Nemo psychologus nisi physiologus”
3.5 First and Third Person: The Outcome of a Debate and the End of Psychology
On 17 July 1990, the then US President George Bush issued a public statement in which he described the decade just begun as the “decade of the brain.” The most surprising aspect of this address to the nation is precisely its emphasis on a 10-year research program focusing on an organ: the brain. It was as though a new space mis- sion was being launched!
Much the same message is conveyed in an editorial which Jones and Mendell (1999) published in “Science” 10 years later. The two authors—the former presi- dent of the American Society for Neuroscience and its current one—drew a remark- able balance of the decade which had just come to a close and which had made neuroscience a point of reference for many fields of knowledge, assigning it a role comparable to that played by mathematical physics for much of the twentieth
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century. The considerable visibility and public acknowledgement enjoyed by neuroscience was not only due to its evident successes, and to the new hope it had sparked in the fight against serious illnesses, but also the explosive growth of the number of people describing themselves as neuroscientists: researchers coming from a range of disciplines that apparently had nothing to do with neuroscience.
Jones and Mendell mentioned around a thousand new memberships a year, pointing to the rapid spread of new technologies related to functional imaging or molecular genetics as a possible reason for the phenomenon. The year was 1999.
Along with the triumph of neuroscience, the same decade witnessed something completely unexpected, which Bush’s speech had certainly not foreseen and which remained largely undetected even in the report delivered 10 years later. With the celebrated decade of the brain, the problem of consciousness returned to the center of the scientific stage. The novelty did not lie in the effort to thematize conscious- ness or the mind: the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition had continued to do so throughout the twentieth century, articulating the mind-body problem according to the various “-isms” of philosophy. Arguably the most intriguing point made within this tradition was formulated by Nagel in a famous 1974 article boldly entitled
“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?.” Here the philosopher noted that the use of an objec- tive explanation to account for what it is like to be a particular organism leaves an irremovable trace and that is to say: what remains of what it is like to be a bat, if one removes the point of view of the bat19?
With the rise of neuroscience, the problem of consciousness emerged from a new angle. The novelty lays in the attempt to study consciousness using the tools and methods of the natural sciences. The title of the first of a series of interdisciplinary conferences that were held in Tucson each year from 1994 onward, “under the Clear Desert Skies of Arizona,” is highly revealing in this respect: “Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness.” It was in a paper delivered at this first Arizona meeting that David Chalmers outlined for the first time what has become a well-established distinction: that between the easy problem of consciousness, involving cognitive functions that can be explained by invoking neural or computational mechanisms, and the hard problem, which remains such even once the mechanisms and modes of execution of relevant functions have been explained.
Within the framework of this new context, the hard problem newly raises the question of what it is like to be a bat. While the challenge consists in attempting to scientifically explain the hard problem or—as was argued a few years after Chalmer’s paper—to naturalize the study of the phenomena of consciousness, the very possibility of posing the question of first-person experience is due to the remarkable impact of the new brain imaging technologies (FMRI, SPECT, PET, etc.). A series of gradual advances in mathematics, physics, and computer and clini- cal imaging—followed by a series of legal battles over competing claims and dis- putes concerning patent priorities, down to the public dispute over the Nobel
19 As we shall see in the second part of the present work, an attempt can be made to answer this question only by resorting to a privative zoology, i.e. one that understands animality by taking its lack of humanness as a starting point.
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Prize—has spawned a new generation of machines that provide access to the inner recesses of the most sacred of all organs. The new machines enable the “profana- tion” of the living brain, the brain of a living body that feels, acts, and thinks. This is the dense organ which medical science had hitherto studied only on the dissection table or by grasping a few superficial expressions of it as a living organ through EEG. As with Galileo and the telescope, imaging technology has generated a new sphere of observation and elicits a renewed conceptuality, not only in the field of established medical culture but also across the various disciplines which are gradu- ally starting to investigate the brain (Arciero 2006). Only from this perspective can a truly unique aspect be understood: consciousness has returned to being a focus of inquiry for the very reason that it could no longer be such roughly a century earlier.
This, then, is the field in which the problem of the first and the third person, and of the relation between the two, emerged and gradually became dominant.
The interdisciplinary debate on these themes—which for a few decades continued to be framed according to the trajectories traced by the annual Tucson conferences and essentially developed through the “Journal of Consciousness Studies”—is also marked by another peculiarity. Psychology, which up until the early 1990s still played a prominent role, gradually vanished from the scene. After a whole century had passed, just when the study of experience required a science finally capable of resuming the research which James had made his own, and which logical positivism had broken off, psychology dissolved. Little by little it was swallowed up by neuro- science, which assimilated it and even absorbed all its different branches: these became the cognitive, affective, social, behavioral, evolutionary, clinical, etc. neu- rosciences. So much so that, from the very university in which one of the authors of the present volume studied the fluxes and variations of individual consciousness together with Mahoney in the 1980s, Gazzaniga announced the death of psychol- ogy: “Psychology itself is dead” (1998).
Indeed, as first-person experience became an object of investigation for the natural sciences, it ceased being of interest to psychology, which had neither the tools nor methods—if not those of the natural sciences—to undertake its study. This raises a series of questions. What is the relation between the end of psychology, the development of brain imaging technologies, and the first- and third-person prob- lem? Why has psychology failed to live up to the task set by the latest research developments? On what basis has it been absorbed by neuroscience? And how does neuroscience approach the first- and third-person question?
As already noted, all research on man is shaped by the way in which man’s nature or essence is conceived. This perspective, which is often adopted unquestionably, determines the framing of the questions and hence the very course of the research. The formulation of a problem already suggests the possible answers and is inevitably asso- ciated with what we may term a—more or less conscious—ontological decision that concerns the way in which the preliminary question of the nature of man is tackled.
Framing the first-person problem in terms of how we can scientifically account for what it is like to be a self implies a factual view of the nature of that self. In other words, the problem of the first-person position is only addressed after having already established what it means to be a self.
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Besides, the answer which Chalmers provides in his famous 1995 paper betrays precisely this ontological approach, which was to become the common point of reference for all researchers seriously considering the problem of consciousness in the wake of the Tucson conferences. Chalmers writes: “I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive the- ory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information” (pag. 200). What stands in the background is a well-defined view of who man is: man is “the self,” the invariant, that which, by remaining the same over the course of its existence, is conscious of itself and at the same time of its manifold experiences.
It makes little difference that, in the light of this way of conceiving man’s being, some researchers have endeavored to grasp phenomenal regularities by interpreting them as an expression of the subject’s beliefs or desires. This is the case with Dennett (2004), for example, who based his conclusions on data from Damasio (1994, 1999, 2003). Other researchers have instead sought to identify, by means of eidetic reduction, the experiential invariants that emerge in variations, in order to study the emergence of conscious experience in relation to the neural activity that accompanies it. This is the case with neurophenomenologists who have chosen to follow Varela’s lead (Petitot et al. 1999).
In 2004, 10 years after the first Tucson conference, which had marked the comeback of first-person experience as one of the hot topics in natural science, C. Whitehead was invited by the “Journal of Consciousness Studies” to review the themes of the conference. Whitehead provided the following picture of the different degrees of influence of the two most representative approaches: “By 2002 the triumph of cognocentrism was virtually complete, at least at the plenary level. Of 40 plenary papers, 32 came from cognitive neuroscientists and artificial intelligence investigators. There were only five plenary papers on phenomenology, and three on emergent phenomena and downward causation” (p. 71). This disparity may be due to the greater operational simplicity of the cognoparadigm compared to the transcendental approach, although the ontological assumptions are always the same.20
Thus even in this new context, chiefly dominated by neuroscience, the unquestioned underlying perspective has engendered the same kind of epistemological tension between different currents as had emerged over the course of the cognitive revolution. Just as back then, the actors involved—all striving to defend their arguments and research programs, and to manage their spheres of influence–never consider the problem of the ontological perspective shaping their shared view. All disputes aside, these researchers share the same conception of the nature of man, which they unquestionably assume: what guides them is the same ancient view, marked by the predetermination of the essence of man according to the categories of production.
20 C. Whitehead remarks: “I have nothing against the cognitive sciences, but the cognoparadigm is not only disembodied and individualistic, it is profoundly impoverished.”
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According to this view, natural entities are present in the world not as entities produced by someone but as emerging, self-organizing selves. A natural entity, the self, emerges and comes into presence and thus remains unchanged over time and immutably stands at the basis of all changeable qualities.
According to this perspective, therefore, what it means to be a self has already been established; and what is also preestablished, on the basis of this determination, is the trajectory of sense orienting the research. A shared underlying foundation is provided by the conception of the motility of life in terms of the paradigm of pro- duction, whereby every “not yet” is traced back to enduring presence: that enduring present which makes objects available, manipulable, and theoretically graspable.
Such is the idea of man adopted by all those researchers who, from the first Tucson conference to the present day, have directed their efforts toward the develop- ment of a natural science of consciousness. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the new wave created over the last 20 years by the impact of brain imaging technology on the study of first-person experience has exhausted itself, without even touching upon the theme which it sought to clarify.
If ancient ontology is what has shaped the cognitive sciences, and subsequently the natural-scientific research on consciousness, with its conception of the living organism as a technological-computational artefact, it is evident that the study of first- and third-hand experience can only proceed according to this perspective. As already noted, the way in which a problem is formulated already hints at the possi- ble answers. In the light of this, we can understand why the triumph of neuroscience goes hand in hand with the terminal crisis of psychology. The latter came about when the guiding notion of organism—which stands at the basis of physiological psychology—in conjunction with the new technologies enabled neuroscience to grasp experience in its nascent state by examining its source, the brain, in the present.
Remarkable evidence of these developments is to be found in the way in which the social neurosciences approach and claim to grasp the problem of the understanding of meaning by tracing its origin back to the neural dynamics at work, thereby effectively devitalizing actual experience and dehistoricizing life. On these conceptual and methodological bases, the prefix “neuro” is attached to any disci- pline whose practice may be correlated with the brain activity of the people exercis- ing it. The result is a wide range of “neuro-” disciplines, from neuroeconomics to neurogastronomy. Neuroscience is therefore acquiring the role which mathematical physics played in the years of logical positivism. Regrettably, it is guided by the same principle: the idea that its own level of theorization is enough to prove the incompleteness, or insufficiency, of the level of theorization characterizing other sciences! This clearly seems to be the case in the relation between psychology and neuroscience. A banal example would be the study of emotional experience.
From the perspective of the psychologist, who never loses sight of actual experience, a particular emotion, e.g., sadness, corresponds to the way in which a person positions himself with respect to the existing circumstances: to the meaning of the ongoing situation and, at the same time, to a specific way of perceiving oneself within it. For the neuroscientist, sadness—understood as lived
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experience—cannot be regarded as a scientific datum, unless it is traced back to stable and objectifiable criteria, such as facial expressions or the main cerebral structures activated by it. The essentially nonsensical passage which occurs in the laboratory—in keeping with the distinctive perspective of the neurosciences—is the reduction and transposition of the sphere of individual experience, which is what psychology ought to study, into that of objectiveness, which is completely foreign to the former sphere, with the alleged purpose of gaining a more in-depth understanding of it. The evident result of this operation is that sadness as a neuroscientific datum usually has very little to do with sadness as a psychological datum. As a consequence of this mode of operating, psychology, which shares the same ontological foundation as neuroscience, becomes redundant: “it’s a dead topic,” as Gazzaniga preached years ago (1998).
The primacy of presence, which served as the basis for the assimilation of psychology to natural science and still constitutes the positum for contemporary psychology, thus calls for a new debate on the founding principles of the discipline and its relation to the natural sciences: for it is precisely this assumption which remains unchallenged when it comes to the conception of man which psychology has continued to uphold up until its recent dissolution.
It is in the light of this disturbing condition of the discipline that we now embark on a journey to investigate the foundations of psychotherapy and possible ways to reclaim them. The inadequacy of certain concepts with respect to the thematic field, whose essence they purport to express, and the need to elucidate the bases of our practice are what lead us to raise some questions concerning the origins of the dis- cipline. Finally, the requirements directly imposed by therapeutic practice in terms of the concepts used to express it, and which by now have made many of such terms outdated, lead us to follow in the footsteps of phenomenology, by providing an ontological redefinition of the thematic domain itself.
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