I've found a page that addresses and clarifies the stages in the phenomenological and neuroscientific history of what Steve describes as "the long, strange road from Husserl's ambitions to neuro-phenomenology."
neurophenomenology – Neurophenomenology
For the moment, I'll quote a lengthy extract from Part 2 of a comprehensive analysis of developments in that history [appearing part-way down the informative page I've just linked; note that links are also embedded there to Parts 1 and 3 of this historical interdisciplinary analysis]. I think that everything presented on and linked at the above-linked webpage as a whole must be read and understood if our current discussion is to proceed with any mutual understanding of -- and responsibility to -- what has been developed over the last century in the project of understanding consciousness and mind and their relationships with biological embodiment and contact with the environments/world in which consciousness has emerged.
". . . Pribram’s essay “Behaviorism, Phenomenology, and Holism in Psychology” pointed to the need for a broader, phenomenologically and neurobiologically informed approach to psychology (pg. 142:
“But there are limits to understanding achieved solely through the observation and experimental analysis of behavior. These limits are especially apparent when problems other than overt behavior are addressed, problems related to thought or to decisional processes, to appetive and other motivational mechanisms, to emotions and feelings, and even to images and perception”.
and (pg. 146):
“Existential-phenomenological psychology has not, up to now, been very clear in it’s methods. I suggest that multidimensional analyses (factor analysis, principle components analysis, stepwise discriminant analysis) might serve well as tools to investigate the structure of experience-in-the-world.”
Moss lucidly analyzed the similarities and divergences between neuroscience and existential-phenomenology in a essay entitled “Phenomenology and Neuropsychology” (pg.159):
“Pribram points to the role of the brain processes in”constructing” the world as perceived. Yet existential-phenomenology has also emphasized the “constituting functions”of the ego (Husserl), the constituitive role of the lived body (Merleau-Ponty), and the role of the human body and upright posture in articulating the world of sensory experience (Straus). Thus, neither school of thought naively recognizes a reality per se unaffected by the presence and condition of the organism.”
Such exchanges occurred on the margins of mind-science. By the 1960’s, the largely cold-war funded research program of
Artificial Intelligence (A.I) and growing interest in cognitive or information-processing approaches to problems in psychology etc. had produced a “cognitive revolution”. Some brave cognitivists even made use of introspective techniques (though not without drawing fire from behaviorists).
Herbert Simon asked his subjects to verbally report on how they solved logic-puzzles, much to the chagrin of the remaining orthodox behaviorists. The renewal of mentalistic language and willingness to freely use data from introspection and verbal reports from subjects about how they solved logic problems was a robust challenge to the behaviorists, but over time a rapprochement ensued.
But what really allowed the scientific study of consciousness and experience to re-emerge was the success of theoretical and laboratory neuroscience.
EEG data had been produced for years with good temporal but limited spatial resolution, but in the 1970’s and 1980’s an alphabet soup of new imaging technologies (CAT, PET, MRI, and recently MEG) allowed neuroscientists to better “peek inside” the living brains of subjects in experiments. Progress in molecular biology, genomics, and biophysics in the postwar West allowed curious researchers to formulate models of emotions in chemical terms, such as the finding of endogenous opiates (or
endorphins) and their
receptors in the brain. The finding that nerve fibers connect with the organs of the immune system helped ground theories of the effect of emotions and beliefs on health, leading to the interdiscipline of
psychoneuroimmunology. A growing industry to synthesize pharmaceutical products based on the molecular structure of
receptor proteins has led to
neuropharmacology and
neuropsychopharmacology.
Some brain researchers looking for theoretical models of the mind found the information-processing/computationalist approach of the cognitivists limiting in understanding emotions and experience. Cognitive science itself had been rocked from its early (late 1950’s-early 1960’s) success to the gradual realization that many aspects of mind are not easily characterized as formal-logical, rule-based systems, as had been predicted by the phenomenologically-informed philosopher
Hubert Dreyfus (1972) in
What Computers Can’t Do, where he argued that rule-based, symbolic-logical, representationalist models of mind and language fail to deal with the radically embodied nature of cognition. This was hotly rejected by prominent AI researchers, but later influenced
Terry Winograd, among others.
Mostly the insights of clinical neurologists and phenomenological psychologists were ignored in postwar cognitive science, which had a great overlap with computer science and
Artificial Intelligence (A.I). Indeed, cognitivists and AI engineers might profess agnosticism about the neurobiology of the mind, viewing brain “hardware” as the domain of other specialists. In the late 1950’s and through the 1960’s, cognitive science and
Artificial Intelligence seemed to have revolutionary new insights. AI as engineering of useful artifacts overlapped with AI as cognitive modeling. An early era of exciting optimism eventually gave way to slow progress on “general purpose” problem solving. The limitations of their symbolic-logical, information-processing, and computationalist approach led others to develop the hybrid field of
cognitive neuroscience. Sometimes there were interesting discrepancies between the two: onetime “pure” cognitivist
Stephen Kosslyn performed
neuroimaging experiments on subjects who were asked to rotate mental objects. According to John McCrone’s report of Kosslyn’s work in
Going Inside: A Tour ‘Round a Single Moment of Consciousness, the resulting pattern of distributed activity across disparate brain regions was difficult to reconcile with the neat schematic Kosslyn had developed as an abstract cognitive model possessing a few modules for accomplishing aspects of the rotation operation. This lends credence to those who propose that cognitive science must be much more thoroughly integrated with the “gory details” of neuroscience, with the neural networks/connectionist camp serving as a conceptual bridge fro brain to symbols and representations. Over time, the lack of interest in biology and “implementation agnosticism” of some computationalist cognitive scientists has given way to modern cognitive neuroscience. A movement in the 1980’s to reform cognitive science and artificial intelligence along biologically-inspired and “subsymbolic” lines known as
connectionism,
artificial neural-networks, and parallel-distributed processing splits cogntivism to this day.
A pathbreaking (and for some, puzzling*) book appeared in the second half of the 1980’s that seemed to point the way to a synthesis of neurobiology, cognitivism, computer science, and phenomenology:
Understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation for design by AI and language-processing expert
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores:
The book proposed a phenomenologically-grounded understanding of how people in real-world environments use systems that software designers build. It took inspiration from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela‘s idea of autopoesis, a cybernetics-inspired, dynamical theory of organisms self-organizing their own structure by regenerating parts and by being coupled to their environment, until death. The brains of creatures do not represent features (such as colors) of objects external to them as cognitivists typically assume. Rather, each ecologically-situated animal brings forth or co-constitutes a perceived world through evolutionarily-selected sensorimotor systems. Autopoesis is a sort of post-Cartesian biology, and Maturana and Varela described it in 1981 as:
“a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.”
While a cognitivist might recognize a consonance with cybernetics here, abandoning representationalism is very difficult for some. What other bridging concepts are there to relate brain and mind events? This is still an open issue.
As it turned out, a sophisticated alternative to cognitivism was on the way: Walter Freeman, Francisco Varela, and others have offered a post-representationalist approach to consciousness, cognition, and the brain based in dynamical systems theory. The undercurrents of dissatisfaction with understanding the mind as information-processing, rule-based symbolic logical procedures, and “computations over representations” emerged in the 1990’s as embodied cognitive science and neurophenomenology.
(Part I is here, and part III is here)"
