Dan Lloyd, Department of Philosophy

Before me is a bowl of plums. I choose one, and take a bite. Ah.

How is one to explain this "ah," the subjective experience of seeing,

reaching, and tasting? As this century ends, the search for a theory of

human consciousness is widely regarded as one of the ultimate scientific

quests, comparable to questions of the origin of the universe or the origin

of life. In the search for an explanation of how consciousness arises in

the brain, new clues emerge daily from cognitive neuroscience; philosophers

as well as neuroscientists have been prolific in interpreting these clues.

But in the excitement of the scientific explosion, it is easy to forget

that the description of human experience is also fundamental to the

humanities. Historically, the starting point for understanding

consciousness has been first-person experience, narrated in literature and

described analytically in the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology,

the description and analysis of "phenomena," or the subjective appearances

of the world and the self. The new sciences of consciousness neglect this

humanistic tradition, and as a result the experiences that science tries to

explain are thin shadows of the rich reality of conscious life. Thinly

understood subjectivity leads to narrow theories of consciousness, which

offer only partial and unpersuasive explanations of the varieties of

consciousness.

My study restores "thick" phenomenology as the starting point for

the understanding of consciousness, and develops phenomenological readings

of experiments in cognitive neuroscience. This confluence of disciplines

is neurophenomenology, which I define as the explanation of real experience

in terms of its biological embodiment. Neurophenomenology is ripe for a

systematic, foundational, book-length exposition for general readers in

both science and humanities. I propose to draft such a book by 2001. A

faculty research grant will enable me to augment a regular sabbatical

leave, making my project of creating the first systematic treatise in

neurophenomenology feasible.

The modern theorist of consciousness typically rolls the

paradigmatic plum through a gamut of refinements and reductions, beginning

with making short work of consciousness as it is experienced. The most

common simplifying assumptions are the following: 1) The "experience" of a

plum being vague, let us focus on an aspect of the experience, a sensory

property of the plum. 2) Among all its sensible properties, let's focus

just on qualitative property (like sweetness) rather than the "easier"

quantitative properties (like shape). In making both moves, it is commonly

assumed that readers already know everything else about the experience in

question. It is enough simply to refer to the experience of plums, without

elaboration.

On the other hand, contrast the simplifications above with William

Carlos Williams' description of a similar experience:

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Williams' famous poem restores the sweetness of the plum to its

subjective context. It is a sweetness compounded with coldness, but not

only that: the poem plants the plums amid tender domesticity, where their

sweetness is a guilty pleasure, the guilt in turn undone by the plea for

forgiveness. Its humor and charm reveal that the poet does expect to be

forgiven, and so the twelve lines turn out to be an implicit love poem.

The lesson for the student of consciousness is that the experience of a

plum, or anything else, is a complex compound of both the sensory and the

non-sensory or abstract: objects imbued with purposes, feelings,

possibilities, and history. In human experience, the sweetness can never

be isolated from all these overlays. Even in the lab, a bare flashing

light suggests to a subject everything from science fairs to car alarms,

even if the experimenter listens only for the subject to report the light's

mere presence or absence. To study the brain's reactions to "stimuli"

without considering the harmonics and resonance of lived experience slights

consciousness. The science that results may be good as science, but fall

short of fully explaining consciousness even of flashing lights, let alone

plums (or everything else).

This reorientation to consciousness, in its holism and its layers

of meaning, imposes useful revisions on the strategies for explaining

consciousness. The conscious brain must be the sort of organ in which

Williams' plums can be pondered, in all their detail and nuance,

simultaneously overlaid with every aspect of their context. Real

phenomenology challenges a familiar image of the brain as a bureaucracy of

specialists, each the locus of a specific state of consciousness, and each

in a fixed place in a sequential hierarchy of information processing. The

bureaucracy metaphor offers no insight into the phenomenology of "thick"

plums. A better image is that of a radical democracy of neural citizens,

each pulling its peers toward an ever-shifting consensus of the whole,

where this consensus is exactly the complex, holistic, multi-layered

shifting stream of consciousness. Complex states of the brain support

complex states of mind, and by comparing and contrasting these states we

can begin to decode the network of representations that is our experience

of a bowl of plums.

Progress to date, and plan of the book

Several main ideas in neurophenomenology have been presented in

recent scholarly publications and papers in preparation, noted with * on my

CV. In general, the papers have been written for specialized audiences.

Meanwhile, over the last two years I've drafted and revised a philosophical

novel in which the main approaches of neurophenomenology are explored

through detective fiction. (The manuscript is in review at MIT Press.)

While the novel reaches valiantly for the general reader, it cannot present

the detailed and systematic exposition of its topics. Thus, the proposed

project is both a culmination and something quite new. It will present

results and proposals that appear in papers and the novel, but it will

fully explore issues in method, alternative interpretations, and

connections to issues in the philosophy of mind that I have had to table so

far.

The first part of the projected work is devoted to building a

systematic phenomenology, with reference to philosophers and psychologists

in the phenomenological tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre,

Merleau-Ponty, James, Köhler, and others). The general anatomy of

experience features two main points: First, as discussed earlier in this

proposal, every state of consciousness is in part non-sensory or abstract.

Second, following Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness,

every state of awareness has a temporal structure. Among the overlays of

meaning, every "now" bears traces of the immediate past and anticipations

of the next moment. (Husserl distinguishes these traces and anticipations

from explicit recollection or deliberate anticipation, a point absent in

current discussions of consciousness.) Within the general framework,

experiences organize themselves along a number of dimensions, including the

distinctions among the senses and the modes of thinking (perception,

reflection, etc.). The resulting phenomenological anatomy offers an

outline of the fundamental types of conscious experience, their subtypes,

and the distinctive properties of overlapping categories of experience.

What do these phenomenological observations tell us about the

structure and function of the brain? The book continues in Part Two with a

phenomenological reading of recent efforts to simulate cognition. The

closer these simulations come to resemble the biological brain, the better

the fit with phenomenology. A few recent simulations (primarily developed

by Jeffrey Elman) model "recurrent connections," the feedback connections

by which brains recycle information, an endemic feature of our central

nervous system. Extending these models, I show their capacity to explain

the multi-layered, multiply meaningful, and temporal structures of the

stream of consciousness.

In Part Three the mind-brain links are extended and systematized in

connection with human brain function. Systematic phenomenology is used as a

framework to organize and compare several hundred experiments using

"functional brain imaging" technologies. These experiments image the

specific states of the brain during a wide variety of perceptual and

cognitive tasks. No one has yet attempted a synthesis on this scale, nor

have these studies been read through the lens of phenomenology, as windows

into distinct human experiences. This large-scale comparison reveals, for

the first time, the same fundamental structures as those revealed through

phenomenology. This is the synoptic vision of the mind as brain, the brain

as mind. To put it informally, through neurophenomenology it is possible

literally to read minds. By paying attention to the details of both

consciousness and the brain, one can preserve the subjective richness of

human experience even as it is rooted in a network of scientific knowledge.

The world, after all, is the world as seen through the lens of

human consciousness. With the rapid advance of cognitive neuroscience, many

writers are describing aspects of the lens. A scientific consensus may be

decades away, or months. But whenever it emerges, it will be important

that we recall that the starting and ending point is not the subject in the

lab, detecting plums or rating their sweetness, but rather the subjectivity

in the kitchen, seeing a history and a future reflected in each cold bite.

A philosophical approach grounded in a humanistic conception of

consciousness can better capture the plums and the world they reflect. I

hope to reach the broadest possible audience with the implications of the

rich and distinctly human experience that is human consciousness.