The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special (...) Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer’s hard problem. Next, I outline the phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy. (shrink)

My purpose in this article is to propose an explicitly naturalized account of the experience of present nowness on the basis of two complementary sources: phenomenological analysis and cognitive neuroscience. What I mean by naturalization, and the role cognitive neuroscience plays will become clear as the paper unfolds, but the main intention is to use the consciousness of present time as a study case for the phenomenological framework presented by Depraz in this Special Issue.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 35-53 [Access article in PDF] "Truth Is What Works": Francisco J. Varela on Cognitive Science, Buddhism, the Inseparability of Subject and Object, and the Exaggerations of Constructivism—A Conversation Francisco J. Varela Bernhard Poerksen Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft Universität Hamburg Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Santiago de Chile, obtained his doctorate 1970 at Harvard University with a (...) dissertation on the insect eye, and worked there for some time in the laboratory of Torsten Wiesel, the later Nobel Laureate for medicine. From his scientific beginnings as a researcher in biology, he not only studied and practiced biology but, resisting the dominating mainstream, pursued a research program that ignored and broke down traditional disciplinary boundaries. This research program is best characterized as experimental epistemology, a concept introduced by the neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Francisco J. Varela's great aspiration was to examine and answer the philosophical ur-question of cognition with scientific precision and with the help of the best possible theoretical framework. [End Page 35]Having obtained his doctorate, he went back to Chile to work as a professor of biology together with Humberto R. Maturana. He contributed to the writing of the theory of autopoiesis, which was to cause a furor in the world of science as a universally applicable explanatory model. After the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the dictatorship by the putsch general Pinochet, Francisco J. Varela first escaped to Costa Rica, then became a professor at the American University of Colorado and University of New York, and finally returned in 1980 to the University of Chile in Santiago for five years. Temporary positions as guest professor for neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive science in Germany, Switzerland, and France led him to Paris in the end, where he worked as research director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique until his death on May 28, 2001.In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities—blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela's claim is that individual and world create each other. The Computational Model of the Mind Poerksen: The ancient key questions of philosophy are at the center of modern cognitive science. What is the essence of the mind? Do our conceptions represent a given world, which is independent from our minds? What is the formative power of external objects over our perceptions? How does cognition function? The search for an adequate answer and an improved understanding of the human mind has led many cognitive scientists to entertain the assumption that the brain is actually a kind of computer. Memory is taken to be a store. Thinking and perceiving are understood as data processing in the sense that an independent external world is computationally transformed into symbols and represented in the organism in this manner. You are very critical of this view. Why?Varela: If the brain is considered as a kind of computer, then cognitive research is limited to discovering certain self-sufficient shapes—the symbols—together with the rules [End Page 36] governing them—the programs. But this search for symbols and programs will never be profitable because it... (shrink)

How can science be brought to connect with experience? This book addresses two of the most challenging problems facing contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science. Firstly, understanding how we unconsciously execute habitual actions as a result of neurological and cognitive processes that are not formal actions of conscious judgment but part of a habitual nexus of systematic self-organization. Secondly, attempting to create an ethics adequate to our present awareness that there is no such thing as a transcendental self, a stable subject (...) or soul. The author combines researches in cognitive science and phenomenology with two representatives of what he calls the 'wisdom traditions': Confucianism and Buddhist epistemology. (shrink)

This paper represents a step in the analysis of the key, but much-neglected role of affect and emotions as the originary source of the living present, as a foundational dimension of the moment-to-moment emergence of consciousness. In a more general sense, we may express the question in the following terms: there seems to be a growing consensus from various sources -- philosophical, empirical and clinical -- that emotions cannot be seen as a mere 'coloration' of the cognitive agent, understood as (...) a formal or un-affected self, but are immanent and inextricable from every mental act. How can this be borne out, beyond just announcing it? Specifically, what is the role of affect-emotion in the self-movement of the flow, of the. (shrink)

The study of conscious experience per se has not kept pace with the dramatic advances in PET, fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies. If anything, the standard approaches to examining the 'view from within' involve little more than cataloguing its readily accessible components. Thus the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science, leading to a widespread scepticism over the possibility of a truly scientific study of conscious experience. Drawing on a wide range of approaches -- (...) from phenomenology to meditation -- The View From Within examines the possibility of a disciplined approach to the study of subjective states. The focus is on the practical issues involved. (shrink)

This ambitious work aims to shed new light on the relations between Husserlian phenomenology and the present-day efforts toward a scientific theory of cognition—with its complex structure of disciplines, levels of explanation, and ...

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

Different explanations of color vision favor different philosophical positions: Computational vision is more compatible with objectivism (the color is in the object), psychophysics and neurophysiology with subjectivism (the color is in the head). Comparative research suggests that an explanation of color must be both experientialist (unlike objectivism) and ecological (unlike subjectivism). Computational vision's emphasis on optimally prespecified features of the environment (i.e., distal properties, independent of the sensory-motor capacities of the animal) is unsatisfactory. Conceiving of visual perception instead as the (...) visual guidance of activity in an environment that is determined largely by that very activity suggests new directions for research. (shrink)

Some major leftist thinkers, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton, have lately offered readings that claim the relevance of alternative interpretations of the Christian tradition in the face both of the conservative turn in the Catholic Church and of the contemporary secular oblivion of anything that has to do with religion. Furthermore, post-colonial studies have tended to blame the West en bloc for the disasters of past and present colonization, and have attacked the western endeavour to extend universal (...) truths as an ethnocentric device to facilitate and justify exploitation. In Holy Terror, Terry Eagleton both condemns western politics and questions its appeal to universals; but he also hears in this tradition a demand for a relationship with the other which offers an alternative to that established by current politics and capitalist exploitation. The other is the excluded, the oppressed, the exploited; the true material, rather than ideal, universal produced by global capitalist exploitation. As a consequence, anything that happens in any part of the planet belongs in our world and indicts us, though we tend to build barriers around an ideally safe and stable identity that ignores part of its own reality and that is therefore haunted by it. Texts like the Bacchae or the New Testament open the gates of the city and of the heart to the excluded. Terrorists — saints for their own communities and satanic for the rest — offer an example of the other that is impossible to comprehend within our conventional ways of life. Nevertheless, only if we hear in their violence a demand for justice can an exit be found from the vicious circle of violence and revenge. (shrink)

Some major leftist thinkers, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton, have lately offered readings that claim the relevance of alternative interpretations of the Christian tradition in the face both of the conservative turn in the Catholic Church and of the contemporary secular oblivion of anything that has to do with religion. Furthermore, post-colonial studies have tended to blame the West en bloc for the disasters of past and present colonization, and have attacked the western endeavour to extend universal (...) truths as an ethnocentric device to facilitate and justify exploitation. In Holy Terror, Terry Eagleton both condemns western politics and questions its appeal to universals; but he also hears in this tradition a demand for a relationship with the other which offers an alternative to that established by current politics and capitalist exploitation. The other is the excluded, the oppressed, the exploited; the true material, rather than ideal, universal produced by global capitalist exploitation. As a consequence, anything that happens in any part of the planet belongs in our world and indicts us, though we tend to build barriers around an ideally safe and stable identity that ignores part of its own reality and that is therefore haunted by it. Texts like the Bacchae or the New Testament open the gates of the city and of the heart to the excluded. Terrorists — saints for their own communities and satanic for the rest — offer an example of the other that is impossible to comprehend within our conventional ways of life. Nevertheless, only if we hear in their violence a demand for justice can an exit be found from the vicious circle of violence and revenge. (shrink)

Response to the Commentary on ‘The View from Within’ The numerous commentators to this Special Issue have greatly enhanced its focus and usefulness. We thank them all very sincerely for their efforts. Within the restricted space of this rejoinder we cannot respond in detail to all the issues raised. Instead, we shall concentrate first on some fundamental criticisms.The remaining additions and complementary ideas will only be touched on briefly, merely to see them in perspective. We shall start with our two (...) main critics of the global enterprise, Baars and Nixon. They both offer arguments that our enterprise is misguided, but their arguments fall on two opposite extremes: empirical and hermeneutical. (shrink)

We start this Volume 13 with the usual Editorial Note reviewing the main features of Economics and Business Letters. EBL is an online letter-type journal, free both for authors and readers, covering all areas of economics and business and with theoretical and empirical letters.

There is a constructive method to define a structure of simple k -cyclic Post algebra of order p , L p , k , on a given finite field F ( p k ), and conversely. There exists an interpretation Φ 1 of the variety $${\mathcal{V}(L_{p,k})}$$ generated by L p , k into the variety $${\mathcal{V}(F(p^k))}$$ generated by F ( p k ) and an interpretation Φ 2 of $${\mathcal{V}(F(p^k))}$$ into $${\mathcal{V}(L_{p,k})}$$ such that Φ 2 Φ 1 ( B ) (...) = B for every $${B \in \mathcal{V}(L_{p,k})}$$ and Φ 1 Φ 2 ( R ) = R for every $${R \in \mathcal{V}(F(p^k))}$$. In this paper we show how we can solve an algebraic system of equations over an arbitrary cyclic Post algebra of order p, p prime, using the above interpretation, Gröbner bases and algorithms programmed in Maple. (shrink)

Searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience.

This paper proposes a basic revision of the understanding of teleology in biological sciences. Since Kant, it has become customary to view purposiveness in organisms as a bias added by the observer; the recent notion of teleonomy expresses well this as-if character of natural purposes. In recent developments in science, however, notions such as self-organization (or complex systems) and the autopoiesis viewpoint, have displaced emergence and circular self-production as central features of life. Contrary to an often superficial reading, Kant gives (...) a multi-faceted account of the living, and anticipates this modern reading of the organism, even introducing the term self-organization for the first time. Our re-reading of Kant in this light is strengthened by a group of philosophers of biology, with Hans Jonas as the central figure, who put back on center stage an organism-centered view of the living, an autonomous center of concern capable of providing an interior perspective. Thus, what is present in nuce in Kant, finds a convergent development from this current of philosophy of biology and the scientific ideas around autopoeisis, two independent but parallel developments culminating in the 1970s. Instead of viewing meaning or value as artifacts or illusions, both agree on a new understanding of a form of immanent teleology as truly biological features, inevitably intertwined with the self-establishment of an identity which is the living process. (shrink)

The target article concludes that it is essential to introduce the personal level in cognitive science. We propose to take this conclusion one step further. The personal level should consist of first-person accounts of specific, contextualized experiences, not abstract or imagined cases. Exploring first-person accounts at their own level of detail calls for the refinements of method that can link up with neural accounts.