The issue I want to talk about today is the question of the place of phenomenology (experience) within science, specifically psychology and cognitive science. Traditionally, phenomenology has been the classic example of the kind of domain that is unsuitable for science. It's been my position that although some phenomenological data are inappropriate for scientific work (especially clear scientific work that others can understand easily), there are certain kinds of phenomenal "facts" that are appropriate and actually very helpful for the progress of science.
In a project last year, I focused on exploring the connection between the phenomenal experience of bodily control and the anatomy of the nervous system (and the body as a whole). I thought, and still think that exploring connections such as these is a fruitful way to explore the way that biological systems are associated with consciousness.
A major conclusion of this work was the emergence of the idea that biological systems can never be completely adaptive. By virtue of their existing in the physical world, and being bound by the constraints therein, no living system can ever be completely adaptive since being completely adaptive would require having complete control over its own functions. In a physical world, such an idea makes absolutely no sense. A system can have control over its parts, and can use this control (with the aid of perceptual systems and the interpretation of sensation) to act adaptively, but the operations of the entire system cannot all be controlled adaptively since every mechanism of adaptive control is itself uncontrolled until an additional structure controls it. The quest for complete control ends up with an infinite regress of additional control structures.
Now, a central feature of our embodied existence is this conscious divide between control and no control. We have no direct control over the environment, and no control over many parts of our body, but we of course have control over some. What I'm trying to say here is that the constraints on physical systems that I talked about in the last paragraph show up conveniently in our own embodied experience. This comes as no surprise if one accepts the view that there is a complete correlation between phenomenal states and biological states in any given living system.
Recently, I've been thinking about the extent to which (and the ways in which) we have control over our mental processes. While we can of course control our arms and legs, we can also control our thoughts-but there are limits to this. While we can bring images into our mind at will, we cannot control other aspects of our mental states-such as awareness, otherwise people like me would never suffer the embarrassment of falling asleep in class.
What this means is that our phenomenal awareness of those mental processes that are and aren't under our control is a reflection of the organization of the nervous system. The fact that I can bring certain images into my mind at will reflects the fact that my nervous system has mechanisms of control over the production of mental images. In contrast, the fact that I can't always make myself fully aware or bring myself into deep concentration when I want to is reflective of the fact that full awareness is not amenable to conscious control-or very much conscious control (maybe biofeedback could change this).
By exploring the issue of control with regards to our mental processes, we can make valuable use of phenomenology to make sense of the biological organization of the brain at a very high level. By understanding our phenomenological states in terms of these constraints we are in fact creating an understanding of the underlying neural organization. This is especially helpful given the complexity of the nervous system-a complexity that bars us from seeing the kinds of organization I'm talking about by looking at the neurons themselves (this would be a herculean task).
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