How could husserl’s theory of the bodily self-constitution of the ego help bridge the explanatory gap?

Ðàçðûâ â îáúÿñíåíèè -- êàæóùàÿñÿ íåïðåîäîëèìîé ïðîïàñòü ìåæäó ôèçè÷åñêèìè, òåëåñíûìè ïðîöåññàìè è ñîñòîÿíèÿìè, ñ îäíîé ñòîðîíû, è ñóáúåêòèâíûì, ïåðåæèâàåìûì îïûòîì, ñ äðóãîé -- ïðèíàäëåæèò ê âåëè÷àéøèì ïðîáëåìàì ñîâðåìåííîé ôèëîñîôèè ñîçíàíèÿ è ïîñâÿùåííûõ ñîçíàíèþ ýìïèðè÷åñêèõ èññëåäîâàíèé. Ñîãëàñíî íåêîòîðûì èññëåäîâàòåëÿì -- òàêèì, êàê ýëèìèíàòèâèñòñêè íàñòðîåííûå ôèëîñîôû Ïîë è Ïàòðèñèÿ ×åð÷ëàíä -- ýòî ïñåâäîïðîáëåìà. Îäíàêî, ñ íàøåé òî÷êè çðåíèÿ, ñòðîãàÿ ôåíîìåíîëîãè÷åñêàÿ ðåôëåêñèÿ íà ñîáñòâåííîå ñîçíàíèå óáåæäàåò âíèìàòåëüíîãî è îñìîòðèòåëüíîãî ôèëîñîôà â òîì, ÷òî ýòîò âîïðîñ ÿâëÿåòñÿ áîëåå ÷åì ðåàëüíûì è ôàêòè÷åñêè ðåøàþùèì.  íàñòîÿùåé ñòàòüå ïðåäïðèíÿòà ïîïûòêà ïîêàçàòü, ÷òî ãóññåðëåâñêàÿ òåîðèÿ òåëåñíîãî ñàìîêîíñòèòóèðîâàíèÿ ego, âìåñòî òîãî ÷òîáû óñòðàíÿòü ðàçðûâ â îáúÿñíåíèè íà ðåäóêöèîíèñòñêèé ìàíåð, ìîæåò, ñêîðåå, ïîìî÷ü íàì ïåðåáðîñèòü ÷åðåç íåãî ìîñò, âûÿâëÿÿ íåîáõîäèìóþ ñâÿçü ìåæäó ñóáúåêòèâíîé, ôåíîìåíàëüíîé ñòîðîíîé îïûòà è åãî òåëåñíûì áàçèñîì. Ñîãëàñíî òàêîé èíòåðïðåòàöèè, ãóññåðëåâñêàÿ êîíöåïöèÿ òåëåñíîñòè ìîæåò äàæå ñëóæèòü áîëåå ñòðîãèì è ïðî÷íûì òåîðåòè÷åñêèì îñíîâàíèåì èññëåäîâàíèÿ ñîçíàíèÿ, íåæåëè ëþáîå èç òåõ, êîòîðûå â íàñòîÿùåå âðåìÿ ëåæàò â îñíîâå ýìïèðè÷åñêèõ èññëåäîâàíèé èñòîêîâ ñîçíàíèÿ â ïðèðîäíîì ìèðå.  ïåðâîé ÷àñòè ñâîåãî èññëåäîâàíèÿ ÿ î÷åð÷èâàþ ïîïûòêó Òîääà Ôàéíáåðãà è Äæîíà Ìàëëàòà ïðåîäîëåòü è, âñëåä çà òåì, óñòðàíèòü ðàçðûâ â îáúÿñíåíèè, â õîäå êîòîðîé îíè äâèæóòñÿ îò âíåøíåãî ìèðà ê âíóòðåííåé ñôåðå ñîçíàíèÿ. Âî âòîðîé ÷àñòè ñòàòüè ïðåäñòàâëåí ôåíîìåíîëîãè÷åñêèé àíàëèç, êîòîðûé ïðèçâàí ïîêàçàòü, ÷òî ãóññåðëåâñêîå ðåøåíèå ýòîé ïðîáëåìû ïîäðàçóìåâàåò äâèæåíèå â ïðîòèâîïîëîæíîì íàïðàâëåíèè -- îò âíóòðåííåé ñôåðû ñîçíàíèÿ âîâíå, ê âíåøíåé, ôèçè÷åñêîé ðåàëüíîñòè.

Êëþ÷åâûå ñëîâà: ðàçðûâ â îáúÿñíåíèè, òåëåñíîñòü, ôèëîñîôèÿ ñîçíàíèÿ, Ýäìóíä Ãóññåðëü, ñà- ìîêîíñòèòóèðîâàíèå, òðàíñöåíäåíòàëüíîå è ýìïèðè÷åñêîå ego, òðóäíàÿ ïðîáëåìà ñîçíàíèÿ.

1. INTRODUCTION

This study explores the intersection of contemporary philosophy of mind and phenomenology by asking how the so-called “explanatory gap” can be handled by Husserl's theory concerning the bodily self-constitution of the transcendental ego.

The core of the problem, labelled with the term “explanatory gap,” is that the specific qualitative character of subjective experience is apparently completely independent from the characteristics of physical states and processes, and we are seemingly entirely incapable of deriving the former from the latter. In its modern form¹, this problem dates back at least to Charles Dunbar Broad, who wrote the following in 1925:

He [the archangel] would know exactly what the microscopic structure of ammonia must be; but he would be totally unable to predict that a substance with this structure must smell as ammonia does when it gets into the human nose. The utmost that he could predict on this subject would be that certain changes would take place in the mucous membrane, the olfactory nerves and so on. But he could not possibly know that these changes would be accompanied by the appearance of a smell in general or of the peculiar smell of ammonia in particular, unless someone told him so or he had smelled it for himself. (Broad, 1925, 71)

In the more recent discourse of analytic philosophy of mind, we can find a related articulation of the problem in Thomas Nagel's famous 1974 article, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” then later and more explicitly in the work of Joseph Levine, who introduced the term in 1983 in his article “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.” After such initial formulations, the explanatory gap increasingly became a focal topic for philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. It was treated by scholars such as McGinn (1989), Dennett (1991), Chalmers (1995, 1996), Varela (1996), and Thompson (2007, 253-266), and more recently by Feinberg and Mallatt (2018, 2019, 2020) and many others. This article proposes a possible way to handle the “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1995) In my interpretation, this idea could already be identified in Descartes' conceivability argument, according to which we could and should conceive of mind and body as completely independent entities. In other words, in Descartes' view, mind and body, spirit and matter appear to the reason as two completely independent realities with entirely different natures. According to Chalmer's distinction, the “hard problem of consciousness” relates to the question how brain processes at all lead to consciousness, and the `easy problems' on the other hand concern the correlation of specific mental processes and their underlying physical, functional processes (such as attention, memory, listening, perceptual discrimination etc.)., that is, the difficulty implied by the explanatory gap, in a rigorously phenomenological manner, guided by Husserl's theory of the bodily self-constitution of the ego.

This article presents three different strategies to bridge the explanatory gap. The first departs from the outside and proceeds inwardly. The analysis of Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt could be characterized as an example of this approach (2018, 2019, 2020). They posit the existence of a particular causal chain which individualizes a conscious experience as a unique neurobiological phenomenon, and ultimately, this peculiar causal process is responsible for the unique phenomenal features of a subjective event (i.e. for the particularities of “how it feels”). We can also associate with this “external way” of explanation the approach of Alva Nob and Susan Hurley (2003), who made a distinction between a “comparative” and an “absolute” explanatory gap. Thus, by setting aside the “absolute” explanatory gap (i.e. why does a particular brain process “have any qualitative expression at all”), they are able to claim that the “comparative” explanatory gap (i.e. why does a particular cerebral process “have this qualitative expression rather than that one”) is explainable in causal terms for the most part.

The second strategy is exemplified by the overall position of the branch of phenomenology that deals with embodied cognition, and by neurophenomenology in particular (Fuchs, 2018, 2020; Thompson, 2007; Varela, 1996; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991; Yoshimi, 2014). According to embodied cognitivists, the physical and subjective sides of experience have an essentially circular relationship In this context, we should remark that circularity and circular connections are also very important for Feinberg and Mallatt (2020, 3, 8).. In their opinion, the explanatory gap as such cannot be eliminated, although our scientific duty in regard to it is quite different. Instead of erasing it in a reductionist manner, we should rather make this gap scientifically fruitful, meaning that we ought to analyse rather the isomorphic features and circular interconnections between these two sides of conscious experience. In Evan Thompson's words:

The dynamic sensorimotor approach is best understood not as an attempt to close the comparative explanatory gaps in a reductionist sense, but instead as an attempt to bridge these gaps by deploying new theoretical resources for understanding perceptual experience and neural processes in a coherent and overarching sensorimotor framework. (Thompson, 2007, 257) The strategy and aim of the phenomenological current of embodied cognition are twofold. On the one hand, these scholars want to avoid reductionism; on the other, they strive after a monist description of the world--consciousness relationship. They believe that “mind and world” are “mutually overlap-ping” (Varela, 1996, 346), although they also want to conceive of and describe this “overlapping” in non-reductionist terms. These doubly directed efforts are nicely characterized and summarized by the following words of Evan Thompson: “I have argued that the standard formulation of the hard problem is embedded in the Cartesian framework of the `mental' versus the `physical' and that this framework should be given up in favor of an approach centered on the notion of life or living being. Although the explanatory gap does not go away when we adopt this approach, it does take on a different character. The guiding issue is no longer the contrived one of whether a subjectivist concept of consciousness can be derived from an objectivist concept of the body. Rather, the guiding issue is to understand the emergence of living subjectivity from living being, where living being is understood as already pos-sessed of an interiority that escapes the objectivist picture of nature. It is this issue of emergence that we need to address, not the Cartesian version of the hard problem” (Thompson, 2007, 236).

Finally, there is a third strategy, to which we will dedicate the last and longest part of our study, which we term the Husserlian way. It departs from the immanent sphere of subjective experience (i.e. the “inside” of consciousness) In this context we should refer to an important distinction by Husserl between “real” (“reell”) imma-nence and the “real” (“real”) content of conscious, subjective experiences, which was a crucial motif in his The Idea of Phenomenology (Husserl, 1999, 62-64). The first refers to the real or true (“reell”) im-manence of a transcendentally reduced consciousness, the second (“real”) to the consciousness as part of the natural world, as a constituted psychological reality. In this present article, at the deepest level, as the ultimate point of departure of the self-constitution of the ego, we are having in mind the first, more radical meaning of “immanence,” or “inside” of the consciousness, as transcendental consciousness.. According to Husserl, the concrete form of subjective experience is characterized entirely by embodiment (cf. Husserl, 1960, 1989a, 1997). He further posited that a phenomenological analysis of subjective experience-one which is attentive and careful enough--can identify a priori indications of this experience that point toward the transcendent, physical, and “external” aspects of reality. More specifically, in his view, the particular phenomenal features of each lived experience--and therefore, not those features which intentionally relate us to transcendent objects and facts in the world (e.g. the visual experience of a chair) --contain indications of the body and certain bodily functions.

Husserl held that the self-constitution and bodily functioning of the ego has certain a priori necessary and also some contingent features (cf. Yoshimi, 2010) At this point we should emphasize Husserl's strong anti-naturalistic commitment, the fact that in his opinion--after his so-called `transcendental turn' around 1906/1907 (Husserl, 2008b)--philo-sophy must take a strongly anti-naturalistic stance, and naturalistic conception of philosophy and science is fundamentally mistaken. Husserl's anti-naturalism does not mean that in his view natural sciences would be erroneous. That would obviously be an utterly delusional idea. By naturalism, Husserl means the conception that nature would be the only reality and ontological dimension, that everything that exists would be only natural and nothing else, and thus the only legitimate way of approach of reality and things in the world (including humans) would be the way of natural scien-ces. Husserl goes as far as to say, that in his opinion, naturalism would inevitably lead global human-ity to a civilizational catastrophe (Husserl, 1970, 299). He was of the opinion that transcendental consciousness and transcendental ego were not part of this world, we can also say, that we believed that these were something absolutely “otherwordly.” He criticized Descartes' conception of ego as “res cogitans,” because--Husserl thought--in Descartes' interpretation the ego was “a little tag-end (Endchen) of the world” (Husserl, 1960, 24). These considerations had also enormous consequences on Husserl's theory of the self-constitution of the transcendental ego in the form of an empirical ego.

Husserl's own conception of the self-constitution of the ego has an inherently idealistic character in accordance with his reinterpretation of phenomenology around 1906/07 as transcendental idealism. However, the idea of the self-constitution need not necessarily be an idealistic theory.

There are at least three main possible way to interpret this conception. 1) Firstly, there is a strongly idealist and metaphysical interpretation. The transcendental ego creates itself in the form of an em-pirical ego--very similar to Plotinus' idea of the emanation of reality from the One. As if flesh and bone would grow around the transcendental ego in a very literal sense. This idea would demand a. In our opinion, in the light of developments in phenomenology, philosophy of mind and neurology over the last one hundred years, we can modify Husserl's view so as to rephrase it in a much stricter way. In this regard, we believe that a slight modification of Husserl's conception of the necessary embodiment of the ego and its subjective experience serves as a theoretical foundation for what we might call the “Embodied Manifestation Thesis,” according to which every conscious experience and capability refers to a physical, bodily basis as its carrier and realizer. Thus, the ego and its experiences are manifested in a necessarily embodied mannerstrong metaphysical interpretation of the constitution. We can find the seeds of such an interpretation in Eugen Fink (Fink, 1966, 130-133; cf. Tengelyi, 2007, 112-113). Now we can find such a metaphysi-cally strongly committed interpretation of transcendental idealism and constitution in Arthur David Smith (2003), and Dermot Moran's own interpretation of Husserl is at least open to this direction (Moran, 2003, 2005, 2021). 2) The second could be labelled as a sort of “transcendental parallelism.” This means that the transcendental domain is not a completely independent, we can also say “super-natural,” realm that shapes and creates the natural world “from the above,” in a literal and metaphysical sense, but that subjective processes (like meaning-bestowal of things) necessarily have a transcen-dental aspect, which is not entirely independent from physical reality. It is a rather Kantian model, according to which, man is a citizen of two worlds. Robert Sokolowski has a good illustration of this model (Sokolowski, 2000, 118-119). According to this, we should have in mind the example of a chess figure, such as a rook. On the one hand, a rook is an empirical entity. Fire could burn it, it is a subject to gravity, so it can fall from the table etc. On the other hand, it is an agent of a game. As an agent of a game, it cannot be burnt or fall from the table, but one can checkmate with it the opponent's king. Similarly, says Sokolowski, a man is an empirical being on the one hand, but, on the other, she's an agent of truth and logic, and is a subject of the laws of rationality, logic, and truth. Tengelyi has a similar interpretation of Husserl (2014, 200-213, 411-433), and--in my opinion--also Klaus Held (1966). According to this second approach, subjectivity always involves disclosing the world and subject in it in certain ways, and this process of disclosing also always has certain a priori laws. 3) Finally, there is the attempt to naturalize phenomenology (Petitot et al., 1999). According to this current, we can use phenomenology as a methodologically elaborate discipline to study first-person subjective experienc-es in natural scientific research on consciousness. Representatives of this stance do not endorse--or do not endorse whole-heartedly--Husserl's anti-naturalistic position. They emphasize that conscious-ness is not something otherworldly or supernatural, but something inherently embodied, where em-bodiment also means physical embodiment, (so, not just the experience of having a body). They also emphasize that there are circular connections between the subjective and objective (physical, bodily) side of the experience (Thompson, 2007; Fuchs, 2018, 2020). They attempt to bring mind and world into complete “overlap,” but in a non-reductionist, non-eliminativist manner, although, they certainly do not endorse the idea of an otherworldly, creating transcendental subjectivity.

Of these three models, we would like to ally ourselves with the second--that is to say, we endorse a stronger interpretation of transcendental subjectivity, but also like to emphasize the importance of application of the phenomenological method in empirically oriented consciousness studies.

⁷ This view, the “Embodied Manifestation Thesis,” does not lead to determinism, of course. It leaves space for top-down causation, for the view that the subjective agent as a whole can autonomously determine herself. In other words, it leaves room for free choice..

In other words, Husserl's theory of embodiment offers us a way to bridge the explanatory gap starting with conscious immanence, highlighting the necessary embodied features of subjective experience, and proceeding towards the external bodily and physical aspects of reality, following Husserl's notions of constitution and self-constitution. This represents an inside--outwards bridging strategy for the explanatory gap.

We articulate our study in the following four sections: 2. Causal and External Strategies: Starting with Physical Reality; 3. Making the Explanatory Gap Fruitful: The Standpoint of Embodied Cognition; 4. A Husserlian Stance concerning the Explanatory Gap: Proceeding from Immanence Towards Transcendence; and 5. Conclusion.

2. CAUSAL AND EXTERNAL STRATEGIES: STARTING WITH PHYSICAL REALITY

This section examines certain characteristic examples of a concept that we could call the “external approach” to the explanatory gap, a concept which starts with the natural scientific attitude and external physical reality as a point of departure and attempts to arrive at the internality or immanence of subjective experience from that orientation. Proponents of this approach believe that an adequate causal explanation and description of the respective neurophysiological processes that lead to peculiar subjective experiences can at least provide a framework to study the so-called explanatory gap. It can explain why a certain physical causal event produces a certain subjective experience with its specific phenomenal features rather than another. Below, I present an analysis of two examples from this approach: first, that of Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt, and second, that of Alva Noe and Susan Hurley Of course, there are a great many “externally oriented” strategies applied to the explanatory gap which rely on the third-person perspective of a natural scientific attitude as their point of departure. Daniel Dennett (1996) would say that the idea of “philosophical zombies”--hypothetical creatures who are completely equivalent to conscious human beings in functional regard but lacking a con-sciousness (cf. Chalmers, 1996)--is a misleading construction that evades the real issue of con-sciousness, which is primarily a functional problem. Patricia Churchland (1996) and other elimina- tivists would say that even the problem of the explanatory gap is ill-fetched and misleading because there is no such a thing as “consciousness.”

Here we cannot provide an overview of these different strategies, as it is neither the focus nor the aim of the present study. In this section, we highlight only certain characteristic strategies--leaving us open to the accusation of “cherry-picking”--to make our point.

For an early overview, see (Varela, 1996, 330-333); for a more recent one, see (Godfrey-Smith, 2019). For a recent comparative analysis, see (Revonsuo, 2021). See also: (Tye, 2021)..

These scientists and philosophers seek a concrete, scientific way to explain the specific this-ness of conscious experiences, meaning their peculiar phenomenal, qualitative features. They incorporate a huge amount of neurobiological information into their attempts. Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness is an emergent feature of the functioning of living beings with a nervous system that has achieved a certain grade of complexity. “Emergence” here is a characteristic of complex systems that have novel features that can be explained only in terms of the peculiar forms of interaction among the parts of the system in question. As Feinberg and Mallatt assert: “Emergence occurs in complex systems in which novel properties emerge through the aggregate functions of the parts of that system” (2020, 2). Regarding the genesis of consciousness, they also differentiate between “strong” and “weak emergence.” In the case of “strong emergence”: “no known properties of neurons could ever scientifically reconcile the differences between subjective experience and the brain; i.e. that the explanatory gap can never be closed” (2020, 4). In the case of “weak emergence,” complex systems have real novel features and emergent new qualities, but such emergence can be explained by a causal story that is accurate enough. They believe that consciousness is an emergent feature of living beings in the “weak” sense and, thus, is a case of “weak emergence.”

Below the level of consciousness, Feinberg and Mallatt highlight two major emergent levels of complexity which laid the groundwork for the appearance of conscious experience: life and nervous systems. Every living being exhibits a number of systematically interrelated emergent features, such as embodiment (separation from the environment by possessing its own living body), information-based organization (DNA), communication with the environment, goal-directed or teleological being (self-preservation), metabolism, reproduction and dynamic adaptation to the challenges of its surroundings On this point, see also: (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Mayr, 2004; Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019).. The next major emergent level was the appearance of neurons, and the nervous system in particular. This granted a much faster and more efficient way to process and integrate sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective information within an organism, much more effective ways of learning and problem solving, and much greater adaptivity to environmental challenges. Feinberg and Mallatt attach the third emergent level, consciousness, to a higher stage of organization and development of the nervous system that enables the organism to produce sophisticated models of its internal and external environments, more nuances of affective evaluation of information related to interoceptive and exteroceptive data, and more flexible behaviour (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016; Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019).

To offer a basically physicalist solution to the problem of the explanatory gap, Feinberg and Mallatt (2020) turn to Bertrand Russell's distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description” (Russell, 1910). All three agree that a fundamental difference exists between knowing something from a first-person perspective experience and having access to something only externally (i.e., from the third-person point of view). Feinberg and Mallatt speak about an “experiential gap”-- unequal access to subjective experience from the first-person perspective--and a “descriptive gap”--unequal access to subjective experience from a third-person viewpoint. In their opinion, the “experiential gap” arises from the fact that a living being is an embodied organism, a relatively closed system, who has a unique and exclusive way of accessing some of her information processes that--due to the ontological structure of the physical world--no organism but she alone possesses. In their interpretation, this conception does not violate physicalism and harmonizes with the principles of “weak emergence.”

As we said earlier, in Feinberg's and Mallatt's opinion, it is a particular causal chain or story that individualizes a concrete experience as a specific ultimate result of bodily, neurophysiological and cognitive processes. The peculiar qualitative features of conscious experiences are due to several strongly related factors. Firstly, the experiencing activity always pertains to relatively closed physical systems. That is, to strongly embodied organisms that have unique access to their sensorimotor, affective and cognitive states and events. The “what-is-it-like”-ness of subjective states and processes is also shaped by the complete, concrete bodily constitution of the particular organism. Secondly, the qualitative features of subjective experiences are also determined by the physical characteristics of the stimuli in question “Electromagnetic waves of light have many different physical properties than the mechanical forc-es of touch, and both differ from chemical odorants, so translating all three kinds of stimuli into similar feelings would miss the special properties that make each sense so especially informative. Therefore, these diverse sensations should not--and indeed could not--all have the same subjective `feel'” (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2020, 7). Of course, Feinberg and Mallatt's approach did not convince everybody as a successful solution of the “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” as an indubitable way to bridge the Explanatory Gap. The most frequent point of criticism made is that their claim is “untestable.” Susan Blackmore expresses such a reservation concerning their position. (“Along the way they make untestable claims: that reflexes are not conscious, that sensory hierarchies require four or more levels to be conscious, or that the `defining features of consciousness' include non-nested and nested hierarchical functions, isomorphic representations and mental images. It is not that these suggestions are wrong but that there is no way of telling whether they are. And the argument is circular--specify in advance what you think the defining features are and then conclude that any creature with those features must. Thirdly, internal, bodily causal processes, with all their peculiar characteristics, shape the final qualitative form of a particular conscious subjective experience, establishing internal access of the particular organism to its inner states and events¹¹.

Alva Êî¸ and Susan Hurley also chose the external approach. As they write:

We suggest that an inward focus in response to explanatory gap worries can be misleading. To find explanations of the qualitative character of experience, our gaze should be extended outward, to the dynamic relation between brain, body, and world. (Hurley & Noe, 2003, 132, my emphasis -- B. M.)

¹¸ and Hurley differentiated between the “absolute” and the “comparative explanatory gap.” The “absolute gap” relates to the question of why an objective, physical process--a particular neurophysiological activity--should result in anything like a subjective experience. The “comparative gap” refers to the problem of why a peculiar neurophysiological process would lead to this subjective feeling or experience instead of another. While in this particular article they set aside the question of an “absolute explanatory gap”be conscious” (Blackmore, 2017, 312)). Although, Blackmore does highlight the value of the work of Feinberg and Mallatt (2016) as offering an exceptionally exquisite description of the evolution of the nervous system and its mechanisms to represent the environment. Another, more recent criticism of Feinberg and Mallatt's ideas can be found in Takayuki Suzuki, who claims that their approach is an important step in the naturalization of consciousness, but that it does not solve the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (Suzuki, 2022). The special merit of their evolutionary model is, Suzuki claims, that they were successful in showing where the “Explanatory Gap” was the smallest, but, according to Suzuki, in the end they failed to bridge this gap. They believe, however, that the “absolute” gap could be also addressed using what they call the “sensorimotor approach” (Myin & O'Regan, 2002; O'Regan & Noe, 2001; Thompson, 2007). More about this in the next section., they believe that a “comparative” or relative gap could be handled by careful and nuanced neurophysiological analysis.

Concerning the “comparative explanatory gap,” they make a further distinction between “intermodal” and “intramodal” gaps. An “intermodal” gap refers to the question of why a particular neural process leads to a visual experience instead of an e.g. auditory one. An “intramodal” gap, on the other hand, pertains to the question of why a peculiar neural event ends up in the sensation of e.g. a red patch instead of a blue one. Õ()¸ and Hurley contend that such questions could be addressed by detailed investigations and causal studies of the interactions between the brain, body and world. In this context, they introduced a third related distinction, this one between “cortical dominance” and “cortical deference” (or “neural dominance” and “neural deference”), which they argue could help explain the difference between intermodal and intramodal gaps in a philosophically and scientifically intelligible way. They describe this latter distinction as follows:

In cases of cortical dominance, cortical activation from a new peripheral input source gives rise to experience with a qualitative character normally or previously associated with cortical activity in that area. In such cases, we can say that cortical activity in a particular region dominates, that is, it retains its “natural sign” or normal qualitative expression. In cases of cortical deference, in contrast, cortical activity in a given area appears to take its qualitative expression from the character of its nonstandard or new input source. In these cases, the qualitative expression of cortical activity in that area changes, deferring to the new input source. (Hurley & Ìñ¸, 2003, 133)

In other words, they connect the explanation of the peculiar qualitative features of conscious experiences, which involve certain sense organs, different qualitative types (e.g. a sensation of red instead of blue) in relation to neural plasticity The capacity of the nervous system to reorganize itself in a dynamic manner in order to flexibly adapt to new environmental circumstances and challenges. To the question of neural plasticity see also (Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019, esp. 260-261): “In a sense, it is the neural network that constitutes and defines its units (the neuron and the synapse) rather than the other way around.”, and our dynamic relationship to ourselves and the world. However, as mentioned above, Êé¸ and Hurley--along with scholars such as Erik Myin and J. Kevin O'Regan--further posit that in the end, the “absolute explanatory gap” could also be handled by applying what one could call the “sensorimotor approach,” which relates to the dynamic relationship between the brain, body and world.

This approach involves a more holistic treatment of the brain-body-world relationship according to which subjective phenomenal consciousness is the active expression of the particular way that an organism practically inserts itself into its surroundings: the phenomenal givenness of a particular way that the organism enacts itself within its world or surroundings (cf. Êé¸, 2021). In the opinion of those who follow this approach, phenomenal consciousness is the manifestation of “skilful knowledge” about ourselves, the world and how to deal with the difficulties and challenges with which the world presents us “According to the sensorimotor approach, perceptual experiences are active manifestations of a kind of skilful knowledge and are defined in terms of potential for action. In general, it is difficult to describe the knowledge underlying a skill” (Thompson, 2007, 259).. For them, it is imperative that we study the details of this actively performed or enacted relationship, whereby we become capable of gradually closing the “absolute gap” through careful investigation of the detailed nature and structure of this actively conceived tripartite relationship.

The strategy of a dynamic “sensorimotor approach,” as Evan Thompson mentions, is “the strategy of working on both sides of the gap” (Thompson, 2007, 256). The program of enactivism and embodied cognition to “make the explanatory gap fruitful” is a logical consequence of this approach. However, in this section, we highlighted only one partial and abstract segment of it--its predominantly externally related research orientation. In the next section, we will have a closer look at the “fuller” version of this project, in which the researchers attempt to bring the two edges of the gap closer to each other in a systematic way by “working on both sides of the gap” We should emphasize that phenomenology is heavily present in the research of scholars such as Alva ¹ç¸, Susan Hurley, Erik Myin and J. Kevin O'Regan. In this present section, however, I only wanted to highlight the externally related moments that are prevalent in their philosophical and scientific efforts..

3. MAKING THE EXPLANATORY GAP FRUITFUL: THE STANDPOINT OF EMBODIED COGNITION

The main strategy of phenomenologically committed proponents of enactivism and embodied cognition is to work “on both sides of the gap”--as Thompson said. They attempt to narrow this gap systematically and gradually by comparative and interrelated analyses of the external and internal aspects of experience. Their goal is to lead the “mind-body” question back to the “body-body” question (Fuchs, 2018; Thompson, 2007)--which essentially refers to the Husserlian distinction between “Leib” and “Korper” (i.e. between the subjective and objective aspects of the body) See e.g. (Husserl, 1960, 1989a, 1997). This is covered in detail in the next section: 4. A Husserlian Stance Concerning the Explanatory Gap: Proceeding from Immanence Towards Transcendence.

In this regard it seems indispensable to have a closer look at Evan Thompson's interpretation and criticism of Husserl--to see the difference in a sharper light. First of all, we should emphasize that when Varela, Rosch, and Thompson presented their phenomenologically committed version of Embodied Cognition in 1991, they were aligned more with Merleau-Ponty than Husserl--of whom, under the influence of Hubert Dreyfus's interpretation (Dreyfus, 1982), they had a rather critical opinion. According to them, Husserl was 1) a representationalist, 2) a methodological so-lipsist, 3) underestimated the bodily features of consciousness, 4) had a rather idealist and repre- sentationalist picture of the life-world, and 5) tended to substantialize consciousness in an idealistic manner. Evan Thompson systematically revised this interpretation of Husserl in 2007 (Thompson, 2007, 413-416). He said that when they were working on their book their understanding of Hus-serl was strongly influenced by Dreyfus, and they only read a limited number of Husserl's texts (Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, Crisis of the European Sciences and the Tran-scendental Phenomenology). Thompson said in 2007 that, after processing a large number of man-uscripts by Husserl, he no longer thought that their 1991 criticism was correct. Now, he does not think that Husserl was a representationalist, methodological solipsist, placed little emphasis on embodied character of subjectivity, or had a representationalist and overly idealist conception of the life-world. He believes that Husserl's phenomenology even today could provide a substantial contribution to contemporary scientific and empirical research on consciousness. Thompson says that he can even endorse a methodological, non-idealistic, non-substantialist conception of the transcendental attitude. On the other hand, Thompson is still of the opinion that there are a large number of metaphysically strongly committed, strongly idealist elements in Husserl's texts that Em-bodied Cognition--even in its criticism of reductionist or eliminativist materialism--cannot join (esp. Thompson, 2007, 81-87, 356-359). We e.g. need to “guard” ourselves against the assump-.

In this project, these authors attach special significance to circular relations between the subjective and objective sides of experience, and between brain, body, behaviour and environment (cf. Fuchs, 2020).

Earliertion “physical forms are constructions out of a preexistent consciousness” (Thompson, 2007, 82). Thompson did not share Husserl's radical anti-naturalism, nor his emphatic protest against the possibility of the mathematization of consciousness (Thompson, 2007, 356-357).

We can see that in 2007 Thompson had a much more positive and affirmative reading of Husserl than in 1991. However, he also emphasized his critical constraints concerning Husserl, and differs from a strictly Husserlian position at many points, which also makes his conception--and the sec-ond strategy concerning bridging the explanatory gap--clearly different from the third approach that we are going to treat in the next section, that could be labelled as “more orthodoxically Husser- lian.”

Firstly, Thompson--following Varela (1996)--was working on “two sides of the gap” in parallel. For him, the subjective point of view was not an absolute point of departure as it was for Husserl. That makes Thompson's approach--and other proponents of Embodied Cognition, who attempt to handle the problem in a similar way--unambiguously different from the third strategy, from a more radically Husserlian viewpoint. Secondly, Thompson follows Varela also in the regard that he attempts to articulate a more monistic--although non-reductionist--ontology, and tries to bring subjectivity and objectivity, consciousness and the world in a complete overlap. That also means that Thompson explicitly and expressively does not endorse a more radical conception of transcen-dentalism-such a conception that we would like to follow, after Sokolowski, Held, and Tengelyi (see earlier), which attributes a stronger metaphysical reality to the transcendental dimension, next to the dimension of physical reality., we stated that phenomenologically committed versions of embodied cognition and enactivism have a bidirectional strategy or objective. On the one hand, they aim to avoid dualism, that is, the “doubling” of the world. They oppose functionalism (as smuggling back mind-body dualism in the form of software[mind]-hard- ware[body] dualism) and representationalism (which would again “double” reality as internal mental representations and represented external entities and states of affairs) on this and other grounds. They want “mind” and “world” to “overlap” completely (Varela, 1996, 346). They also endeavour to lead the mind-body question back to the “body-body” (i.e. Leib-Korper) problem for this reason. On the other hand, they also want to avoid bald reductionism, the thesis of the sheer identity between the mental and the physical, and also eliminativism, which would simply erase anything regarded as a mental, psychic, conscious etc. phenomenon (cf. Noe, 2021)These latter considerations make the second and the third strategy plainly different.

¹⁷ See footnote 5.

¹⁸ “But the promise, and beauty, of such an approach [enactivism] is that it may help us to explain how people and other animals enact world and experience, not in the ground it is wrongly thought to supply for denying experience, presence and world altogether” (¹ç¸, 2021, 969).. They instead attempt to explain consciousness and subjectivity in terms of an emergent feature of reality that arises from the intricate and complex dynamics of natural processes.

An important element of this project (often characterized or labelled as the “naturalization of phenomenology”) Cf. (Petitot et al., 1999). It is important to mention that there is a significant overlap, but the phe-nomenology of embodied mind and naturalized or naturalizing phenomenology are not entirely identical. Dermot Moran, for example, treated the problem of embodiment in a number of different articles (cf. Moran, 2010, 2013a, 2015, 2017), and he still attaches great importance, actuality, and relevance to Husserl's antinaturalistic and transcendental attitude (Moran, 2008, 2013b). is to treat the individual organism as a co-dependent part of its environment and to derive consciousness from active organism--environment interaction An approach which, in my opinion, could be traced back to Merleau-Ponty's work The Structure of Behavior (1967) at the latest. The holistic conception of the organism and the co-dependent character of the organism-world, or the brain-body-environment relationship mean first and foremost two things. Regarding the ho-listic approach of the organism, we should say that proponents of Embodied Cognition attempt to explain consciousness and behavior in terms of a general structure and top-down causality, instead of a more linear and mechanistic causal explanation. They believe that there is a general structure which is constitutive in the understanding of the particular causal processes in the organism, as well as its individual actions. This conception is clearly reflected in the common work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980) regarding autopoiesis, as well as in later classical works of Embodied Cognition (cf. Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991; Thompson, 2007). Furthermore, con-cerning the holistic character of mental life, these authors believe that the psyche, the organism's in-ner mental sphere has likewise a holistic and organic structure, like its entire body and body-world relationship, which reflects the organicity of the external, physical structure of the organism. In the peculiar constitution of the mental life and sphere of an organism-these theoreticians claim--a whole specific bodily way of life is reflected, and there is an entire sedimented evolutionary pre-history.

On the other hand, as regards the co-dependence between organism and environment, and between brain, body, and world, this does not mean--of course--that world would be somehow dependent on an organism or a group of organisms, as if there was no world, if there was no experiencing or acting subject either. This co-dependence refers to the peculiar nature of their connection. We can understand the bodily and structural constitution and particular way of functioning of an organism in respect to its concrete, specific relation to its environment, as well as to its whole evolutionary pre-history. Organisms, in turn, also deeply affect their environment through their particular way of living and metabolic processes. They are capable of transforming their entire environment-- just think of constructions, like a beehive, ant nest, beaver's lodge or spider's web. If a species is gone from a specific environment, several others might follow it in the way of extinction. Or think of the “Great Oxidation Event” circa 2,5-2,8 billion years ago, when aerobic, oxygen-producing organisms started spread overall the planet, they started to change the entire atmosphere of the Earth, which resulted in mass extinction of anaerobic life-forms, and mass-spread of aerobic life.. These authors conceive of the organism in a holistic manner, and they believe that in a certain way, the entire body participates in the concrete way in which consciousness is realized (cf. Cosmelli & Thompson, 2010)21. According to them, the ineffably peculiar qualitative character of subjective experience is partly due to this holistic manner of realization because so many-neural and non-neural, bodily and (partly) extra-bodily-factors participate in the realization of consciousness. Therefore, they contend that there is always something unique and individual in each conscious experience, not only because it occupies a unique place on a chronological line, but also due to the individuality and uniqueness of the entire momentary causal system that realizes a particular momentary experience or conscious state.

Exponents of this approach employ several methodological techniques to connect the subjective and objective sides of experience and to bind them together as tightly and intimately as possible--or, in other words, to bridge the explanatory gap. In a methodological respect, there are two general ways to treat this problem: neurophenomenology and microphenomenology. Neurophenomenology--as established and described by Francisco Varela (1996)--consists of a method according to which we teach the participants and volunteers in experiments the elements of the phenomenological method, train them how to use this method in a rudimentary way and instruct them how to observe and describe their experiences from a phenomenological attitude (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008, 33-38; Lutz et al., 2002). During the experiment, we let them observe their own experiences according to their training and collect their own first-person accounts later--while we also observe them externally, possibly using certain neuroimaging devices (e.g. EEG, MRI, fMRI, or PET). Lastly, we systematically compare the first-person accounts with the results of third-person external observations of the bodily and neurophysiological functioning of the participants.

Microphenomenology is a second-person perspective interviewing method. It also involves special training of participants in how to observe their feelings and experiences in a very nuanced “microscopic” way (thus the name “microphenomenology”). It focuses on grasping the tiniest details and changes in the experiential field and flow, and on enabling participants to grasp and describe those details and changes (Petitmengin, Remillieux & Valenzuela-Moguillansky, 2018). Although this method focuses on the interviewing procedure, it is also open to neuroimaging techniques See e.g. “Micro-phenomenologically Informed Neuroimaging”. https://www.microphenomenology.

com/cognitive-projects.

Formalization is a crucial element in this project to connect the two sides of the explanatory gap. As an initial step in bridging the subjective and objective aspects of experience, these authors look for isomorphic features on both sides (i.e. on the psychological and bodily-neurological sides of conscious functioning). However, they criticize and reject the idea of mere “analytical isomorphism,” according to which there would be a one-to-one isomorphic correspondence between conscious content and brain states, whereby the latter would merely represent the former somehow and vice-versa (cf. Petitot et al., 1999; Thompson, 2007, 297-298, 357-358). Even a mere reference to the phenomenon of neural plasticity (as we made earlier) would render implausible the assumption of a brain state or process which could permanently correspond or correlate in an isomorphic way to one phenomenal conscious state once and for all. Although there are certain obvious topographically and geographically isomorphic features of brain processes and correlated conscious content and events, these authors embed the attempt at the formalization and articulation of a formal model into a much wider theoretical and particularly mathematical framework, namely: “dynamical systems theory.” Dynamical systems theory is an area of mathematics that describes the behaviour of complex, often nonlinear systems, primarily by using differential or difference equations. This formal and mathematical approach is suitable for the phenomenologist exponents of embodied cognition and enactivism for at least two reasons. Firstly, this approach encompasses the variability involved in neural plasticity (“neural deference”) and a dynamic body--environment relationship. Secondly, it can also embrace physical and psychological factors and their dynamic interactions in one formal theoretical framework. Moreover, it is also able to present these factors as interdependent parts of one and the same system and treat their relationship accordingly “Because dynamic systems theory is concerned with geometrical and topological forms of activity, it possesses an ideality that makes it neutral with respect to the distinction between the physical and the phenomenal, but also applicable to both” (Thompson, 2007, 356)..