Reflexive Monism

This paper provides an initial, multidimensional map of the complex relationships among consciousness, mind, brain and the external world in a way that follows both the contours of everyday experience and the findings of science. It then demonstrates how this reflexive monist map can be used to evaluate the utility and resolve some of the oppositions of the many other “isms” that currently populate consciousness studies. While no conventional, one-dimensional “ism” such as physicalism can do justice to this web of relationships, physicalism, functionalism, dualism, neutral monism, and dual-aspect monism can all be seen to provide useful ways of understanding different aspects of the relationships among consciousness, mind, brain and the external world when these are viewed in either a first- or a third-person way from within this web of relationships by sentient creatures such as ourselves. For example, physicalism and functionalism provide a useful understanding of consciousness, mind, brain and external world when viewed from a third-person perspective, while neutral monism provides a useful way of understanding first- versus third-person views of external phenomena. On the other hand, dual-aspect monism provides a useful way of understanding first- versus third-person views of mind, including Eastern versus Western views of mind.  Dual-aspect monism also provides a useful understanding of the “unconscious ground of being” that gives rise to, supports and embeds all these observable phenomena. For an integrated understanding one needs to understand how these phenomena and relationships combine into an integrated whole.

Understanding Consciousness, second edition provides a unique survey and evaluation of consciousness studies, along with an original analysis of consciousness that combines scientific findings, philosophy and common sense.

Building on the widely praised first edition of the book, this new edition adds fresh research, and deepens the original analysis in a way that reflects some of the fundamental changes in the understanding of consciousness that have taken place over the last ten years.

The book is divided into three parts; Part I surveys current theories of consciousness, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. Part II reconstructs an understanding of consciousness from first principles, starting with its phenomenology, and leading to a closer examination of how conscious experience relates to the world described by physics and information processing in the brain. Finally, Part III deals with fundamental issues such as what consciousness is and does, and how it fits into the evolving universe. As the structure of the book moves from a basic overview of the field to a successively deeper analysis, it can be used both for those new to the subject and for more established researchers.

Understanding Consciousness tells a story with a beginning, middle and end in a way that integrates the philosophy of consciousness with the science. Overall, the book provides a unique perspective on how to address the problems of consciousness and as such will be of great interest to psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and other professionals concerned with mind/body relationships, and all who are interested in this subject.

Dualist and Reductionist theories of mind disagree about whether or not consciousness can be reduced to a state of or function of the brain. They assume, however, that the contents of consciousness are separate from the external physical world as-perceived. According to the present paper this assumption has no foundation either in everyday experience or in science. Drawing on evidence for perceptual projection in both interoceptive and exteroceptive sense modalities, the case is made that the physical world as-perceived is a construct of perceptual processing and, therefore, part of the contents of consciousness. A finding which requires a Reflexive rather than a Dualist or Reductionist model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world. The physical world as-perceived may, in turn be thought of as a biologically useful model of the world as described by physics. Redrawing the boundaries of consciousness to include the physical world as-perceived undermines the conventional separation of the 'mental' from the physical', and with it the very foundation of the Dualist-Reductionist debate. The alternative Reflexive model departs radically from current conventions, with consequences for many aspects of consciousness theory and research. Some of the consequences which bear on the internal consistency and intuitive plausibility of the model are explored, e.g. the causal sequence in perception, representationalism, a suggested resolution of the Realism versus Idealism debate, and the way manifest differences between physical events as-perceived and other conscious events (images, dreams, etc.) are to be construed.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

Abstract (added for 2013 upload): This chapter compares classical dualist and reductionist views of phenomenal consciousness with an alternative, reflexive way of viewing the relations amongst consciousness, brain and the external physical world. It argues that dualism splits the universe in two fundamental ways: in viewing phenomenal consciousness as having neither location nor extension it splits consciousness from the material world, and subject from object. Materialist reductionism views consciousness as a brain state or function (located and extended in the brain) which eliminates the consciousness/material world split, but retains the split of subject from object. The chapter argues that neither dualism nor reductionism accurately describes the phenomenal world; consequently they each provide a misleading understanding of phenomenal consciousness. Reflexive monism follows the contours of everyday experience, thereby allowing a more unified understanding of how phenomenal consciousness relates to the brain and external physical world that is consistent both with the findings of science and with common sense. The chapter goes on to consider how phenomenal objects relate to real objects, perceptual projection, how phenomenal space relates to physical space, whether the brain is in the world or the world in the brain, and why this matters for science.

My target article (henceforth referred to as TA) presents evidence for causal interactions between consciousness and brain and some standard ways of accounting for this evidence in clinical practice and neuropsychological theory.  I also point out some of the problems of understanding such causal interactions that are not addressed by standard explanations.  Most of the residual problems have to do with how to cross the “explanatory gap” from consciousness to brain. I then list some of the reasons why the route across this gap suggested by physicalism won't work, in spite of its current popularity in consciousness studies. My own suggested route across the explanatory gap is more subterranean, where consciousness and brain can be seen to be dual aspects of a unifying, psychophysical mind.  Some of the steps on this deeper route still have to be filled in by empirical research. But (as far as I can judge) there are no gaps that cannot be filled—just a different way of understanding consciousness, mind, brain and their causal interaction, with some interesting consequences for our understanding of free will.  The commentaries on TA examined many aspects of my thesis viewed from both Western and Eastern perspectives. This reply focuses on how dual-aspect monism compares with currently popular alternatives such as “nonreductive physicalism”, clarifies my own approach, and reconsiders how well this addresses the “hard” problems of consciousness. We re-examine how conscious experiences relate to their physical/functional correlates and whether useful analogies can be drawn with other, physical relationships that appear to have dual-aspects.  We also examine some fundamental differences between Western and Eastern thought about whether the existence of the physical world or the existence of consciousness can be taken for granted (with consequential differences about which of these is “hard” to understand). I then suggest a form of dual-aspect Reflexive Monism that might provide a path between these ancient intellectual traditions that is consistent with science and with common sense.

Additional Note for 2012 upload on Academia.edu: This reply responds to thoughtful commentaries on the target article by John Kihlstrom, Todd Feinberg, Steve Torrance, Robert van Gulick, Jeffrey Gray and K. Ramakrisna Rao. One commentary by Ron Chrisley and Aaron Sloman seriously misrepresented my views and then proceeded to criticize their own misrepresentation in ways that I make clear in my response. Ten years after its initial publication, as far as I ca tell, the analysis of consciousness-brain causal interactions presented in "How could conscious experience affect brains?" still conforms closely to both the findings of science and to everyday experience.

Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in recent decades, been resurrected in modern form. In this paper I discuss how some of its basic features differ from both dualism and variants of physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current Western thought. I pay particular attention to the ontological status and seeming “out-thereness” of the phenomenal world and to how the “phenomenal world” relates to the “physical world”, the “world itself”, and processing in the brain. In order to place the theory within the context of current thought and debate, I address questions that have been raised about reflexive monism in recent commentaries and also evaluate competing accounts of the same issues offered by “transparency theory” and by “biological naturalism”. I argue that, of the competing views on offer, reflexive monism most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings of science, and common sense.

This is a commentary on Merker, Williford & Rudrauf (2022), "The integrated information theory of consciousness: Unmasked and identified", a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 45, e65. Merker, Williford & Rudrauf argue persuasively that integrated information is not identical to or sufficient for consciousness, and that projective geometries more closely formalize the spatial features of conscious phenomenology. However, these too, are not identical to or sufficient for consciousness. While such third-person specifiable functional theories can describe the many forms of consciousness, they cannot account for its existence. Main Text Merker, Williford & Rudrauf have provided a thoughtful, and, in my view, decisive critique of the IIT claim that "consciousness is one and the same as integrated information" (Tononi, 2008, Oizumi, Albantakis and Tononi, 2014). Rather, Φ (the formal measure of integrated information within IIT) is one measure of network efficiency, that can be applied to network information processing in general. For this reason, information integration efficiency can be doubly dissociated from consciousness. For example, there can there be efficient information flows in complex economic, social and transportation systems that are far removed from those usually thought to have a unified, integrated consciousness, and there is extensive evidence for efficient unconscious integrated information processing in systems that do have consciousness, namely human minds (see e.g., Velmans, 1991, Kihlstrom, 1996). If so, integrated information processing is not a sufficient condition for consciousness.

Alfredo Pereira Jr.’s target essay “The Projective Theory of Consciousness” is an experimental statement, drawing on many diverse sources, exploring how consciousness might be produced by a projective mechanism that results both in private selves and an experienced world.  Unfortunately, pulling together so many unrelated sources and methods means none gets full attention. Furthermore, it seems to me that the uncomfortable breadth of this paper unnecessarily complicates his project; in fact it may hide what it seeks to reveal. If this conglomeration of diverse sources and methods were compared to trees, the reader may feel like the explorer who cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, it may be the author who is so preoccupied with foreground figures that the everpresent background is ultimately obscured.

Physicalists commonly argue that conscious experiences are nothing more than states of the brain, and that conscious qualia are observer-independent, physical properties of the external world.  Although this assumes the ‘mantle of science,’ it routinely ignores the findings of science, for example in sensory physiology, perception, psychophysics, neuropsychology and comparative psychology. Consequently, although physicalism aims to ‘naturalise’ consciousness, it gives an unnatural account of it. It is possible, however, to develop a natural, nonreductive, reflexive model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world.  This paper introduces such a model and how it construes the nature of conscious experience. Within this model the physical world as perceived (the phenomenal world) is viewed as part of conscious experience not apart from it. While in everyday life we treat this phenomenal world as if it is the “physical world”, it is really just one biologically useful representation of what the world is like that may differ in many respects from the world described by physics.  How the world as perceived relates to the world as described by physics can be investigated by normal science (e.g. through the study of sensory physiology, psychophysics and so on).  This model of consciousness appears to be consistent with both third-person evidence of how the brain works and with first-person evidence of what it is like to have a given experience. It also views consciousness as an integral part and natural expression of the world—in a manner true to the spirit (if not to the detail) of Whitehead’s philosophy.

This is a prepublication version of the final chapter from the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. In it I re-examine the basic conditions required for a study of conscious experiences in the light of progress made in recent years in the field of consciousness studies. I argue that neither dualist nor reductionist assumptions about subjectivity versus objectivity and the privacy of experience versus the public nature of scientific observations allow an adequate understanding of how studies of consciousness actually proceed. The chapter examines the sense in which the experimenter is also a subject, the sense in which all experienced phenomena are private and subjective, the different senses in which a phenomenon can nevertheless be public and observations of it objective, and the conditions for intra-subjective and intersubjective repeatability. The chapter goes on to re-examine the empirical method and how methods used in psychology differ from those used in physics. I argue that a reflexive understanding of these relationships supports a form of “critical phenomenology” that fits consciousness studies smoothly into science.

This Introduction to a Journal of Consciousness Studies Special Issue on Monist Alternatives to Physicalism summarises some of the basic problems of Physicalism and common fallacies in arguments for its defence that are found in the philosophical and scientific literature. It then introduces six monist alternatives: 1) a form of emergent panpsychism developed by William Seager; 2) a novel introduction to the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead by Anderson Weekes; 3) a review of current developments in Russellian Monism by Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa; 4) an analysis of dual-aspect monism and its relation to quantum mechanics originally proposed developed by Pauli and Jung and given a modern interpretation by Harald Atmanspacher; 5)  a form of processing monism that might help to resolve ontological differences in Indian philosophy and psychology between dualist Samkya Yoga and nondualist Advaita Vedanta by K. Ramakrisna Rao; and 6) an account of Reflexive Monism, which, viewed as a global system, can incorporate many of the seemingly opposed “isms” that currently populate Consciousness Studies by Max Velmans. Whatever the fundamental nature of Nature might be, it must have the power to give rise to its observable manifestations. Consequently, all the papers in this issue are concerned to give a “natural” account of the relationships among consciousness, mind, and the material world that is entirely consistent with the findings of science, and they all accept that for a unified understanding, mind, consciousness and the material world must have a common base. The aim of the Special Issue is to contribute to a deeper understanding of that base, and to stimulate novel thinking about its nature.

ABSTRACT (first two sentences added for 2013 upload)

This paper focuses on the ontology and intentionality of conscious states (what conscious states are and what they represent). It also gives a critique of reductive physicalism. Physicalists commonly argue that conscious experiences are nothing more than states of the brain, and that conscious qualia are observer-independent, physical properties of the external world.  Although this assumes the ‘mantle of science,’ it routinely ignores the findings of science, for example in sensory physiology, perception, psychophysics, neuropsychology and comparative psychology. Consequently, although physicalism aims to naturalise consciousness, it gives an unnatural account of it. It is possible, however, to develop a natural, nonreductive, reflexive model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world.  This paper introduces such a model and how it construes the nature of conscious experience. Within this model the physical world as perceived (the phenomenal world) is viewed as part of conscious experience not apart from it. While in everyday life we treat this phenomenal world as if it is the “physical world”, it is really just one biologically useful representation of what the world is like that may differ in many respects from the world described by physics.  How the world as perceived relates to the world as described by physics can be investigated by normal science (e.g. through the study of sensory physiology, psychophysics and so on).  This model of consciousness appears to be consistent with both third-person evidence of how the brain works and with first-person evidence of what it is like to have a given experience.  According to the reflexive model, conscious experiences are really how they seem.

There are two quite distinct ways in which events that we normally think of as “physical” relate in an intimate way to events that we normally think of as “psychological”. One intimate relation occurs in exteroception at the point where events in the world become events as-perceived. The other intimate relationship occurs at the interface of conscious experience with its neural correlates in the brain. The chapter examines each of these relationships and positions them within a dual-aspect, reflexive model of how consciousness relates to the brain and external world. The chapter goes on to provide grounds for viewing mind and nature as fundamentally psychophysical, and examines similar views as well as differences in previously unpublished writings of Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
Added note for 2013 upload: the chapter goes on to give an analysis of how first and third person complementarity in psychology both resembles and differs from complementarity in physics, and also summarises how the dual-aspect monism developed by Pauli/Jung and Velmans resembles and differs from the naturalistic dualism (sometimes referred to as double aspect monism) developed by Chalmers.

Over the millennia, there have been irresolvable tensions between monist and dualist thought in both Eastern and Western analyses of the relations among body, mind and consciousness. This paper compares two approaches to resolving such tensions, Reflexive Monism (RM), a model of the self-observing universe that resolves many of the oppositions in Western thought, and K. Ramakrisna Rao’s Eastern, Body-Mind-Consciousness (BMC) “Trident” model, which focuses on the convergences between dualist Samkya Yoga and monist Advaita Vedanta.  According to Reflexive Monism, many opposing analyses of body-mind-consciousness relationships in Western thought can be treated as different (often complementary) views of the one global system by parts of itself, from within itself. According to the BMC Trident model, many of the tensions between dualist Samkya and monist Advaita can be resolved by noting the similarity in their analyses of the human condition and the developmental processes required to provide a release from the limitations of that condition.  In spite of the very different (Western and Eastern) traditions that inform them, there are many convergences between RM and BMC although there are also some major differences, for example in their grounding ontology and their respective analyses of body-mind-consciousness causal relationships. In this paper I examine both the convergences and divergences in detail.

This interview with Richard Bright of Interalia Magazine provides a brief summary of how I define consciousness, whether consciousness is incidental or fundamental, and whether, in the light of recent discoveries in neuroscience, the concept of consciousness need revising. I then give a brief introduction to Reflexive Monism, and we go on to discuss whether there is a “hard problem”, the viability of panpsychism and my distinction between continuity and discontinuity theories about the distribution of consciousness. We then turn to the potential benefits of a more collaborative combination of third-person science with first-person methods of the kind used in contemplative practice and review some of the most important questions facing consciousness studies at this time.

This is the fourth of four online Companions to Velmans, M. (ed.) (2018) Consciousness (Critical Concepts in Psychology), a 4-volume collection of Major Works on Consciousness commissioned by Routledge, London. The Companion (and Volume) begins with a review of mental influences on states of the body and brain (psychogenesis), which are often thought of as theoretically problematic for conventional materialist theories of mind. The evidence is nevertheless extensive, for example in psychosomatic illnesses and studies of the physiological consequences of meditation, imagery, biofeedback and hypnosis. Such effects are also central to developments in psychoneuroimmunology and studies of placebos, dealing not only with how to control for such effects in clinical trials, but with how such effects operate, and how to harness them for the benefit of patients. The Companion then surveys altered states of consciousness, including the conditions for their emergence, their adaptive as well as maladaptive potential, and the influences of culture on how these are understood. The analysis deepens with reviews of the major ways in which consciousness can be usefully transformed, starting with the burgeoning literature on the nature and effects of meditation practices, including their effects on neural dynamics and the varied ways in which they have, in recent years, been incorporated into a range of psychological therapies, focusing particularly on mindfulness and its potential consequences for psychological health. The survey then turns to mystical experiences, which, of all the positive altered states of consciousness, are perhaps the most extraordinary and transformative. Reported over millennia and recognized by William James to combine ineffability with a noetic quality, their generation, effects and interpretation have, once more, become the subject of research. In this connection, we also review the resurgent interest in the use of drugs in the transformation of consciousness focusing particularly on recent research on the clinical and neurophysiological effects of major psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD. It will be apparent that the four Volumes of this Collection cover a vast range of phenomena that cannot comfortably be accommodated into a materialist, reductionist worldview, and so this Companion (and the entire collection) concludes with a diverse sample of non-reductive, integrative theories that offer unifying ways of understanding consciousness, drawing on information theory, neuropsychology, psychodynamics, physics, psychology, parapsychology, and philosophy. As with the other Companions to these Volumes there are many links to background resources (marked in pink) and to the selected readings themselves (marked in blue).

This is a pre-publication version of a paper given at an invitation-only International Symposium on The Return of Consciousness: A new science on old questions, on 14th-15th June, 2015 in Avesta Manor, Sweden, hosted by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation. The paper summarizes the basic differences between dualist, reductionist and reflexive models of perception, clarifies why these differences are important to an understanding of consciousness, and provides references to how these contrasts have entered into philosophical and scientific discussions over the 25 years since they were first introduced in Velmans (1990)  ‘Consciousness, Brain and the Physical World’, Philosophical Psychology, 3, 77-99.  The paper concludes that there never was an unbridgeable divide separating “physical phenomena” from the “contents of consciousness”. Physical objects and events as perceived are part of the contents of consciousness—which alters the nature of the “hard problem of consciousness” and provides the departure point for reflexive monism.

The study of consciousness in modern science is hampered by deeply ingrained, dualist presuppositions about the nature of consciousness.  In particular, conscious experiences are thought to be private and subjective, contrasting with physical phenomena which are public and objective. In the present article, I argue that all observed phenomena are, in a sense, private to a given observer, although there are some events to which there is public access. Phenomena can be objective in the sense of intersubjective, investigators can be objective in the sense of truthful or dispassionate, and procedures can be objective in being well-specified, but observed phenomena cannot be objective in the sense of being observer-free.  Phenomena are only repeatable in the sense that they are judged by a community of observers to be tokens of the same type.  Stripped of its dualist trappings the empirical method becomes if you carry out these procedures you will observe or experience these results—which applies as much to a science of consciousness as it does to physics.

This one-hour interview, hosted by Celia Sue Larson on DreamVisions7 Radio covers how to define consciousness, the relation of first to third-person perspectives, and the view that these are complementary and mutually irreducible. It then goes on to explain how this approach allows one to resolve the "causal paradox" - that from a third-person perspective consciousness seems epiphenomenal while from a first-person perspective it appears central to mental life. The conversation then turns to Reflexive Monism, the deeper architecture of the Self, and some links to Eastern philosophy along with mystical and other extra-ordinary experiences.

(Abstract pertains to the whole project, not merely this introductory section)

Uncovering the legacy of Gregory Bateson:

(a) Re-contextualizing the double bind theory of "schizophrenia"

(b) The dual nature of the new recursive cybernetic epistemology:

(i) [Local Epistemology] ('e'pistemology)
      - personal and cultural
    (Ontology now subsumed within 'e'pistemological "Patterns of Search")

(ii) [Meta Epistemology] ('E'pistemology)
      - abstract tautological fundamentals and formal regularities
    (as with all scientific theories --without exception-- not a priori, but created by a  human subject)

(iii) Recursiveness of Epistemology:
      ......Local Epistemology.......Meta Epistemology.......Local Epistemology.......Meta Epistemology........and so on ad infinitum

(iii) The double bind as the very kernel of the new recursive epistemology.
      -Taken together, in their entirety, we have the outlines of a solution to the mind-body problem. Or to put this another way, through an overt utilization of the method of "double description" (arising through the evolutionary advantage afforded to us in binocular vision) we perceive difference by comparing materialistic monism with idealistic monism. This going above, or beyond, is meta to the binary positions and, with the assistance of cybernetics, leads to an integral postdualistic monism.

This paper is a commentary on Rupert Sheldrake’s analysis of theories of perception (in JCS, 2005a, 2005b). As Sheldrake points out in his fascinating review of ancient and modern thinking on this subject, theories of vision have ranged from “extramissive” theories that posit some active influence emanating from the eyes that both illuminates and influences the external world, “intramissive” theories that stress the influence of the external world on the (passive) brain, and theories in which intramissive and extramissive influences combine.  As Sheldrake notes, up to the 12th Century, extramissive theories were dominant, but with an increasing understanding of the way light reflected from an object is focused on the retina by the lens of the eye, intramissive theories have become dominant. Drawing on his research on staring experiments, Sheldrake defends an extramissive theory. In this commentary I argue for a model of perception that combines intramissive and extramissive influences, which accepts all third-person evidence for intramissive causal antecedents to visual perception while at the same time accepting the phenomenal evidence for the apparent external nature of the perceived world—an extramissive psychological effect that I refer to as “perceptual projection”. I also suggest some additions to the model that might begin to make sense of apparently extramissive causes of the type needed to explain staring experiments.  Ultimately, I suggest, we may need to accept that we are in our minds, but might be partly out of our brains!

This paper is a commentary on Rupert Sheldrake’s analysis of theories of perception (in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2005, 2006). As Sheldrake points out in his fascinating review of ancient and modern thinking on this subject, theories of vision have ranged from “extramissive” theories that posit some active influence emanating from the eyes that both illuminates and influences the external world, “intramissive” theories that stress the influence of the external world on the (passive) brain, and theories in which intramissive and extramissive influences combine. As Sheldrake notes, up to the 12th Century, extramissive theories were dominant, but with an increasing understanding of the way light reflected from an object is focused on the retina by the lens of the eye, intramissive theories have become dominant. Drawing on his research on staring experiments, Sheldrake defends an extramissive theory. In this commentary I argue for a model of perception that combines intramissive...

What we normally think of as the “physical world” is also the world as experienced, that is, a world of appearances.  Given this, what is the reality behind the appearances, and what might its relation be to consciousness and to constructive processes in the mind? According to Kant, the thing itself that brings about and supports these appearances is unknowable and we can never gain any understanding of how it brings such appearances about. Reflexive monism argues the opposite: the thing itself is knowable as are the processes that construct conscious appearances. Conscious appearances (empirical evidence) and the theories derived from them can represent what the world is really like, even though such empirical knowledge is partial, approximate and uncertain, and conscious appearances are species-specific constructions of the human mind. Drawing on the writings of Husserl, Hoche suggests that problems of knowledge, mind and consciousness are better understood in terms of a “pure noematic” phenomenology that avoids any reference to a “thing itself”. I argue that avoiding reference to a knowable reality (behind appearances) leads to more complex explanations with less explanatory value and counterintuitive conclusions—for example Hoche’s conclusion that consciousness is not part of nature.  The critical realism adopted by reflexive monism appears to be more useful, as well as being consistent with science and common sense.

Dualists believe that experiences have neither location nor extension, while reductive and ‘non-reductive’ physicalists (biological naturalists) believe that experiences are really in the brain, producing an apparent impasse in current theories of mind. Enactive and reflexive models of perception try to resolve this impasse with a form of “externalism” that challenges the assumption that experiences must either be nowhere or in the brain. However, they are externalist in very different ways.  Insofar as they locate experiences anywhere, enactive models locate conscious phenomenology in the dynamic interaction of organisms with the external world, and in some versions, they reduce conscious phenomenology to such interactions, in the hope that this will resolve the hard problem of consciousness.  The reflexive model accepts that experiences of the world result from dynamic organism-environment interactions, but argues that such interactions are preconscious.  While the resulting phenomenal world is a consequence of such interactions, it cannot be reduced to them.  The reflexive model is externalist in its claim that this external phenomenal world, which we normally think of as the “physical world,” is literally outside the brain.  Furthermore, there are no added conscious experiences of the external world inside the brain.  In the present paper I present the case for the enactive and reflexive alternatives to more classical views and evaluate their consequences.  I argue that, in closing the gap between the phenomenal world and what we normally think of as the physical world, the reflexive model resolves one facet of the hard problem of consciousness.  Conversely, while enactive models have useful things to say about percept formation and representation, they fail to address the hard problem of consciousness.

This paper replies to the first 36 commentaries on my target article on “Is human information processing conscious?” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1991, pp. 651-669). The target article focused largely on experimental studies of how consciousness relates to human information processing, tracing their relation from input through to output, while discussion of the implications of the findings both for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind was relatively brief. The commentaries reversed this emphasis, and so, correspondingly, did the reply. The sequence of topics in the reply roughly follows that of the target article. The discussion begins with a reconsideration of the details of the empirical findings, whether they can be extrapolated to non-laboratory settings, and the extent to which one can rely on their use of subjective reports. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of what is meant by “conscious processing” and of how phenomenal consciousness relates to attentional processing. We then turn to broader philosophical and theoretical issues. I point out some of the reasons why I do not support epiphenomenalism, dualist-interactionism, or reductionism, and elaborate on how first- and third-person views of the mind can be regarded as complementary and mutually irreducible. I suggest how the relation of conscious experiences to their neural correlates can be understood in terms of a dual-aspect theory of information, and how this might be used to resolve some of the paradoxes surrounding the causal interactions of consciousness and brain. I also suggest that, viewed from a first-person perspective, consciousness gives purpose to existence, which allows a different way of viewing its role in evolution.

This paper argues that within consciousness studies, dualist vs. reductionist debates typically characterise experience in ways which do not correspond to ordinary experience, and that to understand consciousness one must start with an accurate description of its phenomenology. Only then can one develop an understanding of how experiences viewed from a first-person perspective relate to events in the brain viewed from a third-person perspective. The paper then lists some common arguments for conscious experiences (accurately described) being nothing more than brain states along with their fallacies. It concludes that there are fundamental problems with ontological reductionism of conscious experiences to brain states that cannot be resolved.

About the Book (Publisher’s Description)

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts themselves present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions.

In this volume Max Velmans reflects on his long-spanning and varied career, considers the highs and lows in a brand new introduction and offers reactions to those who have responded to his published work over the years. This book offers a unique and compelling collection of the best publications in consciousness studies from one of the few psychologists to treat the topic systematically and seriously. Velmans’ approach is multi-faceted and represents a convergence of numerous fields of study – culminating in fascinating insights that are of interest to philosopher, psychologist and neuroscientist alike.

With continuing contemporary relevance, and significant historical impact, this collection of works is an essential resource for all those engaged or interested in the field of consciousness studies and the philosophy of the mind.

Further details available at
https://www.routledge.com/Towards-a-Deeper-Understanding-of-Consciousness-Selected-works-of-Max/Velmans/p/book/9781138699441

"Reciprocal constructions in the world's languages are typically associated with unusual syntactic behaviour and other anomalous properties. This thesis examines reciprocal constructions in Icelandic (Germanic), Malagasy (Austronesian) and Swahili (Bantu) in order to: firstly, determine the variability of their non-standard syntax; and secondly, to analyse these constructions within the theoretical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) with a view to explaining the relationship between them and the reasons for their non-standard behaviour. These analyses reveal that the syntactic and, to a lesser extent, semantic behaviour of reciprocal constructions arise not from structural features (such as whether the reciprocal construction is formed from a clitic, affix etc.), but from more fundamental reciprocation strategies by which asymmetric predicates are made to describe symmetric situations.
I demonstrate that the highly irregular case marking and word order associated with the Icelandic (nominal) reciprocal construction is intimately related to two of these reciprocation strategies. As a result of two extensive surveys undertaken to document its behaviour and history (a corpus based survey of the reciprocal construction in Old Icelandic (c. 1200 CE) and an online survey of its usage by 500 Icelanders), I show that the variable word order and case marking of this construction can be understood as a consequence of a change in its underlying reciprocation mechanism from the compositional to the pronominal – a change that is for the most part indiscernible in its morphosyntactic expression.

In contrast to the phrasally formed Icelandic reciprocal construction, the Malagasy and Swahili reciprocal constructions are both verbally marked. As existing analyses of apparently similar constructions in Romance, Hungarian (Uralic) and Chicheŵa (Bantu) are unable to explain their syntax, I propose two alternative analyses. The first is a novel analysis of the reciprocal construction in Malagasy as being derived from a covert application of the pronominal reciprocation strategy. This introduces a mismatch between functional and constituent structure and I show that this mismatch is required to explain the presence of reciprocated control and possession constructions, as well as its surprising similarities to the Icelandic reciprocal construction.

The reciprocal morpheme in Swahili is associated with two, distinct, reciprocal constructions: a monadic construction that groups the participants in the relation into the subject NP while losing an object NP; and a dyadic construction that places one participant in the subject NP and another in a comitative phrase. I show that the syntax of these constructions (and the relation between them) results from a reciprocation strategy that derives symmetric lexemes (much like the naturally symmetric verbs in English, e.g., quarrel, argue).

Most of these reciprocation strategies require that the participants in the symmetric event be in a single NP. This means the normative syntactic principles that link a predicate to its grammatical functions cannot straightforwardly accommodate reciprocated predicates – requiring that these principles be abused or at least stretched. I show this to be the root cause of the unusual syntactic behaviour associated with many of these constructions. Finally, as the morphosyntactic expression of a reciprocal construction is largely divorced from its underlying reciprocation strategy, I advance the view that typologies of reciprocal constructions should be orientated around these mechanisms rather than structural properties."

We normally perceive only the external surfaces of the human body and other physical objects. However it is obvious from our sciences that physical bodies have a complex internal structure that supports the surfaces that we see. What is less obvious is that the realities perceived by humans are models of nature produced by preconscious reflexive interactions of the human mind with external objects and events and even with our own bodies, and that in a deeper sense the perceived world is a projection of nature onto nature. This applies equally to those thoughts and feelings that we identify most intimately with ourselves. Although we tend to identify our self with our perceived body and our experienced thoughts, feelings, volitions and so on, these too are merely the visible tip of an unconscious ground of being that produces, supports and embeds such experiences. In this talk I explore these relationships and consider some of the consequences of shifting our sense of self away from the conscious surface of experience to the supporting, unconscious ground. The talk is online at http://vimeo.com/9931520

In this Journal of Consciousness Studies Special Issue we present a number of unifying (non-dualist), explanatory alternatives to physicalism—hence our title, “Monist alternatives to physicalism.” Rather than reducing mind and consciousness to the body and brain or vice-versa the papers in this issue explore option the possibility that mind, consciousness and physical matter might be aspects or arrangements of something more fundamental that is in itself neither “mental” nor “physical” as normally understood. One can adopt this unifying strategy at microcosmic, intermediate and macrocosmic scales, for example by reconceptualising (a) the basic building blocks of which mind, consciousness and physical matter are made, (b) the relationships among mind, consciousness and the material world as these present themselves in science and everyday experience, and (c) the nature of a universe able to rise to such mental, experiential and material manifestations. In any unified understanding, these explanatory levels must interconnect. Roughly speaking, however, the papers in this issue are arranged in sequence, according to whether their primary focus is microcosmic, intermediate, or global. Whatever the fundamental nature of Nature might be, it must have the power to give rise to its observable manifestations. Consequently, all the papers in this issue are concerned to give a “natural” account of the relationships among consciousness, mind, and the material world that is entirely consistent with the findings of science, and they all accept that for a unified understanding, mind, consciousness and the material world must have a common base.

This chapter reworks notions of reflexivity, exploring how it can be considered as a process through which bodies and places, always mutually constitutive, are continuously and relationally negotiated in ways that decenter subjectivity. Negotiations are out of anyone's control, the making of bodies and places being partial, ephemeral, unsynchronized, and incomplete; the subject is only momentarily stabilized through highly contingent processes that involve being and becoming a 'place' of (and for), chaotic, multiply directed, and multi-scalar demands, expectations, and practices. I argue, accordingly, that 'reflexivity' in cross-cultural fieldwork is about allowing ourselves to be epistemologically disciplined by the unknown, which impresses us from the outside. It is about learning to accept, reject, and respond physically to externalities and subjectivities in ways that allow us to better entertain difference. In this sense, reflexivity is less about self-introspection, self-reflection, "self-conscious practices...in thinking and writing" or self-emanating contemplation of how one "positions and includes oneself in relation to a subject os study" (Marcus 1992, 489; as it is characteristically defined in the social sciences) than about learning to recognize others' constructions of us through 'their' initiatives, spaces, bodies, judgements, prescriptions, proscriptions, and so on. In metaphorical and material terms, reflexivity is about allowing our 'bodies' to become 'places' for 'fielding difference.

In April, 2014 I organized an International Workshop on East-West Approaches to the Nature of Mind, Consciousness and Self, in the beautiful grounds of Dartington Hall, in Devon, England to explore the edges of current understanding of ordinary and extra-ordinary conscious experience. Although Consciousness Studies is now a flourishing area of investigation, ordinary and extra-ordinary human experiences do not fit comfortably into the prevailing materialist-reductionist paradigm, suggesting the need to explore non-reductionist approaches in an open, but nevertheless rigorous way. Consciousness has, of course, also been studied in the East over the millennia, but there are major cultural differences in the ways mind, consciousness and self are conceptualized and investigated in the East and in the West, making it difficult to integrate Eastern with Western ways of thought. This provided the purpose for the workshop—to gather together an invited selection of some of the best current thinkers and researchers in this cross-disciplinary area to present their work, along with a group of discussants that included equally senior, mid-career and more junior researchers from different traditions (both Eastern and Western), to explore the issues in depth, with the aim of moving closer to a more integrated, inclusive worldview.  The progression of the workshop over four days broadly followed four themes: 1) how to obtain knowledge additional to that provided by the usual third-person methods of science through subjective ways of knowing and by focusing close attention on the details of ordinary experience 2) the range and significance of extraordinary experiences 3) the potentially transformative effects on the knower of engaging in such explorations, and 4) some integrative ways of thinking about what is revealed by such investigations.

This talk, given at a seminar on 7th July, 2020, suggest a different way to understand the many ways in which humans and other sentient beings are natural expressions of a reflexive, self-observing universe and the many ways in which this universe might be conscious. The talk introduces and summarizes the detailed analysis given in Velmans, M. (2021) "Is the Universe Conscious? Reflexive Monism and the Ground of Being", in Kelly, E. and Marshall, P. (eds.) Consciousness Unbound. Rowman and Littlefield (in press). The presentation introduces ancient dualist and monist attempts to understand how consciousness, mind, self and soul relate to brain, body and the material world. It then contrasts modern dualist and materialist- reductionist visions of the universe with reflexive monism, the view that the universe is reflexive and self-observing. It explains ways in which the latter requires a paradigm shift in which consciousness and its material accompaniments are entirely natural consequences of what the universe is like, exempified by the dual-aspect monist nature of the human mind and that of other sentient beings. The presentation then introduces different ways to explore the ground of being, and makes connections with Eastern as well as Western philosophy. Available online at https://youtu.be/6AqijBqX7z0

This Ciba Foundation international symposium in 1992, which I proposed to the foundation in 1991, gathered together 25 of the most prominent philosophers and scientists working on consciousness at that time. What is particularly interesting about this collection is that each paper was followed by an in-depth discussion with the participants, which was recorded and then edited for publication as an accompaniment to each paper. Consequently, the collection presents a representative snapshot of the philosophical and scientific problems of consciousness and the varied approaches to their solution at that time.

... 1979. "The Paradox of Rationalization." Pp. 11-64 in Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter (eds.) Max Weber's Vision of History. Berkeley University of California Press. Schneider, S. 1997. ... Berkeley: University of California Press. Steiner-Aeschliman, Sherrie. 1998. ...

From the back cover:
Understanding Consciousness, 2nd Edition provides a unique survey and evaluation of consciousness studies, along with an original analysis of consciousness that combines scientific findings, philosophy and common sense. Building on the widely praised first edition, this new edition adds fresh research, and deepens the original analysis in a way that reflects some of the fundamental changes in the understanding of consciousness that have taken place over the last 10 years.

The book is divided into three parts; Part one surveys current theories of consciousness, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. Part two reconstructs an understanding of consciousness from first principles, starting with its phenomenology, and leading to a closer examination of how conscious experience relates to the world described by physics and information processing in the brain. Finally, Part three deals with some of the fundamental issues such as what consciousness is and does, and how it fits into to the evolving universe. As the structure of the book moves from a basic overview of the field to a successively deeper analysis, it can be used both for those new to the subject and for more established researchers.

Understanding Consciousness tells a story with a beginning, middle and end in a way that integrates the philosophy of consciousness with the science. Overall, the book provides a unique perspective on how to address the problems of consciousness and as such, will be of great interest to psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and other professionals concerned with mind/body relationships, and all who are interested in this subject.

This is a fine book. In what has become a crowded field, it stands out as direct, deep, and daring. It should place Max Velmans amongst the stars in the field like Chalmers, Dennett, Searle, and Churchland who are most commonly referenced in consciousness studies books and articles. It is direct in that the de rigueur history and review of the body-mind problem is illuminating and concise. It is deep in that Velmans deconstructs the usual idea of an objective world as distinct from our experienced world. It is daring in that in his last chapter he comes out on the side of consciousness co-evolving with the universe rather than arising at some point within it (though he insists that such speculation is beyond the more empirical intent of his earlier chapters).