The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16.4 (2002) 264-272

Homing in on the Range:
Comments on Mark Johnson's "Cowboy Bill Rides Herd on the Range of Consciousness"

Robert E. Innis
University of Massachusetts-Lowell

Mark Johnson has raised with exquisite compression and breadth a set of deep and perplexing issues of more than merely academic interest. They revolve around the question of how we are to construct a phenomenologically adequate and empirically supported account of the human organism as a distinctively configured, indeed both internally differentiated and stratified, conscious self.

I will highlight in my comments four hinges on which the swinging door of Johnson's discussion hangs and turns: (1) the relationship between the empirical and the phenomenological, (2) the notion of embodiment, (3) the relations between the concept of self and the concept of consciousness, and (4) the semiotic dimension. I will in the course of my remarks also gesture toward some extensions and parallels that indicate the further implications of what is at stake when we venture out on the lonesome plain of consciousness, surrounded by "our" or "our fellow" dogies.

1. The Empirical and the Phenomenological

Following William James's lead, Johnson clearly and rightly sees that any comprehensive attempt to deal with the twin and intertwined [End Page 264] enigmas of consciousness and human selfhood must merge "science with phenomenology." There are a number of questions we could ask here. First, there is the question of priority and the conceptual scope of the two orders of empirical investigation and descriptive or phenomenological analysis. The "cognitive neuroscience" that Johnson adduces, represented in the case at hand by Damasio's well-known work, investigates the human organism first and foremost as a system defined by the presence of certain cognitive "organs" located in the brain, which is clearly a functionally differentiated spatio-temporal object subject to various electro-chemical states and changes of state. Their ensemble makes up the enabling conditions (Polanyi: boundary conditions) of the various functions and powers of consciousness.

But, it seems to me, we only know what to look for in this ensemble if we have performed a full phenomenological inventory of consciousness as experienced. Such an inventory is guided by certain conceptual decisions about what the significant joints are in the plenum of consciousness. The Jamesian frame (there are clearly other possible frames for delineating the groundlines of consciousness) is guided by certain root metaphors that his project lives or dies by: consciousness is a stream not a lake (Peirce's metaphor), a process of tying up, of binding together (also of "releasing"), characterized by "warmth" or "coolness" of self-appropriating thoughts (or thinkings), of enfolded and enfolding feelings, and so forth. My first point is that cognitive neuroscience is actually dependent on a phenomenology of some sort, understood in the broad sense of a descriptively adequate model. Once we give up, which Johnson and Damasio so clearly do, a kind of cognitive science version of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness with its obsession with locating consciousness at a specific "place" in the brain, we are in a position to begin a large scale enterprise not of reduction but of correlation. In this sense, it is the prior phenomenological account that functions as the essential heuristic device for cognitive neuroscience. It guarantees that cognitive neuroscience looks for the right things and relies upon an adequate set of categories. Rather than philosophy's looking to cognitive neuroscience for support, it is the other way around. Indeed, we even need to perform the essentially hermeneutical task of recognizing symptoms of either defects or the distinguishing features of achievements before we can set up our experimental procedures for investigating their neural substrates.

The medical side of cognitive neuroscience (including the biopsychological side) has both a purely theoretical and a practical or therapeutic dimension. The theoretical side, to the degree that it is defined by treating the brain as an electro-chemical system of systems, is parasitic upon a prior hermeneutics...