The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness

(vip2019) #1
Biological Naturalism and Biological Realism

Even so, progress has been made, the gap between the phenomenal and the physical
is less wide than it was.
(Dainton 2004: 19)

So, the first step to solve the Explanatory Gap is taken by marrying phenomenal space with
physical space. The second step is to explain what the modulations of this field are and how
they constitute the qualitative contents of phenomenal consciousness. A serious challenge for
the explanation of consciousness crystallizes in the notion of “presence” and “self-presentation”:


Although biological self-presentation appears for us to be a magical feat, perhaps it is
no more magical than biological self-replication...there may be particular biological
mechanisms that render a biological process present-for-itself...
...the problem of understanding phenomenal consciousness seems to boil down
to the problem of mechanistically modeling “self-presentation.” Do we have any idea
why some levels of biological organization may “feel” or “sense” their own existence
whereas others have no means for sensing any existence at all? ... Most physical phe-
nomena exist but in the dark, hidden even from themselves. They are not present for
themselves and nothing is present for them. Somehow, for a physical or biological sys-
tem to sense its own existence... It must make an appearance to itself, in order to create
its own, self-contained, inner presence: the world-for-me. The “self-sensing” capability
might be the result of the system being connected to itself in a particular way at the
lower levels of organization, which would support a special type of global unity at the
higher level. Every part of the system should become present to every other part simul-
taneously, to create their spatial co-presence in the same phenomenal world... This kind
of neural architecture might be found in the thalamo-cortical loops... The integrated
sphere of neuroelectrical flow may thus become present-for-itself, a world-for-itself.
(Revonsuo 2006: 360–361)

5 Biological Realism at Work in the Study of Consciousness

Biological Realism guides the research in several ways. One of the implications of BR deals
with the objective measurement of consciousness and the problem of accessing other conscious
minds. According to BR, the current methods of cognitive neuroscience are not sufficient to
measure consciousness, because they do not deliver data from the higher levels of organization
in the brain where phenomenal consciousness is realized. Thus, we cannot “see” the phenome-
nal level in the brain via any brain scanning methods that are currently available. However, there
is no reason why the objective measurement of consciousness should be impossible in principle.
What we need is first, research methods that retrieve signals directly from the phenomenal
level and its constituents in the brain. Secondly, we also need more sophisticated technology to
understand and model the data. As phenomenal qualities only have an existence inside the phe-
nomenal level, the brain imaging data that captures conscious experiences should be presented
to observers within their own phenomenal level, by making the observers’ phenomenal level
simulate the state and contents of the phenomenal level of the observed subject. Observation
of phenomenal consciousness, the patterns of qualities in someone’s phenomenal level in one
conscious brain, thus is simply a shared simulation that will run in the observers’ phenomenal
level and recreates similar patterns of qualities in each observer’s phenomenal level. Two separate
worlds-for-me become one shared world-for-us by the observer’s consciousness closely mirror-
ing the subject’s consciousness. This renders the “public observation” of anyone’s consciousness

Free download pdf