1 For overviews see Clark (1997, 2001); Franklin (1995); and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).
2 What counts as computation is actually a difficult conceptual and empirical question. What I am summarizing here is the received or formalist view of computation in classical cognitive science and philosophy of mind. If Brian Cantwell Smith (1996) is right, however, then this received view is seriously defective. Readers are referred to Smith’s book for an important reconceptualization of computation from an embodied and situated perspective.
3 The term explanatory gap was originally introduced by Levine (1983) to describe the conceptual and epistemological gap between the qualitative characteristics of conscious states (qualia) and brain states. See Roy et al. (1999) for a broader discussion of the explanatory gap in cognitive science.
4 Not all cognitive theorists with strong ties to the cognitivist tradition share this view, however. Jerome Bruner, for instance, a founding father of the cognitive revolution, has long argued that cognitive science must include culture, embodiment, subjectivity, and the experience of meaning (Bruner 1990). In addition, in the 1990s a number of computational theorists began to advocate embodied and situated approaches to computation that departed from the classical view in various ways (see Agre 1995; Smith 1996; Wilson 1994).
5 See Dupuy (2000) for an account of cybernetics and its influence on cognitive science.
6 See Freeman (1995, 1999a); Kelso (1995); Port and van Gelder (1995); Thelen and Smith (1994); and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).
7 See Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986); Johnson (1987); Lakoff (1987); Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991); and Winograd and Flores (1986). Dreyfus (1972) was a pioneering antecedent for much of this work.
8 See Freeman (1995, 1999a) and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).
9 Varela first thought of the name “the enactive approach” in the summer of 1986 in Paris when he and Thompson began writing The Embodied Mind. At one point before introducing the term enactive, Varela had been using “the hermeneutic approach” to emphasize the affiliation of his ideas to the philosophical school of hermeneutics—an affiliation also emphasized by other theorists of embodied cognition at the time (Johnson 1987; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, pp. 149–150; Wino-grad and Flores 1986). The first and second ideas summarized above were presented in Varela’s 1979 book, Principles of Biological Autonomy. They were developed with Humberto Maturana and grew out of Maturana’s earlier work on the biology of cognition (Maturana 1969, 1970; Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987). The third, fourth, and fifth ideas were presented by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) and by Thompson, Palacios, and Varela (1992), and were elaborated by Varela and Thompson in a number of subsequent papers (Thompson 2001; Thompson and Varela 2001; Varela 1991, 1997a; Varela and Thompson 2003).
10 The Embodied Mind briefly discussed and criticized Husserlian phenomenology (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, pp. 15–21). Although I still stand by some of those critical points, I also believe our treatment was too hasty. At the time we lacked sufficient knowledge of the depth and breadth of Husserl’s writings. We were also influenced by Hubert Dreyfus’s (1982) interpretation of Husserl as a cognitivist and protocomputationalist, an interpretation I no longer accept and that Varela too disavowed in his subsequent work on naturalizing phenomenology (see Petitot et al. 1999). For further discussion of this matter see Appendix A.
1 Does Husserl thereby succumb to the idea that there is an uninterpreted and theory-neutral “given” in experience, the so-called philosophical myth of the given? This is a difficult and complicated question. Philosophy offers us not one but several different notions of the “given,” and Husserl’s thought developed considerably over the course of his life. In fact, he held different views at different times regarding what might be meant by the given. Suffice it to say that it is a mistake to label Husserl as a philosopher of the given in the sense originally targeted by Wilfrid Sellars (1956) or by critics of the notion of theory-neutral observation, such as Thomas Kuhn (1970), for at least four reasons. First, the given in the phenomenological sense is not nonintentional sense-data but the world as it appears to us. Second, the phenomenality of the world is not understandable apart from the constitutive relation that subjectivity and consciousness bear to it. Third, as discussed in this chapter, whatever counts as given has to be seen as dynamically emergent in relation to what is pregiven, and the transition from pregiven to given depends on the subject’s motivations, interests, and attentional capacities. Finally, the given comprises not simply phenomenal presence in a narrow sense (what is facing me right now), but also absence and possibility (the sides of the bottle I cannot see but that are available for me to see through movement). For recent discussions of some of these issues see Botero (1999); Roy (2003); and Steinbock (1999).
2 These features of the epoché closely parallel the basic mental skills cultivated in Buddhist mindfulness (shamatha-vipashyana) meditation (see Wallace 1998, 1999; see also Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003).
3 This sense of the epoché is well expressed by the noted phenomenologist J. N. Mohanty (1989, pp. 12–13): “I need not emphasize how relevant and, in fact, necessary is the method of phenomenological epoche for the very possibility of genuine description in philosophy. It was Husserl’s genius that he both revitalized the descriptive method for philosophy and brought to the forefront the method of epoche, without which one cannot really get down to the job. The preconceptions have to be placed within brackets, beliefs suspended, before philosophy can begin to confront phenomena as phenomena. This again is not an instantaneous act of suspending belief in the world or of directing one’s glance towards the phenomena as phenomena, but involves a strenuous effort at recognizing preconceptions as preconceptions, at unraveling sedimented interpretations, at getting at presuppositions which may pretend to be self-evident truths, and through such processes aiming asymptotically at the prereflective experience.”
4 See Depraz (1995, 2001a); Steinbock (1995); Welton (2000, 2003); and Zahavi (2003a).
5 Some scholars have argued that Husserl’s mature philosophical thinking about history and the life-world derives from Heidegger’s influence. It is possible, however, that the substantial (but unacknowledged) influence goes in precisely the opposite direction (Smith 2003, pp. 10, 14). Merleau-Ponty himself declares on the very first page of his Phenomenology of Perception (1962, p. vii) that the whole of Heidegger’s Being and Time “springs from an indication given by Husserl” and amounts to nothing more than an explication of Husserl’s notion of the life-world. A few pages later Merleau-Ponty states: “Far from being, as has been thought, a procedure of idealistic philosophy, phenomenological reduction belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ appears only against the background of the phenomenological reduction” (p. xiv). It has long been said that Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl as anticipating not simply the spirit but much of the substance of his own Phenomenology of Perception is nothing more than an inaccurate reading of his own views back into Husserl. Recent scholarship, however, indicates that Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl is for the most part correct (Zahavi 2002b).
6 This paragraph and the next three are indebted to Zahavi (2003a, 2003c).
7 Another important category of experiences that do not have a subject-object structure are various types of contemplative or meditative states (see Austin 1998; Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson 2007; and Forman 1990). In a future work, I plan to explore the relation between Western phenomenology and the epistemological and phenomenological accounts of conemplative states found in Asian philosophical traditions.
8 My use of this example is due to Gallagher (1986b) and Zahavi (2003c).
9 A huge amount of scholarly discussion has been lavished on the proper way to interpret the Husserlian notion of the noema. The discussion concerns the relation between the object-as-intended (the noema) and the object-that-is-intended (the object itself)—the wine bottle-as-perceived (as felt and seen) and the bottle itself. According to the representationalist interpretation, the noema is a type of representational entity, an ideal sense or meaning, that mediates the intentional relation between the mental act and the object. In this view, consciousness is directed toward the object only by means of the noema and thus achieves its openness to the world only in virtue of the representational noema. According to the rival nonrepresentationalist interpretation, the noema is not any intermediate, representational entity; the noema is the object itself, but the object considered phenomenologically, that is, precisely in its givenness. In other words, the object-as-intended is the object-that-is-intended, but considered under the operation of suspending the realistic positing of the natural attitude. The noema can thus be grasped only in a phenomenological or transcendental attitude. This view rejects the representationalism of the former view. Consciousness is intrinsically self-transcending. Accordingly, it does not achieve reference to the world by virtue of intermediate entities that bestow intentionality upon it. It would take me too far afield to review the twists and turns of this debate. I shall therefore simply state that for a variety of reasons I think the representationalist interpretation is mistaken and the nonrepresentationalist interpretation is correct, both as an interpretation of Husserl and as a philosophical account of (object-directed) intentionality (see Drummond 2003; Zahavi 2003a, pp. 53–68, 2004a).
10 Cf. Susan Hurley (1998), who proposes a “two-level interdependence view” of animals and people as “dynamic singularities” at the subpersonal level and as normatively understood intentional agents at the personal level.
11 For simplicity of exposition, I am here setting aside phenomenologists, most notably Sartre (1960), who maintain a nonegological conception of intentional consciousness. According to this conception, the ego is a constituted object of an egoless consciousness and thus belongs on the noematic and not the noetic side of the correlational structure. For an important discussion showing how Husserl already recognized Sartre’s insights, see Stawarska (2002).
12 In 1949 the psychologist Donald Hebb proposed what is now known as Hebb’s Rule (Hebb 1949). He suggested that learning could be based on changes in the brain that stem from the degree of correlated activity between neurons: if two neurons tend to be active together, their connection is strengthened; otherwise it is diminished. Therefore, the system’s connectional architecture becomes inseparable from its history of transformation. In 1890 James had already written in his Principles of Psychology: “When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on reoccurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other” (1981, p. 534; emphasis omitted).
13 It is often assumed that Heidegger was the source of Husserl’s idea of the pregiven life-world that cannot be made explicit as an object. Yet Husserl had already been working on the notion of the life-world in the early 1920s (Heidegger’s Being and Time was published in 1927), and his work in the 1930s does not show any direct influence of Heidegger’s notion of the world. See Welton (2000, pp. 120, 339).
14 For an important contemporary reflection on this point as it relates to the metaphysics of intentionality, see Brian Cantwell Smith (1996, pp. 103–104).
1 For a brief introduction to dynamic-systems theory see Norton (1995). A now classic exposition from a visual and geometric perspective is Abraham and Shaw (1982–1988). See also Kellert (1993) for a useful philosophical treatment.
2 See Freeman (1999a); Friston (2000a, 2000b); Kauffman (1993); Kelso (1995); Le Van Quyen (2003); So et al. (1998); and Solé and Goodwin (2000).
3 This book contains Varela’s reworking of his collaborative work with Maturana as well as his early attempts to formalize the notion of autonomy.
4 “Closure” is used here in its algebraic sense: an operation K exhibits closure in a domain D if every result of its operation yields results within D. Thus the operation of a system has operational closure if the results of its activity remain within the system itself. This notion of operational closure has nothing to do with the idea of a materially closed system—a system that is closed to interactions with what lies beyond it. Autonomous systems are and must be coupled to their surroundings; the issue is the nature of the dynamics that defines them and determines how they interact with what lies beyond them (Varela 1979, 1997a; Varela and Bourgine 1991). Varela in his writings does not distinguish between organizational and operational closure; he uses the two terms more or less interchangeably. My usage follows Rudrauf et al. (2003, p. 34).
5 The quotation at the end is from Goldstein’s 1934 work, The Organism (Goldstein 1995, p. 85).
6 Varela (1979) indicates that this thesis is meant to be analogous to Church’s Thesis that any calculation is formally equivalent to a recursive function. “Recursive function” is a technical notion used to define the imprecise notion of a calculation. Similarly, “organizational closure” is a technical notion used to define the imprecise notion of autonomy. In either case the thesis is not subject to proof (hence is not a theorem), but it can be taken as a challenge to find a counterexample (something that intuitively counts as a calculation but is not formally equivalent to a recursive function; something that intuitively counts as autonomous but does not have organizational closure).
7 “Self” in this setting means identity through change in the form of an invariant topological form that is recursively produced by the system and that defines a domain of interactions. Hence this notion of self does not imply consciousness. These points are discussed at greater length in Parts II and III.
8 See Varela (1979, p. 12): “If one says that there is a machine M in which there is a feedback loop through the environment, so that the effects of its output affect its input, one is in fact talking about a larger machine M’ which includes the environment and the feedback loop in its defining organization.”
9 The following discussion combines a number of points made by Freeman (1995, 1999a, 1999b, 2003); Maturana and Varela (1980, 1987); Skarda and Freeman (1987); and Varela (1979, 1984).
10 See Freeman (1999a); Friston (2000b); Kelso (1995); Le Van Quyen (2003); Tononi and Edelman (1998); and Varela et al. (2001). The article by Le Van Quyen provides a very useful overview.
11 See Le Van Quyen, Adam et al. (1997); and Le Van Quyen, Martinerie et al. (1997). For discussion, see Le Van Quyen and Petitmengin (2002) and Thompson and Varela (2001).
12 Cf. Varela and Goguen (1978): “The wholeness of a system is embodied in its organizational closure. The whole is not the sum of its parts; it is the organizational closure of its parts.”
1 My discussion here is indebted to Priest (1998, pp. 162–163).
2 Merleau-Ponty takes human symbolic behavior as paradigmatic of mind—hence his alignment of matter, life, and mind with the physical, vital, and human orders. Missing from this typology is any animal order. Although Merleau-Ponty does not single out an animal order explicitly in The Structure of Behavior (whereas he does later in his lecture course Nature), he does recognize one within the vital and human orders. Earlier in the book he classifies behavior according to the degree to which its structure (and hence the organism) is submerged in or emergent from the organism’s concrete situation (1963, p. 103). The more emergent the structure of behavior is with respect to the milieu, the more effectively the organism can dominate situations and learn. The more effectively the organism can withdraw from and exercise control over its immersion in the milieu, the more it triumphs over immediacy and achieves individuality.
Merleau-Ponty presents a hierarchy of three forms of behavior, which he calls “syncretic,” “amovable” (removable or detachable), and “symbolic” (1963, pp. 104–124), and explains, “These three categories do not correspond to three groups of animals: there is no species of animal whose behavior never goes beyond the syncretic level nor any whose behavior never descends below the symbolic forms. Nevertheless, animals can be distributed along this scale according to the type of behavior which is most typical of them” (1963, p. 104). “Syncretic” means a structure whose elements are blended, fused, or united in some way; hence syncretic behavior is largely fused or united with its milieu. Syncretic behavior is typical of simple animals, such as invertebrates, whose responses to situations seem largely prescribed and inflexible. “Amovable” (removable or detachable) behavior is exemplified in higher animals that are not so tightly bound to their immediate material situation because they can interact with it on the basis of “signals” that are not “instinctual” (1963, p. 105). Signals of this sort “are founded on structures that are relatively independent of the materials in which they are realized” (ibid.). Amovable behavior is signal behavior: the situation to which the organism responds is a signal and its signification, as in the simple temporal or spatial contiguity of a conditioned and an unconditioned stimulus (1963, pp. 105–106).
Unlike the reflex theorists he criticizes, however, Merleau-Ponty argues that the organism responds to the stimulus because of the form or structure it has for the organism. The stimulus as signal is a structure, a gestalt, and the organism’s response is always to a structure-for-the-animal (a stimulus informed by the sensorimotor structure of the animal), not to an animal-independent, physicochemical element (1963, pp. 10–15). Yet signals are not signs or symbols: “The true sign represents the signified, not according to an empirical association, but inasmuch as its relation to other signs is the same as the relation of the object signified by it to other objects” (1963, pp. 121–122). Thus the third form of behavior is symbolic behavior: “Here behavior no longer has only one signification, it is itself signification” (1963, p. 122). Merleau-Ponty asserts that “In animal behavior signs always remain signals and never become symbols” (1963, p. 120), but cognitive ethology today challenges this view (see Deacon 1997; Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin 1994). In any case, symbolic forms of behavior are most typical of human beings and thus distinguish the human order (see Tomasello 1999).
3 It would be fruitful to compare Merleau-Ponty’s typology, in particular his conception of the human order, with Heidegger’s treatment of the fundamental difference between animal and human life, in his lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Heidegger 1995). Heidegger distinguishes between stones as being “worldless,” animals as being “poor in world,” and humans as being “world-forming.” Whereas humans have a “comportment” (Verhalten) toward a “world,” animals merely display “behavior” (Benehmen) in relation to an “encircling ring” of animal desires and drives. Thus, for Heidegger, there can be no disclosure of the “world” or “objects in the world” to the animal. It is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter to undertake an examination of Heidegger’s view in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s. Moreover, this undertaking would also need to cover the development of Merleau-Ponty’s views on animal and human life, as represented especially by his lectures on the idea of nature (Merleau-Ponty 2003).
4 I have discussed this issue extensively elsewhere. See Pessoa, Thompson, and Noë (1998); Thompson, Noë, and Pessoa (1999); and Noë and Thompson (2004a, 2004b).
1 The theory of autopoiesis was first presented in Spanish in Maturana and Varela (1973). Maturana and Varela (1980) contains a translation of this text, as well as an important earlier article by Maturana (Maturana 1970, which is a revision of Maturana 1969). The first English-language presentation of autopoiesis appeared in Varela, Maturana, and Uribe (1974). For useful discussions and elaborations of autopoiesis see Fleischaker (1988), Luisi (2003), and Mingers (1995).
2 Compare Maturana (1980a, pp. 52–53): “A dynamic system that is defined as a composite unity as a network of productions of components that, a) through their interactions recursively regenerate the network of productions that produced them, and b) realize this network as a unity by constituting and specifying its boundaries in the space in which they exist, is an autopoieitic system.”
3 For instance, some social theorists have argued that human social systems such as the family are autopoietic. In this case it is not at all clear that “boundary” and “internal network” have a clear sense. For Maturana’s and Varela’s differing views on autopoiesis and social relations, see Maturana (1980b) and Varela (1989). For discussion see Luisi (2003) and Mingers (1995).
4 The history of the original model and its reimplementation is an interesting story of its own. See McMullin (1997a, 1997b).
5 As McMullin and Varela (1997) point out, the spontaneous formation of an autopoietic network cannot occur unless the artificial chemistry actually supports the realization of the autopoietic organization. Thus the phenomenon of spontaneous formation is logically secondary (though prior chronologically) to that of the realization of the autopoietic organization.
6 Letelier, Marín, and Mpodozis (2003) interpret the need for the chain-based bond inhibition interaction as implying that “the closure exhibited by tesselation automatas [sic] is not a consequence of the ‘network’ of simulated processes, but rather an artifact of coding procedures” (p. 270). But in the revised McMullin and Varela (1997) model, chain-based bond inhibition is a purely local rule of the qualitative chemistry. It is not clear, therefore, why the closure of the network is supposed to be an artifact of coding procedures.
7 For the background of this work see Luisi and Varela (1989). For recent overviews see Luisi (1993, 2003).
8 It is interesting to note that Mikulecky (2000) reaches the same conclusions by applying Robert Rosen’s (1991, 2000) theory of living systems to the Gaia hypothesis. For an important discussion of the relation between Rosen’s metabolic-repair (M,R) systems and autopoiesis, see Letelier, Marín, and Mpodozis (2003). I discuss Rosen’s ideas in Chapter 6.
9 For a wide-ranging literary and philosophical reflection that brings together the work of Lovelock, Margulis, Varela, and mathematician Ralph Abraham, see W. I. Thompson (1989). See also the essays collected in W. I. Thompson (1987b, 1991a).
10 This invocation of norms goes beyond Maturana’s (1970) characterization, quoted above, of what makes a living system a cognitive system. See Chapter 6 for further discussion of this point.
1 This line of reasoning is similar to the one behind contemporary formulations of the explanatory gap or hard problem of consciousness. It is argued that the laws of nature do not suffice to explain the presence of consciousness in a physical world because consciousness is contingent with respect to those laws. Hence novel psychophysical principles are required (see Chalmers 1996, 1997).
2 To the best of my knowledge, Kant was the first to introduce the term self-organizing and apply it to organisms. It is surprising there has been so little reconsideration of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in relation to contemporary scientific theories of self-organizing biological systems. Notable exceptions are Juarrero-Roqué (1985) and Weber and Varela (2002).
3 See Jantsch (1980); Kauffman (1993); Kelso (1995); Prigogine and Stengers (1984); and Solé and Goodwin (2000).
4 Recall Bitbol’s words, quoted in Chapter 4: “Here science is not supposed to reveal anything of a preexistent underlying absolute reality, nor is it a more or less random aggregate of efficient recipes. Science is rather the stabilized byproduct of a dynamic reciprocal relation between reality as a whole and a special fraction of it. Defining this special fraction of reality qua subject is the reverse side of its actively extracting objectlike invariant clusters of phenomena” (Bitbol 2003, p. 337).
5 Varela writes: “In this book ‘machines’ and ‘systems’ are used interchangeably. They obviously carry different connotations, but the differences are inessential, for my purpose, except in seeing the relation between the history of biological mechanism and the modern tendency for systemic analysis. Machines and systems point to the characterization of a class of unities in terms of their organization” (1979, p. 7, note 4).
6 In a Darwinian context, such functions are thought to be determined by natural selection. A structure has the function it does because its playing that role increased the reproductive success of ancestral organisms that possessed it. I discuss this idea in the next chapter.
7 Philosophers often confuse these two senses of intrinsic. The point is that something can be intrinsic in the sense of constitutive while also being relational. For example, orange is intrinsically (constitutively) a mixture of red and yellow, and red is intrinsically (constitutively) opposed to green. These constitutive properties of the colors are also relational ones.
8 Varela and I discussed these issues in e-mail exchanges over a period of several months in 1999. Our discussion began because I pointed out to him that his commitment to the explanatory role that phenomenology could play in relation to biology seemed inconsistent with his older position on teleology with Maturana. We had both independently been reading Kant and Jonas, and I asked him whether he would still maintain his earlier antiteleological stance in light of Jonas’s argument (discussed below) that one cannot recognize something to be a living being unless one recognizes it as purposive and that one cannot recognize something as purposive unless one is an embodied agent who experiences purposiveness in one’s own case. Varela replied that he was “still quite suspicious” about this appeal to teleology, and hence about this way of linking phenomenology and biology, and that he preferred to “shift the accent” from teleology to original intentionality, understood as the sense-making capacity proper to autopoietic units. He saw this shift as a refinement of the “‘Santiago school’ move to introduce the equation life = cognition.” It is clearly “silly,” he said, to make cellular cognition just like animal cognition, but their “common root” is this basic sense-making capacity proper to autopoietic life. Appealing to sense-making, he suggested, was more “constructive” than appealing to the “elusive principle of purpose.” Sense-making provides a strong link to intentionality, but “whether this turns into teleology,” he said, “is another matter.”
This line of thought struck me as unsatisfactory because “original intentionality” and “sense-making” are themselves teleological notions. The issue is precisely how to analyze this teleology. Although the proposition “living is sense-making” may be an important elaboration of the equation life = cognition, it is insufficient to establish any antiteleological stance with respect to Kant’s and Jonas’s notions of intrinsic purposiveness. I pressed Varela on this issue, and he later indicated that as time had gone by he had come to have a “broader view.” He had begun to see that “in a funny way you do recover a full fledged teleology . . . but this teleology . . . is intrinsic to life in action,” and “does not require an extra transcendental source” in the Kantian sense. In other words, teleology, in the sense of self-organized, intrinsic purposiveness, can be seen as a constitutive feature of the organism, on the basis of its autonomy and sense-making, rather than only a form of our judgment, as Kant had held. It is precisely this conception that Weber and Varela (2002) advance and call immanent teleology.
9 Di Paolo (2005, p. 438) defines adaptivity as “a system’s capacity, in some circumstances, to regulate its states in relation to its boundary of viability with the result that, if the states are sufficiently close to the boundary, (1) tendencies are distinguished and acted upon depending on whether the states approach or recede from the boundary in some scale-invariant measure and, as a consequence, (2) tendencies of the first kind are moved closer to or transformed into tendencies of the second and so future states are prevented from reaching the boundary with outward velocity.” As he goes on to note, “This capacity may result from the action of dedicated mechanisms or it may be an emergent aspect of specific ways of realizing autopoiesis. But importantly, it is not a direct consequence of the definition of autopoiesis but an elaboration of it from which it is possible to recover the homeostatic [as opposed to merely conservational] interpretation.” See also Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno (2004) for related considerations in the context of the thermodynamic requirements for the realization of basic autonomy.
10 Of course, from a transcendental phenomenological perspective this statement needs qualification. Physicochemical phenomena, considered from the first-order vantage point of physics and chemistry, do not implicate a point of view in the way that biological phenomena do. When seen from a second-order, transcendental perspective, however, physical and chemical phenomena also have to be understood in terms of the conditions of possibility for their disclosure to science, and thus do implicate a point of view, namely, that of the scientific tradition itself.
11 Heidegger, for his part, distinguishes sharply between nonliving and living things, and characterizes living things in a way that serves to elucidate the phenomenological meaning of being-in-the-world: “A stone never finds itself but is simply on hand. A very primitive unicellular form of life, on the contrary, will already find itself, where this disposition can be the greatest and darkest dullness, but for all that it is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being on hand like a thing” (Heidegger 1985, p. 255). This notion of “finding itself” or “disposition” (Befindlichkeit) defines the phenomenological meaning of being-in-the-world (see also pp. 165–166, where Heidegger explains “in-being” as analogous to the being proper to life, by contrast with non-living things). Heidegger characterizes animal being (understood as including unicellular organisms) as “poor in world,” by contrast with human being, which is “world forming” (Heidegger 1995).
12 Merleau-Ponty, in discussing von Uexküll, writes that the “reactions of the animal in the milieu . . . behaviors . . . deposit a surplus of signification on the surfaces of objects” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, pp. 172–173).
13 Boden apparently finds this usage objectionable. She writes: “ascriptions of knowledge and cognition normally presuppose the possession of perceptual and motor capacities, integrated in adaptive ways” (2000, p. 137). There is no need to dispute this claim. Instead, we can point out that what counts as possession of perceptual and motor capacities is not obvious and seems to be a graded matter. Consider again the humble bacterium. As we have seen, motile bacteria engage in complex sensorimotor-style behaviors. Some of the most basic features of animal brains and sensorimotor coordination can be found in these tiny organisms (see Allman 1999, pp. 3–8; Bonner 1980, p. 68; Koshland 1977; and Maturana and Varela 1987, pp. 147–150). As Harold Morowitz writes: “The first biological emergence where there is a hint of mind is in the swimming of motile bacteria uphill in a food gradient and downhill in a gradient of toxic substance. This is not well understood. It requires a cell to sense concentration and to interpret the time derivative as a spatial gradient. By randomly changing direction with a frequency that responds to the gradient, the cell can statistically swim in the appropriate direction. The cognitive feel about this is that the cell can let its profits run and cut its losses” (Morowitz 2001, pp. 51–52).
14 One could appeal here to Heidegger for support (see note 11 above): living being, even in its simplest unicellular form, involves a kind of being-in-the-world, unlike the “worldess” being of nonliving things (even if for Heidegger living being is “poor in world,” in contrast to the “world-forming” being of Dasein).
15 I thus agree with Damasio when he describes Spinoza’s idea of conatus as containing the thought “that of necessity, all living organisms endeavor to preserve themselves without conscious knowledge of the undertaking and without having decided, as individual selves, to undertake anything. In short, they do not know the problem they are trying to solve. When the consequences of such natural wisdom are mapped back in the central nervous system, subcortically and cortically, the result is feelings, the foundational component of our minds” (Damasio 2003, p. 79). The phrase “natural wisdom” strikes me as problematic in this context, and we cannot yet be said to understand how the brain’s mapping of vital processes results in feelings (for a hypothesis, see Rudrauf and Damasio 2005).
16 One might think this situation is not unlike cellular automata models of autopoiesis (see Chapter 5), in which every unit is local and discrete, and the global pattern may simply be in the eye of the beholder. The status of such models is a difficult matter. We could follow Dennett (1991b) and see the global patterns as “real paterns.” If Rosen (1991, 2000) is right, however, that the self-referential organization of living beings makes them noncomputable, then these models cannot capture the living organization.
17 Of course, one can always argue that firsthand experience of how things seem to one does not necessarily count as valid knowledge of how things are. But the point above is rather that experience itself needs to be accounted for. To deny firsthand experience outright would, in the present context, be tantamount to “sacrificing an evidence (purposiveness) to a theorem (exclusiveness of causa efficiens) which was derived by generalization from another evidence” ( Jonas 1966, p. 90).
1 The following discussion is based on Maturana and Varela (1987). See also Fleischaker (1994).
2 Proteins are produced from their constituent amino acids according to the sequence of nucleotide triplets of DNA on the chromosomes (the so-called genetic code). From this DNA sequence is “transcribed” a complementary sequence in messenger RNA (mRNA). This RNA sequence is then “translated” into an amino acid chain through the action of ribosomes and transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules. In addition, each step along the way depends on the participation of many other molecular elements, such as RNA polymerase enzymes, and negative and positive regulatory proteins, to name just a few.
3 In DNA replication, the hydrogen bonds between the complementary bases on the two strands of the parent DNA molecule break apart and the strands of the double helix uncoil, with each strand serving as a template for the synthesis of a new strand complementary to itself. The copying mechanism involves many molecular elements, such as the enzyme DNA polymerase, which moves down the two single strands linking free nucleotides to their complementary bases on the templates; DNA-binding proteins, which stabilize the single DNA strands so that they do not coil back up; and DNA-repair mechanisms, which remove damaged sections of the strands so that they can be replaced with the correct sections by DNA polymerases.
4 Strictly speaking, the process of natural selection has a fourth requirement, namely, that the mechanism producing phenotypic variations be independent of requirements (2) and (3), so that (2) and (3) can have no directional effect on the mechanism producing variations.
5 Chromatin is the substance of which eukaryotic chromosomes are made; it consists primarily of a kind of protein called histone. DNA methylation is the attachment of methyl chemical groups to the DNA sequence, which block the transcription of the genes to which they are attached, and thereby regulate gene activity.
6 This point is not new, having been made many times by biologists over the years. One of the earliest criticisms of the genetic-program metaphor came from the embryologist Paul Weiss (1969; see Dupuy 2000, pp. 132–133). Another early criticism was made by Maturana and Varela (1980, pp. 90, 102). For recent critical discussions see Goodwin (1994); Keller (1995, 2000); Lewontin (1993); Moss (1992, 2003); Oyama (2000b, first edition published in 1985); Rose (1997); and Sarkar (1996).
7 For recent debate about the notion of information in this context, see Maynard Smith (2000a) and the replies by Godfrey-Smith (2000a); Sarkar (2000); Sterelny (2000); plus Maynard Smith’s rejoinder (2000b).
8 Dennett relies here on an argument developed by the philosophers Sterelny and Kitcher, according to which a length of DNA can be said to “code for” a phenotypic trait relative to a “standard” background of other genes and a “standard environment” (Sterelny and Kitcher 1988). To which Griffiths and Gray reply: “But consider the DNA in an acorn. If this codes for anything, it is for an oak tree. But the vast majority of acorns simply rot. So ‘standard environment’ cannot be interpreted statistically. The only interpretation of ‘standard’ that will work is ‘such as to produce evolved developmental outcomes’ or ‘of the sort possessed by successful ancestors.’ With this interpretation of ‘standard environment,’ however, we can talk with equal legitimacy of cytoplasmic or landscape features coding for traits in standard genic backgrounds. No basis has been provided for privileging genes over other developmental resources” (Griffiths and Gray 1994, p. 283).
9 Jonas made this point long ago in The Phenomenon of Life (1966, pp. 52–53).
10 Compare Dawkins’s allowance that “a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal” is a metaphor, whereas in the passage quoted earlier he avows that “it is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs” is not a metaphor. Both are metaphors, and both express informational dualism.
11 The classic text of developmental systems theory is Oyama (2000b). See also Griffiths and Gray (1994); Oyama (2000a, 2000c); Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray (2001); and Sterelny and Griffiths (1999, Chapter 5). Griffiths and Stotz (2000) explore some of the parallels and mutual support between developmental systems theory and enactive cognitive science.
12 I have omitted Oyama’s references (many of which I have already cited).
13 The distinction here is between biological evolution, conceived of as driven by natural selection (with separation of germ line and soma, and one-way “information flow” from DNA to protein) and cultural evolution, conceived of as operating according to the acquisition of traits by learning.
14 This point about the inseparability of nature and culture links developmental systems theory to discussions in the social sciences and humanities, in particular to those cultural theorists who have criticized the “modernist project” of trying to separate culture and nature (see Latour 1993; W. I. Thompson 1987a, 1987b, 1991a, 1991b).
15 Oyama (1999) has expressed dissatisfaction with the “internalist predilection” she discerns in earlier formulations of the autopoietic perspective. The formulations to which she objects, however, have played no role in my presentation of the autopoietic perspective in this book.
16 The common terminology of “regulatory genes” “controlling” development is misleading. First, the genes do not control the particular kind of structure that develops: Mouse pax-6 transferred to the fruitfly leads to the development of the fruitfly eye at that site; thus the surrounding cellular context is essential. Second, the genes act not alone but as participants of a network or system (involving transcription factors and other genes); hence regulatory properties can be properly assigned only at the level of the system, not at the level of the individual gene. As Stearns observes: “the concept of ‘regulatory genes’ often comes up in discussions of developmental constraints . . . There is, however, no such thing as a regulatory gene, only regulatory systems with genes embedded in them. Some genes make products that have direct control over the expression of other genes, and some genes make products that have indirect control over the expression of other genes. At times, gene products may be primarily structural in their impact. At other times, the same products may be primarily regulatory in their impact. Since the same gene product can play various context-dependent roles, it is a mistake to assign to the genes a property that is properly applied to the different roles their products can play in different contexts . . . The technical distinction between regulatory and structural is worth preserving, so long as one remembers that they refer to context-dependent roles, not to a property of a gene as fixed as its DNA sequence” (Stearns 1986, p. 40).
17 “Selector genes” are genes that specify so-called selector proteins, which are transcription factors that play a crucial role in the formation and patterning of body parts. The term selector gene unfortunately suggests that these genes themselves select a particular outcome, whereas the outcome is rather the result of the network or system consisting of these genes and their transcription factors (as well as other genes and proteins). See the previous note.
18 One might wonder: how could skeletal considerations serve as the basis for the proposal that arthropods and vertebrates have a common body layout, given that arthropods have no bones? The answer, according to Coen, is as follows: “Geoffroy proposed that these apparently different types of organisation were really two sides of the same coin; it was just that vertebrates were organised around a skeleton whereas insects lived within theirs. To turn yourself into an insect you have to imagine your skeleton expanding outwards, whilst your body remains the same size. Eventually the bones reach and enclose the skin, and all the soft tissues and vital organs end up interior to them, like a very elaborate bone marrow. He believed that once this was appreciated, detailed correspondences between insect and vertebrate structures fell into place according to his principle of connections. For example, the main trunk of the insect would correspond to the vertebral column (backbone), and its legs would be equivalent to our ribs” (Coen 1999, p. 114).
19 In Maturana and Varela (1987) and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), this view of evolution was called evolution by natural drift. Enactive evolution makes explicit the homology with enactive cognition.
20 A morphogenetic field is a region in the developing organism that organizes itself spatiotemporally according to various precise biochemical processes.
21 The notion of persistence has been technically defined as a measure of fitness in terms of risk minimization: “A single-generation measure of risk minimization expresses the idea of minimizing the probability of leaving no offspring that survive to maturity, for example, while a long-term measure of risk minimization expresses the idea of minimizing the probability that a gene, clone, or species would go extinct” (Stearns 1986, p. 30). Risk-minimization measures of fitness contrast with abundance measures, such as measures of lifetime reproductive success.
22 A nice case of reverse engineering is Simon Conway Morris’s attempts to figure out the anatomy and mode of life of Hallucigenia sparsa, a worm that lived in the seas during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. At first he thought that the seven pairs of stilt-like spines along its body enabled it to rest and walk on the ocean bottom, but later he realized he had reconstructed the animal upside-down and that the spines served as a defensive array on top of the animal. This case is telling because its object is a fossil, that is, a static form, not a living being. Given a frozen form, reverse engineering becomes a pragmatically necessary stance to adopt. But it is important not to confuse the interpretive stance with the thing itself being interpreted. See Conway Morris (1998, pp. 54–56) and Gould (1989, pp. 153–157).
23 The Argument from Design has a long philosophical history, going back to St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato. The version of the argument presented above is the one that directly influenced Darwin; it appeared in William Paley’s 1805 work Natural Theology (Paley 1996). Paley’s argument is best understood to be an inference to the best explanation: given the two hypotheses of intelligent design and random formation, which is better supported by the evidence of the complex organization of living beings? Just as the complex organization of a watch is better evidence that the watch is the product of intelligent design rather than of random formation, so too is the complex organization of living beings better evidence that they are the product of intelligent design than of random formation. There is another version of the Argument from Design, the analogical or inductive version. It states that organisms and artifacts are similar (both seem well organized); artifacts are the product of intelligent design; therefore organisms are the product of intelligent design. David Hume had already subjected this version of the argument to devastating criticism in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). See Sober (1993, pp. 30–36).
24 Indeed, the very term Design Space, which Dennett uses to refer to the logical space of possible forms or organizations for living things, is not theoretically neutral (as it ought to be if it is to demarcate the phenomena needing explanation). It is biased because it takes for granted the functionalist assumption that organisms are designed entities. It would be preferable to use the term morphospace. Similarly, Dennett’s functionalist argument against Goodwin’s structuralism—that when Goodwin says there are laws of form in biology he says something as implausible as that there are laws of form in automotive engineering—misses the key point that organisms are different from heteronomous entities such as automobiles. Therefore any analysis of them premised on an analogy to that sort of entity is of limited value.
At one point Dennett even goes so far as to say that “Adaptationist reasoning is not optional; it is the heart and soul of evolutionary biology. Although it may be supplemented, and its flaws repaired, to think of displacing it from [its] central position in biology is to imagine not just the downfall of Darwinism but the collapse of modern biochemistry and all the life sciences and medicine” (1995a, p. 238). This defense of adaptationism turns it into an a priori condition of evolutionary theory (or indeed of all biology) and thereby empties the adaptationist research program of empirical content. As Sober writes: “Adaptationism is first and foremost a research program. Its core claims will receive support if specific adaptationist hypotheses turn out to be well confirmed. If such explanations fail time after time, eventually scientists will begin to suspect that its core assumptions are defective. Phrenology waxed and waned according to the same dynamic. Only time and hard work will tell whether adaptationism deserves the same fate” (1993, p. 129). Contrary to Dennett, modern biochemistry and the life sciences and medicine are not based on the adaptationist research program in evolutionary theory. Therefore they would not collapse were the core assumptions of adaptationism shown to be defective.
25 As Stearns writes: “One could describe all of biology as the consequence of constraints—not just reductionist biology [in which the constraints flow directly from physics and chemistry], but natural selection itself, viewed as a mechanism. The meaning of the word would vanish. We can preserve it in a relative sense if we recognize that it only has meaning in a local context where one concentrates on the possibilities latent in certain processes and views the limitations on those possibilities as arising from outside that context. One could always stand the problem on its head, switch contexts, and what had been constraints would become a set of possibilities, and what had been possibilities would become constraints. Thus life histories can constrain the evolution of behavior, and behavior can constrain the evolution of life histories. Development can constrain the evolution of biochemistry, and biochemistry can constrain the evolution of development” (Stearns 1986, pp. 35–36).
1 Aristotle did hesitate over whether intellectual thought requires a body. Later, the medieval Christian Aristotelians held that whereas sensation requires a body, intellectual cognition does not.
2 It is not clear whether Descartes would have allowed that his argument for a “real distinction” between mind and body could be turned around in this way. He argued in his Discourse on Method that consciousness is required in order to be able to reason and express one’s thoughts in langauge, including being able to put together physical signs in the right synactic patterns so as to express a given meaning. Therefore, in his view, it would seem that there could not be a being functionally and behaviorally identical to a human being—in particular, identical with regard to linguistic behavior—that lacked consciousness.
3 As in Descartes’s “Second Meditation:” “if I look out of the window and see the men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves . . . Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men” (Descartes 1986, p. 21).
4 Nagel’s original formulation, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, reads: “If mental processes are physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery” (1979, p. 175).
5 In Husserl’s words: “The lived-body is at one with the physical body, membered thus and so, and, through the actual and potential kinaestheses belonging [to it] in their special way, [it is] precisely organ and system of organs” (Husserl 1973, p. 643, as quoted and translated by Welton 1999, p. 51; emphasis in original).
6 Thus Husserl uses the following terms: physischer Körper, physischer Leib, leiblicher Körper, Leibkörper, körperlicher Leib, körperliche Leiblichkeit, and Körperleib (Depraz 1997, 2001a, p. 3).
7 Husserl (1970) makes this point at length in his famous discussion of the “Galilean style” of modern natural science in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
8 I think it would be better to say that the appearances exist only for consciousness. To say that consciousness consists in the appearances themselves could lead one to think that appearances are contents of consciousness in the sense of being contained within consciousness. Appearances are relational: they correspond to the phenomenality of the world for conscious subjects.
9 Searle’s position that the irreducibility of consciousness is a trivial consequence of our definitional practices suggests that it might be possible to change those practices so that consciousness would be reducible. Yet, although intellectual revolutions giving rise to new conceptions of reduction and consciousness are certainly possible, any conception or method of reduction, and any definitional practice, will presuppose consciousness or (inter)subjectivity as a condition of possibility, and so there will always remain a nontrivial sense in which consciousness is irreducible. Searle comes close to allowing this sort of point when he writes: “the main point of having the concept of consciousness is to capture the first-person, subjective features of the phenomenon and this point would be lost if we redefine consciousness in third-person, objective terms. We would still need a name for the first-person ontology” (Searle 2004, p. 120).
10 I ignore here the complicated question of what counts as the brain’s or nervous system’s proper parts. See Swanson (2000).
11 I am greatly indebted to Diego Cosmelli for ongoing collaboration and discussion concerning these points.
12 See Hurley and Noë (2003); Noë (2004); Noë and Thompson (2004a, 2004b); and Thompson and Varela (2001).
1 I have slightly modified the English translation. The French reads: “Mais je ne suis pas devant mon corps, je suis dans mon corps, ou plutôt je suis mon corps.”
2 Prereflective bodily self-consciousness is close to Hurley’s notion of “perspectival self-consciousness” (Hurley 1998, pp. 140–143). Perspectival self-consciousness is awareness of one’s own intentional motor agency in perception. This sort of awareness is constitutive of having a unified perspective on the world, such that one is able to keep track of the interdependence of one’s perception and action. According to Hurley, perspectival self-consciousness does not involve conceptually structured thought or inference (but see Noë 2002a and 2004). Perspectival self-consciousness is not equivalent to everything phenomenologists mean by the notion of prereflective bodily self-consciousness; rather, it is equivalent to that part of bodily self-consciousness that involves action consciousness.
3 Prereflective self-consciousness is consciousness of one’s body-as-subject and therefore is not equivalent to proprioception, if proprioception is understood as a mode of perceptual awareness of one’s body-as-object. Whether proprioception should be understood this way is a matter of debate among philosophers. Bermúdez (1998) argues that proprioception is a form of perception; Gallagher (2003) argues that it is a form of non-perceptual bodily awareness; Legrand (2006) contends that it is a form of perception and is not sufficient for prereflective self-consciousness.
4 One might try to argue that one’s impression that there is such an unreflected experience prior to reflection is a kind of illusion, that reflection creates what it reflects upon (this seems to be the view of Blackmore 2002). But I see little to recommend this line of thought. Reflection comprises attention and meta-awareness, and although these mental functions modify experience, there is no compelling reason to think that they invariably create their own content out of material that is completely nonconscious or has no phenomenal character whatsoever. On the contrary, this position leaves reflection unmotivated and thus inexplicable. What could motivate reflection, in the ongoing course of one’s mental life, other than one’s being prereflectively affected? Another problem is that prereflective self-awareness is entailed by the structure of time-consciousness, as we will see in Chapter 11.
5 Merleau-Ponty here alludes to a passage from Husserl’s Ideas II: “Touching my left hand, I have touch-appearances, that is to say, I do not just sense, but I perceive and have appearances of a soft, smooth hand, with such a form. The indicational sensations of movement and the representational sensations of touch, which are Objectified as features of the thing, ‘left hand,’ belong in fact to my right hand. But when I touch the left I also find in it, too, series of touch-sensations, which are ‘localized’ in it, though these are not constitutive of properties (such as roughness or smoothness of the hand, this physical thing). If I speak of the physical thing, ‘left hand,’ then I am abstracting from these sensations (a ball of lead has nothing like them and likewise for every ‘merely’ physical thing, everything that is not my Body). If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, but instead it becomes Body, it senses” (Husserl 1989, p. 152; emphasis in the original).
6 See (Noë 2004) for critical discussion of Humphrey’s view from the perspective of the dynamic sensorimotor approach. See also Humphrey (2001) and O’Regan and Noë (2001b) for a critical exchange on these issues.
7 Noë (2004), however, no longer maintains this view.
8 I do not mean to imply that something is experienced as other simply because it is external to one’s biological membrane. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than of the position of objects through it . . . To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 143).
9 Compare Husserl’s description of this sort of case: “a soft noise becoming louder and louder takes on a growing affectivity in this materially relevant transformation; the vivacity of it in consciousness increases. This means that it exercises a growing pull on the ego. The ego finally turns toward it. However, examining this more precisely, the modal transformation of affection has already occurred prior to the turning toward. Along with a certain strength that is at work under the given affective circumstances, the pull proceeding from the noise has so genuinely struck the ego that it has come into relief for the ego, even if only in the antechamber of the ego. The ego already detects it now in its particularity even though it does not yet pay attention to it by grasping it in an attentive manner. This ‘already detecting’ means that in the ego a positive tendency is awakened to turn toward the object, its ‘interest’ is aroused—it becomes an acutely active interest in and through the turning toward in which this positive tendency, which goes from the ego-pole toward the noise, is fulfilled in the striving-toward. Now we understand the essential modal transformation that has occurred here. First an increasing affection; but the affective pull is not yet, from the standpoint of the ego, a counter-pull, not yet a responsive tendency toward the allure issuing from the object, a tendency that for its part can assume the new mode of an attentively grasping tendency. There are further distinctions that can be made here, but they do not concern us at this time” (Husserl 2001, p. 215). This description is explicitly temporal and dynamic; it displays phenomenal consciousness as characterized by continual, graded transformations of accessibility or access potential; and it roots modal transformations of consciousness in the dynamics of affect and movement tendencies (emotion).
10 Jennifer Church makes a similar point: “the accessibility (i.e., the access potential ) of the hearing experience is evident from the fact that I do eventually access it. Further, it seems that I would have accessed it sooner had it been a matter of greater importance—and thus, in a still stronger sense, it was accessible all along. Finally, it is not even clear that it was not actually accessed all along insofar as it rationally guided my behaviour in causing me to speak louder, or move closer, and so forth” (Church 1997, p. 426).
1 For this debate, see the articles collected in Block (1981a, 1981b). See also Rollins (1989) and Tye (1991).
2 How to specify precisely what makes a representation depictive is a difficult matter. Kosslyn (1994, p. 5) defines a depictive representation as “a type of picture, which specifies the locations and values of configurations of points in a space. For example, a drawing of a box would be a depictive representation. The space in which the points appear need not be physical, such as this page, but can be like an array in a computer, which specifies spatial relations purely functionally. That is, the physical locations in the computer of each point in an array are not themselves arranged into an array; it is only by virtue of how this information is ‘read’ and processed that it comes to function as if it were arranged into an array (with some points being close, some far, some falling along a diagonal, and so on). In a depictive representation, each part of an object is represented by a pattern of points, and the spatial relations among these patterns in the functional space correspond to the spatial relations among the parts themselves. Depictive representations convey meaning via their resemblance to an object, with parts corresponding to parts of the object.” For critical discussion of this concept of depictive representation, see Pylyshyn (2002, 2003a, pp. 328–333). See also Tye (1991, pp. 33–60) for helpful clarifications.
3 This clip can be viewed at: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html
4 My use of Mach’s picture builds on Noë (2004, Chapter 2) and Thompson, Noë, and Pessoa (1998, pp. 194–195).
5 Of course, picture-viewing also involves sensorimotor and mental exploration of the picture. My point, however, is that visual experience is not determinate in its contents in the way the surface of a picture is determinate in its qualitative features.
6 Wittgenstein comments on this feature of Mach’s drawing in his Philosophical Remarks (267). According to Wittgenstein, Mach confuses a (visual) phenomenological mode of representation and a physical mode of representation. See Noë (2004, pp. 71–72).
7 This idea goes back to G. E. Moore: “When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and if we know there is something to look for” (Moore 1993, p. 25). Note that Moore here states that the visual sensation is as if it were diaphanous but that it can be distinguished, a view in keeping with his sense-data theory of perception. H. P. Grice, however, in his expression of the diaphanous idea, implied that we cannot introspectively distinguish any sensation distinct from what we see: “such experiences (if experiences they be) as seeing and feeling seem to be, as it were, diaphanous: if we were asked to pay close attention, on a given occasion, to our seeing or feeling as distinct from what was being seen or felt, we should not know how to proceed; and the attempt to describe the differences between seeing and feeling seems to dissolve into a description of what we see and what we feel” (Grice 2002, p. 45). For discussion of the transparency thesis, see Kind (2003); Martin (2002); Siewert (2004); and Stoljar (2004).
8 My usage of “subjective character of experience” is close to Kriegel’s (2005). He uses the phrase to mean the implicit and nonreflective “forme-ness” of conscious experience. For both Kriegel and me, the phenomenal character of experience is the compresence (to use his formulation) of qualitative character and subjective character (for-me-ness). In this view, every conscious mental state (every mental state with phenomenal character) is implicitly and nonreflectively self-aware (see Chapter 9).
9 This statement needs qualification. By “representationalism” I mean externalist representationalism. For a representationalist model of subjectivity, defined as the possession of a phenomenal first-person perspective, see Metzinger (2003). This model focuses on the phenomenal content of the first-person perspective, but it does not analyze the intentionality of mental acts as these are experienced in their subjective performance. It would take me too far afield to consider Metzinger’s account here. For incisive criticism of this account from a phenomenological perspective, see Zahavi (2005b), and from an embodied dynamicist perspective consistent with phenomenology, see Legrand (2005).
10 Thus Harman says, “Nor does she experience any features of anything as intrinsic features of her experience. And that is true of you too.” Similarly, Ian Gold, citing Harman, writes: “Experience, it is sometimes said, is ‘diaphanous’: one sees through it to the object or property the experience is representing. The experience itself has no properties accessible to the experiencer” (Gold 2002, p. 190).
11 See Kind (2003, p. 230). She distinguishes between “strong” and “weak” transparency claims, whose formulations differ from mine.
12 I do not mean to imply that all imagining is voluntary and effortful in this way. Daydreaming, reverie, and fantasy are usually not. See Sartre (2004 pp. 18–19): “In most cases, no doubt, the [mental] image springs from a deep spontaneity that cannot be assimilated to the will . . . But involuntary and voluntary images represent two closely related types of consciousness, of which one is produced by a voluntary spontaneity and the other by a spontaneity without will.”
13 Dainton (2000, 2002) has criticized what he calls awareness-content dualism in theories of consciousness. Crucial to this dualism as Dainton describes it is the view that awareness is a bare act devoid of any intrinsic phenomenal characteristics. The phenomenological differentiation of experience into intentional-act and intentional-object poles involves no commitment to this notion of bare awareness.
14 Kriegel (2004) interprets this implicit self-awareness as a form of marginal or peripheral awareness. This view can also be found in Gurwitsch (1964). The problem with this view is that it treats one’s nonreflective awareness of one’s experiences on the model of one’s implicit awareness of objects in the background of perception. Various arguments show, however, that experiences are not given as objects to self-awareness and that prereflective self-consciousness does not have a subject/object structure. See Chapter 11 and Zahavi (2005a).
15 Notice I say that the experience is not the object of another higher-order phenomenally conscious mental state. The reason is that I do not wish to beg the question against the higher-order thought theory of consciousness. According to this theory, a conscious mental state is one that is the object of an accompanying higher-order cognitive state that is not itself a conscious state. Thus this theory attempts to explain intransitive consciousness (a mental state’s being a conscious mental state) in terms of transitive consciousness. (A mental state is intransitively conscious just in case one is transitively conscious of it, and to be transitively conscious of it is to have an accompanying higher-order thought that one is in that very state.) This theory is meant to be a substantive hypothesis about what intransitive consciousness is, not a phenomenological description. My point, however, is a phenomenological one: it is that experience involves an implicit self-awareness that is not a function of conscious reflection or introspection. The higher-order thought theory is free to acknowledge this phenomenological point, but would aim to explain or analyze implicit self-awareness in terms of transitive consciousness and accompanying (nonconscious) higher-order thoughts. I think such accounts are unsuccessful, but I do not intend to argue for this point here. For the higher-order thought theory, see Rosenthal (1997). For rebuttals of the higher-order thought theory on behalf of a one-level account of consciousness as intransitive self-consciousness, see Kriegel (2003a) and Zahavi and Parnas (1998).
16 There is a large phenomenological literature on whether this activity of making features of experience explicit and available for phenomenological consideration is primarily descriptive or interpretive, and whether it must involve an objectifying (and hence distorting) form of reflection. For some recent discussions, see Poellner (2003); Stawarska (2002); and Zahavi (2005a).
17 The claim that imagination is a necessary constituent of pictorial experience is controversial. Now classic discussions are Walton (1990) and Wolheim (1980, 1987). For recent discussions, see Hopkins (1998); Levinson (1998); Lopes (1996); and Wolheim (1998).
18 Cf. Searle (1983, pp. 45–46): “If, for example, I see a yellow station wagon in front of me, the experience I have is directly of the object. It doesn’t just ‘represent’ the object, it provides direct access to it. The experience has a kind of directness, immediacy and involuntariness which is not shared by a belief which I might have about the object in its absence. It seems therefore unnatural to describe visual experiences as representations . . . Rather, because of the special features of perceptual experiences I propose to call them ‘presentations.’ The visual experience I will say does not just represent the state of affairs perceived; rather, when satisfied, it gives direct access to it, and in that sense it is a presentation of that state of affairs.”
19 For this notion of the “neutrality modification” applied to belief, see Husserl (1983, §109, pp. 257–259). For discussion of the role that neutralization plays in imagination, see Marbach (1993, pp. 75–76).
20 See Marbach (1993, pp. 76–77). He distinguishes between “imagining a real possibility concerning, e.g., a thing, event, situation, etc. that one believes to exist in the real world” and “imagining a mere possibility, i.e. something purely fictional.”
21 Martin (2002) makes this point and uses it to construct an argument against representationalism analogous to the representationalist’s phenomenal-transparency argument against the sense-datum theory.
22 The status of fiction in relation to the imagination is a distinct problem in its own right and is beyond the scope of this chapter. As Stawarska (2001, p. 101) observes: “One wonders . . . whether it is . . . justified to subsume the non-existence of purely fictional characters under the heading of ‘absence.’ It seems more appropriate to take non-existence as the contrary of existence and to ascribe absence and presence (existential categories) to beings that are posited as existent only. A centaur cannot be absent (nor present) since it does not belong to the class of things posited as existent.” Indeed, Sartre himself notes, “It is only on the ground of sensory intuition that the words ‘absent,’ ‘far from me,’ can have a sense, on the ground of a sensory intuition that gives itself as not being able to take place” (2004, p. 13).
23 Earlier in the text (2004, p. 20), Sartre uses the figures of the Knight and Death in Dürer’s engraving as an example of objects that are posited as nonexistent, that is, as fictions. Sartre’s account of imagination actually contains a tension between assimilating imagining to a kind of pictorial consciousness and conceiving of imagining as a sui generis type of mental activity that cannot be analyzed in pictorial terms. See Stawarska (2001) and McCulloch (1994, Chapter 5).
24 Nevertheless, Sartre states in a footnote: “This suspension of belief remains a positional act” (2004, p. 197, n. 10). As he also makes clear later in the text: “one of the essential factors of the imaging consciousness is belief. This belief aims at the object of the image. All imaging consciousness has a certain positional quality in relation to its object. An imaging consciousness is, indeed, consciousness of an object as imaged, and not consciousness of an image” (p. 86; emphasis in original). Suspension of belief is positional because it is a feature of what Sartre calls positional or thetic consciousness, that is, object-directed consciousness (consciousness that posits an object). But image consciousness also includes (as does all consciousness) a nonpositional or nonthetic consciousness of itself, that is, an intransitive (non-object-directed) and prereflective self-consciousness: “the imaging consciousness that we produce before a photograph is an act and this act includes a nonthetic consciousness of itself as spontaneity. We have consciousness, of some sort, of animating the photo, of lending life to it in order to make an image of it” (p. 25). This remark indicates that, for Sartre, prereflective self-consciousness does not have a subject/object structure, and therefore it cannot be analyzed as a form of marginal, peripheral, or background awareness.
25 See Sartre (2004, p. 57): “The image is defined by its intention. It is the intention that makes it the case that the image of Pierre is consciousness of Pierre. If the intention is taken at its origin, which is to say as it springs from our spontaneity, it already implies, no matter how naked and bare it may seem, a certain knowledge: it is, hypothetically, the knowledge (connaissance) of Pierre . . . But the intention does not limit itself, in the image, to aiming at Pierre in an indeterminate fashion: he is aimed at as blond, tall, with a snub or aquiline nose, etc. It must therefore be charged with knowledge (connaissances), it must aim through a certain layer of consciousness that we can call the layer of knowledge. So that, in the imaging consciousness, one can distinguish knowledge and intention only by abstraction. The intention is defined only by the knowledge since one represents in image only what one knows in some sort of way and, reciprocally, knowledge here is not simply knowledge, it is an act, it is what I want to represent to myself . . . Naturally, this knowledge should not be considered as added to an already constituted image to clarify it: it is the active structure of the image.”
26 Because of these characteristics of imagining—the determination of its content by knowledge and intention, as well as the essential unexplorability of the imagined object—Sartre describes the intentional attitude of imagining as one of “quasi-observation,” by which he means an attitude of observation, but an observation that does not teach anything (2004, p. 10). As McGinn (2004, pp. 19–20) notes, this formulation should be modified to allow for the possibility of cognitive enhancement (for example, problem solving) by imagining.
27 Pylyshyn routinely conflates this hypothesis with the substantive hypothesis that all cognition involves the same propositional format, namely, a “language of thought.” But to pretend that the language of thought hypothesis does not have its own deep conceptual problems (where does the semantics of the symbols come from?), analogous to those that dog pictorialism, is sheer bluster.
28 Sartre compromised this insight, however, by falling back into treating imaging consciousness as a species of pictorial consciousness. See Stawarska (2001).
29 Indeed, although it is unlikely in our day and age, it is certainly imaginable that there could be a subject who gave such a report and did not even know he had a brain, or thought that mental processes were really carried out by the heart.
30 Recall that the sort of phenomenology I am concerned with in the context of this chapter is static phenomenology. Other forms of phenomenology would not describe their mode of access to phenomena in this way. To equate phenomenology with one particular way of doing phenomenology would be a leveling misrepresentation. Different ways of doing phenomenology are appropriate in different contexts. In this respect, phenomenology is no different from science or philosophy overall. The conviction animating this chapter is simply that static phenomenological analysis is directly relevant to the imagery debate in cognitive science.
31 Dennett writes: “[O]f course experimenters on illusions rely on subjects’ introspective beliefs (as expressed in their judgments) about how things seem to them, but that is the agnosticism of heterophenomenology; to go beyond it would be, for instance, to assume that in size illusions there really are visual images of different sizes somewhere in subjects’ brains (or minds), which of course no researcher would dream of doing” (2005, p. 54). In this last statement, we see the same bias toward interpreting first-person reports as expressions of belief about what is going on in the brain or mind considered as a subpersonal cognitive system. Goldman (2004) usefully terms this sort of interpretation “architecturally loaded” (because it interprets subjects as expressing beliefs about their subpersonal cognitive architecture). He writes: “The following . . . seems like a reasonable rule of thumb: ‘When considering an introspective report, and a choice is available between an architecturally loaded interpretation of the report and an architecturally neutral interpretation, always prefer the latter.’ This is just the opposite of Dennett’s practice. His proclivity is to interpret ordinary introspective reports in architecturally loaded terms” (Goldman 2004, p. 12).
1 Husserl’s writings on time-consciousness include the famous “Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from the Year 1905,” published together with other writings from the years 1893–1917 (Husserl 1991). In addition are Husserl’s still untranslated “Bernauer Manuscripts” on time-consciousness, written during 1917–1918, as well as the so-called unpublished C manuscripts in the Husserl archives from the years 1929–1935. For important treatments of Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, see John Barnett Brough’s “Translators Introduction” to Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Husserl 1991, pp. xi–lvii), and Bernet, Kern, and Marbach (1993, pp. 101–114); Brough (1972, 1989); Gallagher (1998); Rodemeyer (2003); Smith (2003, pp. 86–100); and Zahavi (2003a, pp. 80–98, 2003b, 2005a). See also Sokolowski (2000, pp. 130–145) for a clear and eloquent introduction to the Husserlian phenomenology of time-consciousness.
2 I say temporal unity, not temporal object, for we should not assume that any experience of which we become reflectively aware should be described (at least phenomenologically) as an internal object (though resolving this matter will clearly depend on what we mean by “object”).
3 Varela does not indicate whether the correspondence here is type-type or merely token-token—that is, whether every type of cognitive act corresponds to a specific type of neural assembly, or merely whether any particular token cognitive act corresponds to a particular token neural assembly (such that there can be variation in the token neural assemblies corresponding to token cognitive acts of the same type). He does indicate, however, that the hypothesis is meant to be a strong one that predicts that only one dominant or major neural assembly is present during a cognitive act and that physiological correlates associated with the assembly should be repeatedly detected for different instances of the same act. This demand suggests that the hypothesis is meant to imply a type-type correspondence. Nevertheless, the hypothesis needs to be taken in a statistical sense to allow for the fact that endogenous neural activity is highly variable and modulates responses to a given stimulus (see David et al. 2002, p. 56).
4 Synchrony in this context refers to the relation between the temporal structures of the signals regardless of signal amplitude. Two signals are said to be synchronous if their rhythms coincide. In signals with a dominant oscillatory mode, synchronization means the adjustment of the rhythmicity of two oscillators in a phase locking: nϕ1(t) − mϕ2(t) = const, where ϕ1(t), ϕ2(t) are the instantaneous phases of the oscillators, and n,m are integers indicating the ratios of possible frequency locking. It is usually assumed for simplicity that n = m = 1, but there is also evidence for 1:2 and 1:3 phase synchrony (see Varela et al. 2001; Le Van Quyen 2003).
5 For attention and working memory, see Fries et al. (2001); Sarntheim et al. (1998); von Stein and Sarntheim (2000); and von Stein, Chiang, and König (2000). For sensorimotor integration, see Kahana, Seelig, and Madsen (2001); O’Keefe and Burgess (1999).
6 Complex nonlinear forms of cross-band synchrony, so-called generalized synchrony (Schiff et al. 1996), are also to be expected and may prove more relevant in the long run to understanding large-scale integration than strict phase synchrony (Friston 2000a, 2000b; Le Van Quyen 2003).
7 In a subsequent study, Rodriguez and colleagues have shown using a masking paradigm that conscious perception correlates mainly with phase synchrony and not gamma oscillations (Melloni and Rodriguez 2005).
8 For further discussion, see Faure and Korn (2001); Friston (2000a, 2000b); Kelso (1995); Korn and Faure (2003); and Tsuda (2001).
9 This section draws from the detailed treatments in Lutz and Thompson (2003), and Thompson, Lutz, and Cosmelli (2005).
10 Metzinger (2003, p. 592) concludes that “first-person data do not exist” because “first-person access to the phenomenal content of one’s own mental states does not fulfill the defining criteria for the concept of ‘data.’” According to Metzinger, these criteria are, first, extraction from the physical world by technical measuring devices with well-defined public procedures; and second, collection or generation among groups of human beings, specifically “scientific communities open to criticism and constantly seeking independent means of verification.”
This conception is faulty, however. Data are something given (from the Latin datum). What is given in a scientific context are observations and records of observations. Not all recorded observations are measurements. (Think of a naturalist who observes and describes animal behavior in its natural setting, or an anthropologist recording the customs of a people.) Metzinger is right to call attention to the intersubjective nature of data, but he is mistaken to think that first-person reports about experience based on first-person access to one’s own mental states cannot be intersubjective and open to critical evaluation. Finally, first-person data are precisely what psychologists and psychiatrists are collecting when they ask subjects in interviews or through questionnaires to describe their experience.
11 The term phenomenology in this context is not limited to phenomenology in the European sense stemming from Husserl, but includes any systematic project of investigating and describing experience. So understood, phenomenology includes Asian traditions, in particular the various Buddhist and Hindu philosophical analyses of the nature of the mind and consciousness, based on contemplative mental training. The relationship of these schools to Western phenomenology and mind science is beyond the scope of this book, and will be the subject of future work. For further discussion, see Dreyfus and Thompson (2007); Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson (2007); and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).
12 Preliminary examples of this third step can be found in neurophenomenological studies of epilepsy (Le Van Quyen and Petitmengin 2002; Petitmengin 2005) and pain (Price, Barrell, and Rainville 2001; Rainville 2005).
13 Chalmers (2000, p. 25) defines minimal sufficiency as follows: “(1) the states of N suffice for the corresponding states of consciousness, and (2) no proper part M of N is such that the states of M suffice for the corresponding states of consciousness.”
14 The idea of consciousness as a unified field of subjective experience has long been central to phenomenology (see Gurwitsch 1964).
15 Ronald Bruzina, in his review of Naturalizing Phenomenology (Petitot et al. 1999), argues that the neural analogue of the formal structure of temporality cannot be taken to provide an account of the specifically temporal character of experience because the threefold structure of temporality is an intentional structure, not a spatially extended one like the neural analogue (Bruzina 2004, p. 76). This point about the intentional structure of temporality not being spatial is crucial. Yet although the brain as a physical entity is clearly laid out in space, the dynamical form or structure of its processes is not itself a spatially extended structure (a point already seen by Merleau-Ponty 1963, p. 72). It is at this level of dynamical form that we are supposed to find the neural analogue of the threefold structure of time-consciousness. We use the geometrical techniques of phase space to represent this dynamical form to ourselves, but this is analogous to Husserl’s use of geometrical diagrams to represent the threefold structure of temporality.
16 Varela introduces the notion of “generative passages” between phenomenology and science to describe this idea. See Varela (1997b) and Roy et al. (1999, p. 68). See also Lutz (2002), and for critical discussion see Bayne (2004).
1 Varela’s dynamical account of protention is close to Kelso’s dynamical account of intention in which intention is an order parameter for the coordination dynamics of intentional behavior (see Kelso 1995, pp. 137–158). See also Walter Freeman’s (1999a, 1999b, 2000) neurodynamical model of emotion, intention, and consciousness, discussed in this chapter.
2 For the neuroscience of emotion, see Panksepp (1998a). For comprehensive collections of neuroscientific and psychological discussions of emotion, see Davidson, Scherer, and Goldsmith (2003); Ekman and Davidson (1994); Lane and Nadel (2000); and Lewis and Haviland-Jones (2000). For psychoneuroimmunological views of emotion, see Maier and Watkins (1998); Pert (1997); and Pert et al. (1985). For affect and consciousness, see Damasio (1999). For emotion experience, see Lambie and Marcel (2002), and the articles collected in Colombetti and Thompson (2005a).
3 For a thorough critical discussion and rebuttal of the position that there is no such thing as emotion, see Charland (2001).
4 LeDoux is well known for his rejection of the concept of the limbic system and the associated limbic system theory of emotion (see LeDoux 1996, pp. 98–103). Freeman’s view of the limbic system as a neurodynamic source of intentional action, described in this chapter, is significantly different from the limbic system theory of emotion criticized by LeDoux. For a spirited defense of the limbic system concept see Panksepp (2002).
5 For further discussion of the relation between Lewis’s model of emotion and the enactive approach, see Colombetti (in press); Colombetti and Thompson (2005b, 2006).
6 It can also be discerned psychotherapeutically through what Daniel Stern (2004) calls the “micro-analytic interview.” His study The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life offers many interesting points of convergence with the neurophenomenological approach to time and affect presented here.
7 Varela and Depraz (2005, pp. 67–68) provide a description of the experience from Varela’s notes: “Today went to the concert at 11, a certain heaviness in my eyelids, and a bit of a moody blues as setting. I’m sitting leaning forward onto the edge of the 2nd balcony. The musicians (sublime Italian ensemble) arrive, tune up, and settle, a short silence and then begin with the sonata of the Musical Offering, which I love. Instantly, within the first five or six notes of the main theme, the break in mood and feeling tone arises: suddenly my chest heaves a little, my skin becomes goose-bumpy and it is as if the body is brought into position. Almost at the same time there is a wave of beauty, of poignancy which brings sudden tears into my eyes, an intensified breathing. Without premeditation, I feel my eyes close and I lean backwards to relax my body into complete receptivity. My mental-space seems to spread out and my ego-center to become almost imperceptible. By the time the first variation of the musical theme starts the feeling tone is fully formed and the first waves of thought-wandering have begun, the first being a memory of another occasion when the very same music also touched me to tears. The whole thing has lasted a mere fraction of a second.”
8 At one point, Husserl’s description is strikingly reminiscent of the state-space descriptions of dynamic systems theory: “I have already employed the quite suitable expression, affective relief. On the one hand, this alludes to a unity [the content of the ‘living present’ of experience], on the other hand, to a difference of ‘peaks’ for the different particular moments [the distinct contents synthesized within the living present], finally, too, the possibility of entire augmentations or entire diminutions insofar as the affective relief can arch out more prominently or become more flattened depending upon the alterations of the living present” (2001, p. 216).
1 My discussion of empathy in this chapter draws heavily, with revision, from Thompson (2001, 2005).
2 The following discussion is based on Zahavi (1997).
3 One might argue that although the co-intended absent profiles cannot be intended as the correlates of my fictitious co-present perceptions, they can be intended as the correlates of my perceptions were I to walk around the thing and look at it from over there. The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it makes the absent profiles the correlates of my possible future perceptions, which has already been shown to be inadequate. Moreover, this interpretation itself involves the open intersubjectivity of consciousness, in the form of the alterity or otherness built into consciousness, for it requires that one imagine or otherwise mentally grasp oneself as altered or othered in relation to one’s present self.
4 Here I follow Zahavi (1997, pp. 313–319).
5 This work was Stein’s 1916 doctoral dissertation, prepared under Husserl’s supervision. Stein draws from Husserl’s discussion of empathy in his Ideas II (Husserl 1989), but develops Husserl’s ideas in her own unique way. For discussion of the similarities and differences between Stein’s and Husserl’s views on empathy, see Leask (2002).
6 Heidegger (1995, pp. 201–209) rejects the concept of empathy (Einfühlung) as an erroneous way of understanding human relations because it presupposes “that we must first ‘feel our way into’ the other being in order to reach it. And this implies that we are ‘outside’ in the first place” (p. 203). For Heidegger, “being-with” belongs to the essence of our existence, and we are always already “transposed” into one another, prior to any particular attempt to grasp the feelings of another. Heidegger’s criticism of the concept of empathy is insightful and important. In my view, however, Husserl’s concept of empathy remains important, particularly when the overall framework of Husserl’s view of intersubjectivity is taken into account (see Zahavi 2001b). In completely rejecting empathy, Heidegger loses touch with the affective and corporeal aspects of intersubjectivity. In this connection, it is worth noting that Merleau-Ponty, in his lecture course Nature, explicitly retakes Husserl’s notion of empathy (Einfühlung) and uses it to describe how the body in its esthesiological and libidinal being both projects into and introjects other bodies, thereby constituting an “intercorporeity” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, pp. 210, 218, 225).
1 See Langsdorf (1985); Marbach (1993); Roy (1995); Roy et al. (1999, pp. 57–60); Welton (2000, pp. 393–404); and Zahavi (2003a, pp. 53–68, 2004a).
2 Here I follow the nonrepresentationalist interpretation of Husserl. Dreyfus is an exponent of the representationalist interpretation. See Drummond (2003) and Zahavi (2004a).
3 This point bears further elaboration: (1) “Operative intentionality [fungierende Intentionalität] designates prereflective experience that is functional without having to be thematic or engaged in an explicit epistemic acquisition. It constitutes the prepredicative unity of objects, of the world, and of our life. This dimension of experience is described by Husserl under the aegis of ‘aesthetic experience,’ and more particularly with the expressions ‘passive synthesis’ and ‘instinct’ or ‘drive-intentionality’ [Triebintentionalität]. For Merleau-Ponty operative intentionality includes the intentionality of movement, erotic intentionality, the habitual body, etc. Phenomenological analyses of these modes of intentionality take place on the level of the lived-body [Leib, le corps propre]” (Steinbock 1999, p. 183; see also Mensch 1998). (2) Dreyfus cites a passage from Husserl’s Crisis (1970, p. 149) and describes him as there asserting the possibility of gaining access to a “dormant intentionality” corresponding to “the ‘intentional history’ of what we now simply take for granted” (Dreyfus 1982, p. 24). Yet the dormant intentionality with which Husserl is concerned in this passage is operative intentionality, not object-directed intentionality. (3) Husserl does not assert in this passage, as Dreyfus puts it, “that we always have access to the content of our intentional states” (Dreyfus 1982, p. 24). Rather, Husserl explicitly states: “every straightforwardly performed validity in natural world-life always presupposes validities extending back, immediately or mediately, into a necessary subsoil of obscure but occasionally available reactivatable validities . . .” [emphasis added]. Of course, there remains the important problem of what it means to gain access to the emergence of the given (object-directed intentionality) from the pregiven (operative intentionality). But Dreyfus’s interpretation of Husserl (according to which all intentionality is object-directed and we have straightforward access to the content of all such intentional states) does not allow for the proper formulation of this problem. (4) Given the strong linkage between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on the topic of operative intentionality (and given that Husserl does not subscribe to a representational theory of mind), it is inaccurate to state that “Merleau-Ponty . . . developed [his] views in opposition to Husserl’s insistence on the philosophical priority of the analysis of the representational content of individual intentional states” (1982, pp. 2–3). On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty (in his Phenomenology of Perception) can be seen as a direct descendant of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology of the lived body (see Zahavi 2002b).
4 Dreyfus states that Husserl learned from Heidegger the idea “that all cognition depends on a world in which we are involved and which can never be made explicit as an object” (Dreyfus 1982, p. 23). Yet he provides no evidence for this relationship between Husserl and Heidegger. According to Welton (2000, pp. 120, 339), Husserl had been working on the notion of the life-world already in the early 1920s (Heidegger’s Being and Time was published in 1927) and his work in the 1930s does not show any direct influence of Heidegger’s notion of the world.
5 See Depraz (1999a); Gupta (1998, 2003, 2004); Laycock (1994); Lusthaus (2002); and Yamaguchi (1997).
1 See Andersen et al. (2000); Schröder (1998); Silberstein (2001, 2002); Silberstein and McGeever (1999); and Van Gulick (2001).
2 Juarrero treats autopoietic and autocatalytic systems as if they were equivalent, but they are not.
3 Another holistic view of emergence goes further by seeing emergence as a kind of fusion (Humphreys 1996, 1997a, 1997b). The difference between fusion and relational holism is that a fusion is not a relational structure because the previously unrelated elements are “used up” in the fusion.
4 See Belousek (2003); Hawthorne and Silberstein (1995); Healey (1991); Humphreys (1996, 1997a, 1997b); Kronz and Tiehen (2002); and Maudlin (1998).
5 Ontological emergence in the form of relational holism violates atomistic mereological supervenience, but perhaps not every form of mereological supervenience. Atomism states that every property of a whole is logically supervenient on, or logically determined by, the intrinsic properties of the whole’s most fundamental parts. In this view, every relation is a reducible relation. Yet, if mereological supervenience were taken more liberally to mean that every property of a whole is logically supervenient on, or logically determined by, the properties of the parts and their relations—where this allows for nonatomistic or irreducible relations—then mereological supervenience would be consistent with relational holism. This differentiation of versions of mereological supervenience is not too important at this stage of the discussion. It becomes relevant when we discuss emergence as understood by the classical British emergentists (Samuel Alexander, C. D. Broad, and C. Lloyd Morgan) and its influence on contemporary philosophy of mind (see Kim 1999). The British emergentists apparently believed, according to Jaegwon Kim’s (1999) interpretation, that emergent properties are not identical with macrolevel, organizational properties (whether or not holistic), but are additional distinct properties that supervene on those organizational properties as their emergence bases. The emergence of such distinct, irreducible properties (such as “life” or “consciousness”) given a sufficient macrolevel organization, and their supervenience on that macrolevel, were taken as brute facts of nature, to be accepted in an “attitude of natural piety” in Samuel Alexander’s phrase.
6 If one criterion of ontological emergence is that it not be an artifact of our theories or models, and if quantum mechanics is supposed to be the best case of ontological emergence, then it would seem a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is being assumed. Whether there is a coherent realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is an unresolved matter. Bitbol (in press) presents a critical discussion of the realist premises of philosophical treatments of emergence in quantum mechanics. His deontologized conception of emergence is close to my conception of dynamic co-emergence.
7 Therefore it would seem that Kim is mistaken when he writes: “A whole has a certain emergent property, M, at a given time, t, and the fact that this property emerges at t is dependent on its having a certain micro-configuration at t, and this includes a given constituent of it, aj, having Pj at t. That is, unless aj had Pj at t, W could not have had its emergent property M at t” (1999, p. 29). But if W is a complex system with structural stability, then it could well have had its emergent property M at t, without its constituent aj having had Pj at t.
8 Cf. Kronz and Tiehen (2002, pp. 332–333): “the British emergentists may have placed too much emphasis on the Newtonian formulation of classical physics in motivating their metaphysical doctrine by regarding forces as fundamental, and then developing their metaphysics by analogy with the way in which forces behave . . . If they had modeled their metaphysical doctrines on the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics, in which energies (both kinetic and potential) are fundamental, the associated metaphysical doctrine may have had a very different character. Poincaré was aware of chaotic classical models, and that they involved nonseparable Hamiltonians; but it is unclear whether the British emergentists were familiar with them.”
9 In a mere three sentences in his “Making Sense of Emergence” Kim confronts the Kantian problematic of self-organization (from Kant’s Critique of Judgment) and casually dismisses it without so much as a mention: “But how is it possible for the whole to causally affect its constituent parts on which its very existence and nature depend? If causation or determination is transitive, doesn’t this ultimately imply a kind of self-causation, or self-determination—an apparent absurdity? It seems to me that there is reason to worry about the coherence of the whole idea” (1999, p. 28).