2021), Che cos’è la vita? Indagini epistemologiche ed implicazioni etiche, Gemma Edizioni, Ceccano.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel, (2018), The enactive conception of life, in The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, ed. by N. Gallagher, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 71-94.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel (2021), «Enactive becoming», in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 20, 5, pp. 783-809.
Fuchs, Thomas (2017), Ecology of the brain: the phenomenology and biology of the mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Fuchs, Thomas (2021), In Defense of Human Being, Foundational Questions of an Embodied Antropology, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Fuchs, Thomas (2020), «The circularity of the embodied mind», in Frontiers in psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01707
Fuchs, Thomas (2022), «Understanding as explaining: how motives can become causes», in Phenomenology of Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09839-1
Gallese, Vittorio, Sinigaglia, Corrado (2018) Embodied resonance, in The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, ed. by A. Newen, L De Bruin, S. Gallagher, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Gallagher, Shaun, Zahavi, Dan (2020), The phenomenological mind, Routledge, London.
Husserl, Edmund (1965), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. I, II, III, den Haag 1950-1952 (Idee per una fenomenologia pura e per una filosofia fenomenologica, trad. di Filippini, Einaudi, Torino, 2002).
Husserl, Edmund, (2016), Lezioni sulle sintesi passive, La Scuola, Brescia.
Husserl, Edmund (2022), La fenomenologia dell’inconscio. I casi limite della coscienza, a cura di Mariannina Failla, Mimesis.
Lycan, William, (2019), «Representational Theories of Consciousness», in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-representational/
Marraffa, Massimo, (2011), Evoluzione, cognizione e cultura, in Neuroetica, a cura di A. Lavazza, G. Sartori, Il Mulino, Bologna.
Lavazza, Andrea, Sartori, Giuseppe (2011) (a cura di), Neuroetica: Scienze del cervello, filosofia e libero arbitrio, il Mulino, Bologna.
Marraffa, Massimo, Di Francesco, Michele, Tomasetta, Alfredo, (2017), La filosofia della mente. Corpo, coscienza e pensiero, Carocci, Roma.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2003), Fenomenologia della percezione, Bompiani, Milano.
Metzinger, Thomas (2010), The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, Basic Books, New York.
Newen, Albert, De Bruin, Gallagher, Shaun (2018), (a cura di), The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Noë, Alva, (2017), Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness, MacMillan, London.
Perrotta, Davide (2021), «Consciousness and brain mechanisms: Epistemological investigations between phenomenology and clinical neuroscience», in Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 12, 1, pp. 31-43.
Petitout, Varela, Pachoud, Roy (2000), Naturalizing Phenomenology, Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Stanford University Press.
Ramsey, William (2022), «Eliminative Materialism», in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy url: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/
Thompson, Lutz, Cosmelli (2005), Neurophenomenology: An Introduction for Neurophilosophers, in Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, ed. by A. Brook, K. Akins, Cambridge University Press, New York and Cambridge.
Varela Francisco (1996), «Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem», in Journal of consciousness studies, 3, No. 4, pp. 330-49
Varela Francisco, Thompson Evan, Rosch Eleanor (2017), The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience (revised edition), MIT press, Cambridge (MA).
Wegner, Daniel (2003), The illusion of conscious will, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA).
Zahavi, Dan (2017), Consciousness and (minimal) selfhood: Getting clearer on for-me-ness and mineness, in The Oxford handbook of the philosophy of consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 635-653.
Works published in RIFL are released under Creative Commons Licence:Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
