The mind as a whole escapes objective studies because belief in mind- independent reality is self-contradictory and by definition excludes subjective experience (awareness, 'consciousness') from reality. The mind's center therefore vanishes in studies which imply exclusive objectivism or empiricism. This conceptual difficulty can be counteracted by acknowledging that all mental and world structures arise within an unstructured origin- and-matrix for knowledge-structures and beliefs. The mind's structure is thus at the center of reality. Use of such a zero-structure reference can also (...) help to clarify some related conceptual difficulties and to bridge the gap between the 'two cultures'. (shrink)

The generation problem is to explain how material configurations or processes can produce conscious experience. David Chalmers urges that this is what makes the problem of consciousness really difficult. He proposes to side-step the generation problem by proposing that consciousness is an absolutely fundamental feature of the world. I am inclined to agree that the generation problem is real and believe that taking consciousness to be fundamental is promising. But I take issue with Chalmers about what it is to be (...) a fundamental feature of the world. In fact, I argue that taking the idea seriously ought to lead to some form of panpsychism. Powerful objections have been advanced against panpsychism, but I attempt to outline a form of the doctrine which can evade them. In the end, I suspect that we will face a choice between panpsychism and rethinking the legitimacy of the generation problem itself. (shrink)

Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from neural processes in the brain? These questions are among the most intriguing in all of science.

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

The theoretical approach described in a series of articles (Jarvilehto, 1998a,b,c, 1999, 2000) is developed further in relation to the problems of emotion, consciousness, and brain activity. The approach starts with the claim that many conceptual confusions in psychology are due to the postulate that the organism and the environment are two interacting systems (”Two systems theory”). The gist of the approach is the idea that the organism and environment form a unitary system which is the basis of subjective experience. (...) This starting point leads to the conception of emotions as reorganization of the organism-environment system, and entails that emotion and knowledge are only different aspects of the same process. In the first part of the article the general outline of the approach is sketched, and in a subsequent second part (Jarvilehto, 2001) the relations between emotions, consciousness, and brain activity will be discussed in detail. (shrink)

Sometimes, after years of painstaking work, someone presents a startling argument that seems to suddenly snatch the ground right out from under your feet. And it's back to square one. Such a conceptual trapdoor caught me by surprise a few years ago. For decades, I had been convinced it is simply inconceivable that subjectivity -- the interior experience of how consciousness feels -- could possibly emerge from a previously wholly objective world, that mind could evolve from ‘dead’ matter. It seemed (...) to me that the arguments of materialist philosophers, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists invariably missed the point. They always began with an assumption of ontological objectivity or physicality, and proceeded to show that that must be the source of consciousness. Well, of course, it had to be -- given their starting assumption. But what they were talking about wasn't consciousness at all. It was usually either some neural correlation, some computer analogue, or some complex and abstract linguistic deconstruction. Whatever their approach, the first-person experience of consciousness -- it's subjective feel -- always slipped through their grasp. They were looking at the problem from the third-person perspective -- from objectivity. And you can't get to here from there. (shrink)

As a method of oppositional reading, deconstruction argues that a text, and by extension any object of observation including the self, is characterized by disunity rather than unity. The present paper proposes that if we define the self as having a dimension that is not an object of observation, but is a pure witness, or what in Eastern cultures is known as ‘pure consciousness’, then deconstruction can be seen to undo in practice what it claims to do in theory. This (...) reversal has implications for the postmodernist self, which is thought to be fragmented by a multiplicity of social voices and the loss of a unifying depth of feeling. Through an analysis of the deconstructive notions of consciousness and language, this paper suggests that fragmentation can in effect take the postmodernist self toward a sense of wholeness. In theory deconstruction undermines the unity of language and consciousness, while in practice it invites a nonconceptual response similar to that of aesthetic experience. The deconstructive ‘freeplay’ of language empties out the meaning of a text and leads the reader toward a state of being anterior to thought, toward an experience of awareness itself as opposed to its phenomenal content. (shrink)

In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and communications theory, a view has developed which understands conscious experience as experience which is 'reflected' back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991), but the 'hermeneutic objection' would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the hermeneutic circle. -/- The consciousness we (...) humans experience is developed only within the context of crossing the 'symbolic threshold' (Percy 1975; Deacon 1997) and one of the earliest and most important symbols we acquire is that of the self, or 'the subject of experience'. It is only when we achieve self-awareness that the world, as such, comes to exist for us as an object (which contains categories and sub-categories of objects). Any consciousness imputed to prelinguistic stages of development is based on projection and guesswork, since we can know nothing directly of it. It can be said that any experience which does not separate an inner subject from an outer world is probably a continuum of sensation in which environmental stimulus and instinctive response are experienced as a unity; it may be 'lived experience' but it is experience 'lived' non-consciously. -/- Speech requires assertion and by learning to speak we find ourselves asserting, in essence, our selves into the world. The narrative form of language allows us to develop life stories, self-knowledge, and, most important, narrative memory coincident with narrative time. All this is made possible with the intersubjective 'net' of language which allows us to know ourselves by first identifying with the viewpoint of others; and, later, such allows us to identify with other minds as we anticipate their reception our communication. These three, assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity are the essence of what language is and are the keystones that make culture possible outside of nature. (shrink)