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Neurophenomenology and the Spontaneity of Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Hanna  and
Evan Thompson
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Extract

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable (Nagel1980, p. 150).

My reading of the situation is that our inability to come up with an intelligible conception of the relation between mind and body is a sign of the inadequacy of our present concepts, and that some development is needed (Nagel1998, p. 338).

Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain (Kelso 1995, p. 288).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 29: The Problem of Consciousness - New Essays in Phenomenological Philosophy of Mind , 2003 , pp. 133 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2003

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Footnotes

1

We gratefully acknowledge the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson, which provided a grant for the support of this work. ET is also supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Canada Research Chair, and the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences. For helpful comments on portions of earlier drafts, we thank Stephen Biggs, James Campbell, Bryan Hall, Eric Olson, Daniel Stoljar, Jessica Wilson, and the members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Special thanks are due to the participants in the miniconference, “Beyond the Hard Problem: Consequences of Neurophenomenology,” in Boulder CO, May 2001, particularly David Chalmers and Alva Noë, for intensive discussion of this material and other closely related topics. Finally, we wish to thank the faculty and students at CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, especially Jean Petitot, for stimulating discussion when this material was presented at CREA in March 2003. We dedicate this paper to the late Francisco Varela, who inspired many of its main ideas.

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