The Science of Subjectivity

J. Neisser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349499861
  9781137466617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137466624
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Mente y cuerpo en filosofía

Can neuroscience help explain the first-person perspective? The Science of Subjectivity delves into the nature of experience, arguing that unconscious subjectivity is a reality. Neisser identifies the biological roots of the first-person, showing how ancient systems of animal navigation enable creatures like us to cope with our worldly concerns.

1

Introduction: Consciousness, Subjectivity, and the History of the Organism

This book is inspired by the deeply historical science of the organism found in contemporary biology. Since P.S. Churchland’s Neurophilosophy (1986), “neuro” has become a familiar prefix. Neuroethics, neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, neurophenomenology and the neurodiversity movement are all contemporary expressions of an intellectual zeitgeist. A neurobiological image of mind and person is emerging, a picture in which we are hide-bound animal subjects, neurologically enabled, ecologically situated, and historically conditioned. But the true philosophical payoff of the newfangled neuroscience remains unclear. What does it contribute, exactly, to our understanding of human experience? In particular, can it really help us understand how anything like a first-person perspective could arise in the world? (Levine, 2001). My answer is yes. The new biology provides real insight into the nature of “for-me” subjectivity and how it is elaborated in the life of an animal. Evolutionary developmental biology offers the framework for an historical account of the way first-person experience arises and how it functions to enable organisms like us to navigate their world. In short, subjectivity is historically conditioned embodiment. In what follows I set forth a philosophical analysis of the first-person perspective, its central place in mental life, and its probable neurobiological basis. My aim is to articulate a conceptually powerful and empirically informed account of subjectivity that will be relevant to audiences across the humanities and life sciences.

The content of subjective experience is vast and diverse. Fleeting qualities succeed one another with an “inconceivable rapidity” (Hume). It is notoriously difficult even to describe what-it-is-like, let alone to explain it. Nevertheless, experience has a certain minimal structure, consisting in the way things are apprehended first-hand, through a first-person perspective. No matter what life is like, it is always for-me. I begin by arguing that the subjectivity of experience – it’s first-person aspect – is a matter of its form, not its qualitative content. First-person mental states consist in a structure in which “I” am specified by experience but not represented in experience. Roughly, a given representation is for-me insofar as the question who does not and cannot arise. This basic idea guides a naturalistic approach to embodied subjectivity firmly grounded in philosophy of biology and psychology. Part One of the manuscript, “Subjectivity considered as the first-person perspective,” focuses on articulating an analysis of subjectivity culled from philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Part Two, “Subjectivity in the neurobiological image,” moves to identify an empirical framework for explaining subjectivity from the perspective of biology, neurophilosophy, and neurophenomenology.

1   The idea and the approach

The claim that experience essentially involves a subjective point of view has been a constant theme in the literature on consciousness (e.g., Kriegel, 2009; Zahavi, 2005; Levine, 2001; Nagel, 1974). What is needed is an analysis of the relation between subjectivity and consciousness, showing how experiences are “lived” but not necessarily known, doing justice to the idea that the first-person perspective involves a distinctively “direct” kind of representation. I argue that although the first-person perspective is essential for consciousness, the two are not equivalent because subjective thought can take place without awareness. An adequate conception of subjectivity should be capable of extending to a class of for-me mental states that remain unconscious or pre-conscious. In short, while conscious awareness is sufficient for subjectivity, it is not necessary.

It is usual to distinguish representations that are for-me from representations that are merely in me as information processes. The for-me/in me distinction is supposed to cleanly separate the conscious and subjective arena from the unconscious and “subpersonal” domain of cognition (e.g., Kriegel, 2009). But I argue that the for-me/in me distinction crosscuts the conscious/unconscious distinction because there is something it is like, e.g., to have an unconscious emotion. If there is something it is like, this must be for-me or first-person. This reveals an inherent tension in standard ways of thinking about subjective consciousness. It is understood as the presence of phenomenal quality (what it is like for me), but at the same time it is said to consist in an awareness of phenomenal quality (knowledge of what it is like for me). I argue that the former does not require the latter. For-me mental states can exist in me, without my knowledge. Thus, subjectivity runs deeper than conscious awareness (cf. Block, 1995, 2007, 2011). Careful reconsideration of the debate surrounding the so-called Mesh Argument in cognitive science indicates that there is an empirical basis for the idea that there are subjective mental states of which the subject is unaware. And while there is good evidence for the existence of unconscious emotions and other affective processes, neuropsychological research is hampered by the assumption that only conscious thought can have a first-person form (e.g., LeDoux, 2004).

In what, then, does subjectivity consist? The point of entry is the notion of identification-free self-reference (Evans, 1982). In the first-person or subjective mode of presentation, the question to whom the experience is presented cannot arise. Pain is a primary example (Shoemaker, 1981). There is no identifying judgment or inference involved in moving from the experience of pain to “I am in pain.” With respect to subjectivity, consciousness of pain is equivalent to the thought “I am in pain.” Note that the analysis works for other qualia, too: with respect to the subjective component, the experience of reddishness is equivalent to the thought “I see red.” Using identification-free reference as my guide, I argue that the distinctive architecture of the first person consists in the way the “I” of experience is always absent. I develop this idea further by showing how for-me representation consists in a holistic or gestalt scheme in which what-it-is-like is always experienced “from the inside.” Particular contents are nested within the ongoing global subjective scheme. Thus, subjective experience is apprehended as for-me, such that an “I” is specified by the structure of the experience itself.

Considering subjectivity as the identification-free form of the first-person perspective makes a functional analysis possible. Ecologically considered, subjectivity serves an orienting function for an animal in the environment of its concern. Orientation (or coordination) is essential to the notion of identification-free self-reference. The “I” of experience is specified in an identification-free manner in virtue of being specified only in relation to the world (Ismael, 2009; Cassam, 1997). Subjective orientation, then, is the animal’s valenced sense of directionality in its local environment. But baseline subjective orientation does not require a self that is specifically conceptualized as an “I”. Nor does it require full-blown reflective consciousness or metacognitive awareness of itself specifically as qualitative or internal content. It need only enact a first-person point of view. First-person subjectivity specifies “where you are coming from” in the practical situation. It is the way an individual is engaged in life, the basis on which things matter. Subjective engagement with the world is sometimes called coping.

The search for an explanation of concerned coping leads to evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo, or the “expanded synthesis”). The developmental function of subjectivity is learning to cope with the environment of concern. Therefore, the basic problem for the science of subjectivity is animal navigation, and the model explanation is the cognitive map. The first-person perspective partly consists in “finding your bearings;” i.e., in navigation dynamically linked with affective systems. This baseline affective engagement with the world is part of the deep structure of for-me mental states, governing the first-person point of view. Baseline subjectivity in this sense is achieved by species across vertebrate phyla and beyond, irrespective of reflective ability. The baseline structure of the first-person perspective appears as a range of diverse but related neuropsychological character states. Evolutionary developmental biology suggests that this shared structure is rooted in a set of homologous mechanisms, operating under historical and developmental constraints (Jacobs, 2012; Griffiths, 2007). The mechanisms of concerned engagement are also currently investigated within the research program known as “affective neuroscience” (Panksepp, 2012, 2007, 2005, 1998) which, I argue, should be reinterpreted in light of the evo-devo framework. Thus, my approach in The Science of Subjectivity is to tackle the problem of subjectivity head on by (1) providing structural and dynamic analyses in terms of the first-person perspective, (2) identifying neuropsychological functions for the structural and dynamic forms, and (3) connecting these functions with underlying mechanisms via the fundamentally historical and comparative methods of evolutionary developmental biology.

The account must do justice to the way subjectivity is contingent on our particular form of embodiment, and this means moving beyond straight functionalism in philosophy of mind. An essential feature of functionalism is the notion of multiple realization: the idea that functions can be carried out in many different ways. For example, a robot vacuum cleaner could navigate the apartment without any attendant subjectivity in performing this function. This illustrates the subtle sense in which (pure) functionalism remains a “disembodied” theory of mind, inadequate to the first-person perspective. Although it holds that every mental state is realized in some kind of embodiment, functionalism gives no explanatory weight to these mere “implementation” details. Translating functionalism to a biological context has yielded evolutionary psychology in its mainstream form (Cosmides & Tooby, 1991). According to that approach, each neuropsychological feature is an adaptation, and explaining it consists in (a) identifying a functional role in the contemporary organism, and (b) reconstructing a scenario in which the capacity to perform the function might have been selected for. The evo-devo framework moves beyond evolutionary psychology by incorporating homology thinking about structure and lineage (Ereshefsky, 2012). “Homology thinking” names a set of historical and comparative explanatory strategies, used throughout biology, capable of distinguishing the different paths by which biological structures develop, and how these historical differences affect the life of the organism in distinctive ways. I draw on homology thinking to formulate a new approach to embodiment that incorporates elements of both functionalism and embodied holism. In a slogan, embodiment is history.

This explanatory framework bears implications for the search for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC). I approach key NCC research (in particular, the binocular rivalry paradigm) from the perspective of philosophy of science rather than in the usual way, through the lens of philosophy of mind. Doing so, I argue, reveals that the binocular rivalry experiments are part of a larger mechanistic strategy aimed at manipulating component causes within complex biological systems (Neisser, 2012a; 2012b). Philosophical interpreters of NCC research seriously misrepresent the actual empirical practice by framing it as a search for local neural activity that bears a semantic or logical relation to conscious experience. I argue that NCC research is best characterized as an attempt to locate a causally relevant neural mechanism and not as an effort to isolate a discrete neural representation, the content of which correlates with some actual experience. Reflection reveals that the standard conception of the NCC is inadequate precisely because it omits to consider the first-person phenomenology of subjective experience (Noe & Thompson, 2004). The account of subjectivity offered here is more phenomenologically valid because it indicates how isolated sensory representations might become nested within an ongoing, holistically structured first-person context. Thus, the causal interpretation of NCC research that I offer fits well with the evo-devo framework. In this picture, mechanisms identified first through homology and comparative biology are further investigated through manipulation and intervention.

To be “phenomenlogically valid,” the account should show how key features of the first-person perspective arise. One such feature, emphasized and carefully analyzed in the Husserlian tradition, is temporality. Subjectivity doesn’t just take place at a time; it is itself a temporal articulation of intentional content. Husserl identified this temporal dimension of subjectivity and characterized it as a continuous structure of protention and retention, a “direct” intuitive grasp of the about-to-happen and the just-past (1962/1977). The sense of temporal flow does not take its own, separate intentional object (it is not the consciousness of time), but instead is part of the “microstructure” of the first-person perspective (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012). I argue that temporality is what happens when animals like us navigate the world of concern. The first-person perspective points back, as it were, to a temporal position relative to events. The identification-free structure of subjectivity partly consists in the “here-and-now of things,” a subject-position which is specified without being explicitly represented. Thus, subjective temporality does something. It orders particular contents within a larger gestalt. By treating temporality as an aspect of animal navigation, I provide an example of how to put the neuro in neurophenomenology, and I contrast this approach with the enactive account offered by Thompson (2007).

In pursuing this line of inquiry, I also argue against the standard philosophical view about the relation between subjectivity and consciousness. In the recent literature, subjectivity is primarily understood as direct awareness of qualia, a conception that renders subjectivity a special problem for philosophy of mind, over and above the problem about qualia. On this basis, Levine (2001) has suggested that the hardest part of explaining consciousness is explaining how anything like a subjective point of view could arise in the natural world. I agree with the “friends of qualia” that we will not have a complete scientific explanation of consciousness as long as the problem of qualia persists. But I argue that inner awareness is not the essence of subjective thought and that the first-person perspective can be treated independently of the problem of qualia. So I reject the core assumption, shared by researchers of all stripes and on both sides of the Atlantic, that subjectivity is inherently conscious. But subjectivity is partly constitutive of consciousness, and explaining it therefore contributes to an explanation of consciousness. The neurobiological image presents a portrait of a minimally cognitive first-person perspective that demands attribution of subjectivity to a very wide range of animals. When neurobiological subjectivity is understood as the way animals learn to cope with life, its central importance can also be seen. The Science of Subjectivity, then, also provides a naturalistic and phenomenologically valid interpretation of the Knowledge Argument (Jackson, 1982).

2   Relation between this study and others in its field

Within contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, the agenda was set by Levine (2001), who argued that no representational approach, and in particular no “higher-order thought” (HOT) theory of the general kind offered by Rosenthal (2000) or Lycan (2004), can explain subjectivity. This theme has been further pursued in an important monograph by Kriegel, entitled Subjective Consciousness: A self-representational theory (2009). Like Levine, Kriegel holds that subjectivity just is qualitative awareness. On his view, a mental state is subjectively conscious if and only if it represents itself in the right way. Kriegel’s work contrasts with mine in two main ways: (1) He holds that subjectivity is reflexively structured such that the representation comes to take itself as part of its own content, whereas I argue that the distinctive mark of subjectivity is the peculiar lack of reflexivity displayed in identification-free self-reference. (2) He equates subjectivity with awareness of what-it-s-like, denying the possibility of unconscious subjectivity. I argue that awareness is not the essence of for-me-ness and that unconscious subjectivity is a fact of life. Thus, my approach is complementary to the HOT theory, which I take to be an account of our knowledge of our own subjectivity. Conscious states are subjective states we are aware of having, and I hold that this awareness can be understood as metacognition (Neisser, 2004; Koriat, 2000). A mental state is metacognitive if it is directed at other mental states of the cognizer. To be consciously aware, then, is to know (represent) your own subjectivity.

The Science of Subjectivity also connects with the literature on enactivism and neurophenomenology. Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) presents a sophisticated mixture of phenomenology and philosophy of biology, the most complete expression of neurophenomenology to date. Thompson not only questions the received conception of subjectivity, but attempts to rethink it. He formulates the issue in terms of the “body-body problem,” the problem of relating one’s subjectively lived body to the living body that one is. To address this version of the problem, Thompson articulates the theory of sensorimotor subjectivity according to which bodily self-consciousness arises through the dynamic interaction of brain, body, and world. Thompson finds a quite general analogy between mind and life, and uses this to develop a phenomenological version of autopoeisis (self-organization). In contrast, I argue for a specific causal-historical connection between animal navigation and subjective coping. While his paradigm is the biological cell or amoeba, mine is the cognitive map. This also points to a more fundamental difference with Thompson. In the end, his interest in autopoeisis is ontological not explanatory. In particular, Thompson holds that transcendental consciousness precedes “objectivity” and all scientific cognition. The result is a deeply non-naturalistic brand of emergentism. In contrast, I hold that the evo-devo framework promises a true science of the organism that can play a straightforwardly explanatory role in a theory of subjectivity.

Part I

Subjectivity Considered as the First-Person Perspective

2

Subjectivity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Consciousness, Subjectivity, and the History of the Organism
• Part I  Subjectivity Considered as the First-Person Perspective
• Part II   Subjectivity in the Neurobiological Image
• Postscript: Neurophilosophy, Darwinian Naturalism, and Subjectivity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index