5.2 Neurophenomenology and the Pragmatics of Reciprocal Constraints
Methodologically neurophenomenology bridges the ‘explanatory gap’ (see Appendix L), promotes cooperation between qualitative and quantitative approaches, and addresses the philosophical issues a science of consciousness poses to present understandings of subjectivity and objectivity in a manner that provides an appropriate platform for the present enquiry. Founded by Francisco Varela, neurophenomenology does not seek to reduce the phenomenological to the natural (Varela 1996; Varela 1997, 1999b).
We seek to produce epistemological and ontological shifts whereby the two domains of natural objects and phenomenological descriptions can provide a three-dimensional view of mind and experience altogether. From this perspective, any dualist extreme, whether reductionist/objectivist, or transcendentalist/mentalist is a declaration of failure. Moving beyond these antinomies is precisely what is at stake here if we are to avoid yet another repetition of the compulsive history of pendulum swings between favoring nature or a Geistiges domain. (Varela 1997, p.360)
Varela makes clear what this implies with respect to the science of consciousness.
Very specifically, the kind of naturalization we seek could not be found in “merely” finding the neurobiological (brain or body) correlates of consciousness, since this would leave in the shadow the precise circulation between them. In other words, what needs to be addressed is the fact that human experience encompasses properties of both the material and the mental without contradiction. The question is thus not so much how to naturalize Husserlian phenomenology, but rather what should a natural science (such as the cognitive sciences) become to be fully adequate to phenomenological descriptions that could be naturalized but not epistemically reduced. (Varela 1997, p.360)
Although neurophenomenology is informed by neurology its name does not imply that the material aspect of neurophenomenological research is limited to a consideration of neurology alone. The neurophenomenological methodology avoids reducing mind to body or vice versa, whilst placing centre stage their necessary relation. In my view, this provides the ideal platform for the research of psychosomatic disorders such as CFS. Psychosomatic disorders are so called precisely because their ‘human experience encompasses properties of both the material and the mental’. The fundamental question neurophenomenology asks is: how can this naturalisation be achieved? What form can the circulation between the mental and the material take?
Varela (1997) argues that it is in the region of the lived body that access to both phenomenological data and the natural elements of cognitive science can be found. The lived body is the locus where the close relationship between Lieb and Körper, experience and its grounding, takes place. Varela claims that “once the constitution of natural objects is adequately thematised in the phenomenological realm, pure experiences can also be considered as belonging to a psychological consciousness and hence belonging to an organism. In this precise sense data rooted in lived first-hand experiences are intrinsically open to a non-reductive naturalization” (Varela 1997, p.369). Consequently, neurophenomenology considers issues of embodiment central and proposes a circulation of mutual or reciprocal constraints between the natural and the phenomenological: “phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience and their counterparts in cognitive science relate to each other through reciprocal constraints” (Varela 1997, p.369).
The nature of the sought for circulation is none other than one of mutual constraints between both accounts, including both the potential bridges and contradictions between them. The unresolved middle ground and the circulation between the terms are, by necessity, where the various views and approaches to mutual circulation will separate themselves out. (Varela 1997, p.370)
Through the use of mutual constraints, neurophenomenology and the enactive approach to cognitive science enable an understanding of the material and mental aspects of experience that do not stand in contradiction but, instead, mutually inform each other. In application to the experience of CFS, rather than treat these two realms of experience as distinct this approach allows for research that is more comprehensive and research that attends to the condition on terms that are in closer alignment with the experience of CFS.
Mutual constraints are not to be conflated with a correlative approach or an analytic isomorphism which suggests that there is a locus in the brain where neural activity is isomorphic to phenomenality (Varela 1997, pp.370-71). Varela considers phenomenal isomorphism, in which neural causal mechanisms must be isomorphic to phenomenal data, more adequate than analytic isomorphism but questions whether it is possible to separate phenomenal description and natural explanation in the manner assumed by these approaches. Instead, neurophenomenology requires that reciprocal constraints be mutually generative passages.
A more demanding approach will require that the isomorphic idea is taken one step forward to provide the passage where the mutual constraints not only share logical and epistemic accountability, but they are further required to be operationally generative, that is, where there is a mutual circulation and illumination between these domains proper to be in a position to generate in a principled manner reduction analysis and eidetic descriptions that are rooted in an explicit manner to biological emergence. (Varela 1997, p.372)
It is in the Körperlieb that such a mutual reciprocity without explanatory residue exists.
Varela puts forward three levels of mutual constraint that provide a generative triple-braid to link the natural and the phenomenal:
Ι) the formal level since eidetic descriptive structures and implementation partake of the same mode of ideality and hence are effectively on common ground;
ΙΙ) the natural bodily process at the right level spanning across two levels of global emergence and local mechanisms that assure a direct relevance to both the psychological content if examined phenomenologically and to a detailed scientific examination;
ΙΙΙ) the pragmatic level of the Lieb/Körper transition since it, and it alone, can have a situated bi-valence, that excludes neither and provides the relevant basis or data for the preceding threads. (Varela 1997, p.380)
Lutz presents these threads as follows:
1. phenomenological data and invariant structural features of experience (thread #1)
2. neural and somatic substrates (thread #2)
3. formal dynamical models (thread #3) (Lutz 2002a p.149)
Varela (1997, p.381) proposes that these three factors, functioning as the core of neurophenomenology, will provide the foundation for a non-dual philosophy and a science of consciousness. Unlike dualism the neurophenomenological triple braid approach to the ‘explanatory gap’ does not require extra ontological entities. This pragmatic approach instead aims to attend to the multi-perspectival circulation between the natural and the phenomenological (Lutz 2002a).
With respect to formal descriptive structures, Varela proposes a parallel between phenomenology and mathematics. The nature of this link, he suggests, will be clarified in the process of neurophenomenological research but his principal claim here is that the invariants of experience can be discovered and that this will allow a formalisation of the phenomenal (Varela 1997, p.373). ‘Phenomenal invariants’ refer to the “categorical features of experience that are phenomenologically describable both across and within the various forms of lived experience” (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.32). In his original formulation of invariants, Husserl drew inspiration from the calculus of variations to form the perceptual, individual and imaginative universal aspects of the concept of invariants (Depraz 1999b, pp. 101-102). Varela frames these differently.
Francisco distinguished three scales of lived time: the 1 scale, of about one second, which corresponds to the time of a conscious moment and to which “nowness” belongs; the 1/10 scale corresponding to minimal separable perceptual events; and the 10 scale corresponding to narrative time. (Rudrauf et al. 2003, p.52)
In the research interviews I am principally concerned with events on the 1 and 10 scale, the now and the narrative time scales.
Importantly, neurophenomenology does not require the invariants of experience to be fixed. Rather, the creativity of consciousness causes invariants to continually emerge.
With respect to the relationship between local and global emergence, Varela claims that neurophenomenology can draw on the language and mechanisms of non-linear dynamical systems. These dynamical tools are creating radical re-configurations within the domains of ontology and reshaping classical mechanical views of causality and explanation (Varela 1997, p.374-5).
The key point I wish to retain here is that these major scientific developments break from the traditional opposition between matter and life, and provide substance to a modern biology where such dialectical contraries are simply no longer relevant. Similarly, in the cognitive sciences, the traditional opposition between body and mind, or between the biological organic base and the mental and cognitive properties is also simply erased as a fundamental gap. In both cases the erasure of the traditional ontological barriers is done in a non-reductive manner since the new theoretical moves actually retain the specific properties of both traditional regions. (Varela 1997, p.375)
In this way, theoretically and methodologically, neurophenomenology makes use of an embodied large-scale dynamic approach to the neurophysiology and neurodynamics of consciousness (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.31).
On the pragmatic level, by considering invariant experience to be emergent, neurophenomenology stresses the need not to treat the phenomenological domain as a fixed corpus of knowledge but, rather, one that is open to systematic investigation and continuous refinement.
The adoption of a properly phenomenological attitude is an important methodological prerequisite for exploring original constitutive structures and categories of experience, such as egocentric space, temporality and the subject/object duality, or spontaneous affective and associative features of the temporal flow of experience rooted in the lived body. (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.38)
This requires the systematic production and reproduction of phenomenological descriptions. Methods for the study of the phenomenological need to be precise and precisely distinguished from the methods of experimental cognitive psychology and the attitude of philosophical phenomenology (Varela 1997, p.376). Such a pragmatic requires the development of a new skill and opens up a new realm of data. It needs to be systematically theorised and cultivated in training over time (Varela 1997, p.377).
This means not only (i) that the subject is actively involved in generating and describing specific phenomenal invariants of experience, and (ii) that the neuroscientist is guided by these first-person data in the analysis and interpretation of physiological data, but also (iii) that the (phenomenologically enriched) neuroscientific analyses provoke revisions and refinements of the phenomenological accounts, as well as facilitate the subject’s becoming aware of previously inaccessible or phenomenally unavailable aspects of his or her mental life. (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.33)
In this manner, gathering first-person subjective data from trained subjects becomes an heuristic strategy and constraint on the process of identifying and theorising the physiological processes relevant to consciousness. The result of this circulation equally informs the conscious experience of the subject (Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.32).
For examples of neurophenomenological research and a discussion of how the present research is positioned in relation to those studies, see Appendix K.
(Lutz and Thompson 2003, p.32)
(Varela 1997, p.377).
(Lutz 2002a).
Lutz 2002 is critical