Consciousness

• seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
  has supposedly gone from being a private expe-
  rience to a public and objective stimulus. This,
  says Velmans, is absurd, and leaves us asking the
  fundamentally misguided question – is the light a
  subjective or an objective phenomenon?

Velmans thus rejects the dualism between sub-

jective and objective phenomena, and proposes

instead a ‘reflexive model of consciousness’. He

argues that our usual way of describing experi-

ments misdescribes the phenomenology of per-

ception, and hence misconstrues the problems

facing a science of consciousness.

This reflexive model accepts conventional

wisdom about the physical and

neurophysiological causes of perception –

for example, that there really is a physical

stimulus in the room that our experience

of it represents. But it gives a different

account of the nature of the resulting

experience. According to this nondualist

view, when S attends to the light in a room

she does not have an experience of a light ‘in her head or brain’, with its

attendant problems for science. She just sees a light in a room.

(1999, p. 301)

Explaining his theory of ‘non-reductive, Reflexive Monism’, Velmans argues that

human minds and bodies are physical entities embedded in the universe of

which they are a part, and capable of taking individual perspectives on the rest of

the universe and themselves. As the universe evolves, it differentiates into parts

which become conscious of themselves – hence the ‘reflexive’ aspect. Experience

and matter are two sides of the same reality, as viewed from either a first-person

or a third-person perspective. Causal links extend between the two, but neither

can be reduced to the other: ‘the contents of consciousness provide a view of

the wider universe’, but these ‘conscious representations are not the thing-itself ’

(2009, p. 298).

Velmans claims that his model does away with many long-standing problems in

the science of consciousness. He agrees that each of us lives in our own private,

phenomenal world, and also that there are actual physical objects and events that

people can agree about. But whether psychologists study mental or physical phe-

nomena, they are doing so to establish repeatability and intersubjectivity. This,

he claims, does away with the distinction between first-person and third-person

methods. In both cases the motto should be: ‘If you carry out these procedures you

will observe or experience these results’ (1999, p. 300).

This motto is important. Think of the effects of drugs – ‘if you take this drug you

will experience these results’ (Chapter 13) – or of practising mental disciplines: ‘if

you follow this procedure you will experience an OBE’ (Chapter 15); ‘if you med-

itate this way for many years you will gain this insight’ (Chapters 7, 13, and 18).

‘If you carry out these

procedures you will

observe or experience

these results’

(Velmans, 1999, p. 300)

First-person

account essential

Lekoff-Johnson

Consciousness

BaarsDennett

Edelmen

Calvin

Churchland

Jackendoff

Velmans

Varela

Globus

Searle

McGinn Nagel

Crick-Koch

Chalmers

Flanagan

Functionalism

Mysterianism

Phenomenology Reductionism

FIGURE 17.4 • Varela’s 1996 categorisation of
the major theories (after Varela,
1996, p. 332).