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

Mathematization, however, is only one element of this complex project, the aim of which is to mutually enlighten phenomenology and the cognitive sciences or biology through each other and to demonstrate that no firm line exists between first and third-person perspectives (cf. Gallagher, 1997). These authors are very well-aware that through merely formal description we will not be able to explain the qualitative character of conscious experiences. This is not the aim, however. Formal descriptions and formalization are only a means of contributing to the connection or bridging the two sides of the explanatory gap, but these authors know that formalization alone cannot accomplish this. However, there is no need to make the attempt, as this is not its task. By drawing upon “dynamical systems theory” to describe the complex isomorphic forms of psychophysical structures, these authors only want to show that the relationship between the physical and the psychic or psychological is not at all arbitrary. They know with full clarity that the formal approach cannot explain why a particular conscious experience has a given peculiar qualitative character and not another. They maintain that the total causal description of a process that ends in an experiencing act (which includes the particular material elements involved in this process) is capable of providing such an explanation. They further contend that it is not only the structure which matters in the realization of consciousness but that the material constitution of the particular organism is also indispensable to explaining a conscious experience of a certain peculiar qualitative character rather than another (cf. Fuchs, 2021; Shapiro, 2004)24.

4. A HUSSERLIAN STANCE CONCERNING THE EXPLANATORY GAP: PROCEEDING FROM IMMANENCE TOWARDS TRANSCENDENCE

This section represents an attempt to reconstruct a third way to bridge the explanatory gap that commences from the immanent sphere of consciousness and tries to attain transcendence from within. In this endeavour, our guide will be Husserl's idea of the bodily self-constitution of the ego, or, stated otherwise, the Husserlian process through which the transcendental ego constitutes itself in the form of a bodily empirical being in the world, and does so in a necessary way.

The key concept in this inside-outwards bridging attempt is Husserl's notion of “constitution.” For Husserl, the way things appear to us (and consciousness appears to itself) has certain empirical and contingent but also a priori and necessary features (cf. Moran, 2002, 164-168, 2005; Sokolowski, 1970, 2000; Zahavi, 2003, 72-77). From a Husserlian perspective, things cannot appear in a completely arbitrary way. He used the term “constitution” to refer to the process by which consciousness presents (stellt ^{24 Needless to say, embodied cognition, specifically the theoretical endeavours of e.g. Alva} ¹ç¸, Susan Hurley, and Evan Thompson--and the particular way they attempted to handle the problem of the “explanatory gap”--provoked a number of different types of criticism. Common, recurring topics of criticism include, but are not limited to, the charges that embodied cognition operates with a de-pleted notion of cognition, that it applies vague, poorly defined concepts, that it offers no real, fruit-fully applicable alternative to computational cognitive sciences, or that it could not justify its claim in a really indubitable way that the body has a constitutive role in the emergence of consciousness, rather than a merely causal (cf. Shapiro & Spaulding, 2021). In the last few decades there were many controversies between proponents and detractors of embodied cognition, that included criticism of rejection of functionalism by embodied cognition (cf. Rupert, 2009), or criticism of embodied cognition's critical attitude towards representationalism (cf. Venieri, 2015), and many other sorts of criticism aimed at the allegedly vague definitions of embodied cognition and other problematic issues (cf. Goldinger et al., 2016; Zwaan, 2021). In particular, regarding the explanatory gap, the embodied cognitivist stance is subject to criticism of whether it can handle the “hard problem of consciousness” any more effectively or fruitfully than classical cognitivist, functionalist, or mecha-nical approaches. The details of such debates, however, exceed the scope of this present study, where we only wanted to treat the embodied cognitivist approach of the “hard problem” as a characteristic strategy to cope with this challenge. vor) objects to itself and presents itself to itself in an a priori and necessary fashion. Examples of constitution could include the appearance of a spatial object, whose forefront--in Husserl's view--cannot appear without indicating its non-appearing, unseen sides; or a temporal event--such as hearing a melody--which necessarily involves a tripartite structure of primal impression-retention-protention. In the same manner, Husserl also maintained that constitution pertains to the necessary way of being of the ego, that it must ultimately appear as a bodily, historically and culturally shaped practical and active creature in the world (cf. Husserl, 2008a, 251-258; Held, 1966).

Husserl described the self-constitution of the ego as having several moments and layers. In this section, we will have a closer look at this description and attempt to offer an inside-outwards processing explanation of the explanatory gap by following up on the different segments and steps of Husserl's conception of the self-constitution of the transcendental ego in the form of a bodily empirical subject in the natural world.

This section is articulated in three subsections: 1) The General Outlines of Husserl's Theory of the Body, 2) Concrete and Abstract Consciousness, Motivated and Ideal Possibilities, 3) The Role of the Nervous System in the Constitution of Our Concrete Embodied Being: An Internal Theoretical Vehicle for Bridging the Explanatory Gap.

4.1. The General Outlines of Husserl's Theory of the Body

Husserl discovered the fundamental importance of the body to an understanding of the specific and exact structure of conscious experience at a relatively early stage of his career in his 1907 Thing and Space lectures (Husserl, 1997). In Thing and Space and later works Cf. (Husserl, 1960, 1980, 1989a, 2001, 2008a) etc., he conducted detailed investigations and elaborated quite thoroughly on the experience of embodiment and the problem of how concrete consciousness is affected and characterized by the inherently bodily nature of subjectivity For more on Husserl's theory of embodiment, see (Behnke, 2011; Moran, 2010; Zahavi, 1994; Zaha- vi, 2003, 98-109).

Regarding the term of “concrete consciousness,” we consider it important to make the following remarks. The term here does not refer to “individual” or “specific” acts or events of mental life, or “tokens” of the mental sphere, but just the opposite. It refers to the entirety of conscious life or the mental sphere as an organic, coherent whole. “Concrete consciousness” here, in the widest sense, refers to a coherent set of structures that make a concrete conscious, bodily existence in the world possible. It is something to which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty referred with the expression “Being-in-the-World” (Heidegger, 2001; Merleau-Ponty, 2002). It is very close to Husserl's idea of.

He gradually realized that no conscious functioning is conceivable without considering the essentially incarnated character of consciousness. As he pointed out, one's own body is involved even in the mere constitution of space and spatial objects. Not even the first passive experiences related to the external world could begin without a body. Our own body appears first as a special object, which also counts as the zero point of orientation in space (cf. Husserl, 1960, 152). The body is an absolute here that I cannot “rip out” of my visual field, regarding which everything else is a there. It is, furthermore, a special object because it “accompanies me” wherever I go, and I have internal access to it. I experience my body from the inside and also from the outside at the same time. Concerning the external aspect of the body, it is a necessarily incompletely constituted object-- which means that I cannot see e.g. the back of my body directly, without any technical visual aid (such as a mirror).

Husserl conceived of one's own animate body as an inseparable unity of subjective and objective aspects, Leib and Korper, which are constituted as interdependent moments of one and the same phenomenal system, as two sides of the same coin (cf. Husserl, 1973a, 263, 1973b, 75)“monadic subjectivity,” as he presented this conception in the 1920s, when he started to elaborate systematically his “genetic phenomenology.” When Husserl said in the Cartesian Meditations that the monad is “the full concretion of the Ego” (Husserl, 1960, 67), he implied that what could be referred to with the term “concrete consciousness,” and the situation is the same with his expression of “transcendental person” (Husserl, 2002b, 198-201, 451-453). See also: (Luft, 2011). The main point is that Husserl in Ideas I and II presents a rather formal conception of the transcendental ego. He said at that time that it was a purely formal logical pole to actions and experiences, some-thing “without any hidden inner richness” (Husserl, 1989a, 111). In this regard, Husserl's opinion changed significantly when he started to elaborate his ideas on concrete monadic subjectivity as transcendental subjectivity, and the notion of the transcendental person, in the 1920s. Namely, he thought that embodiment, a connection to a concrete world, intersubjectivity, historicity, and cul-ture does not only belong to the empirical ego, but also to the transcendental ego as transcendental. This transcendental ego must have structures with which to make a concrete conscious existence in the world possible, and these structures must be conceived as transcendental.

²⁷ Husserl often used the terms „Leibkdrper“ or „leibkdrperlich“ to emphasize the inseparability of the union of the subjective and objective aspects of the body (cf. Wehrle, 2020).. In other words, for Husserl, in the case of one's living, animate body, the objective aspect cannot be constituted without the subjective, and vice-versa. Externally, our body appears as a systematically coherent complex of external perceptions of an object, that is simply an integral part of our external experiential field and flow. Internally, as Leib, our body is constituted as a coherent system of bodily sensations and feelings of bodily position, movements and orientation (i.e., a system of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic experiences) and also as a system of bodily capacities--a system of multiple instances of “I can” („Ich kann“). Throughout one's concrete life history, the specific composition and structure of this system constantly changes. A teenager has different bodily capacities and possibilities than someone in her sixties. Regardless, the internal structure of the Leib, according to Husserl, has certain eidetically “Eidos”--that is to say, regarding the essence of a certain type of phenomenon. From Ideas I (1983) onwards Husserl uses this term in a rather consequent way to refer to universal and essential features of phenomena. invariant moments and features in the case of every human person.

In Husserl's view, there is an incredibly complex relationship between the ego, its body and the world. He interprets the body as “an organ of the will,” and thus of the ego (Husserl, 1989a, §38, 159-160). In other words, as an instrument. However, he also emphasized that the body is also something indispensable for the constitution of objects and space (Husserl, 1989a, §39, 160-161, 1997; cf. Zahavi, 1994). According to Husserl, without the body, the constitution of things, space and other subjects cannot even start in the first place. The ego integrates and embeds itself into the environment and the world as such through its bodily movements and activities. The ego, furthermore, could constitute itself in a more specific, concrete manner through its constituting interactions with things, space and other subjects. To put it another way, there is a circular relationship between the constitution of the ego, body and world-- each member of this system is interdependent, correlated and mutually constitutes the other (cf. Moran, 2013a).

The next important question is this: What exactly is meant by the constitution of the concrete consciousness and the concrete ego in Husserl?

4.2. Concrete and Abstract Consciousness, Motivated and Ideal Possibilities

Husserl's relevance to analytic philosophy of mind has been repeatedly emphasized in the last few decades by several authors Cf. (Cobb-Stevens, 1990; Dahlstrom, Elpidorou & Hopp, 2016; Dreyfus, 1982; Gallagher & Zaha-vi, 2008; Moran, 2013c; Smith, 1983; 2007; Smith & McIntyre, 1982; Smith & Thomasson, 2005; Yoshimi, 2022).. In this present subsection, we lay out some elements of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of an attempt to bridge the explanatory gap starting from conscious immanence, following Husserl's notion of constitution as a guide. It should be noted that, for Husserl, the relationship between the subjective and objective sides of experience, and Leib and Korper in particular, has a priori necessary features that we will use to indicate a possible way to bridge the explanatory gap. In such a project, we are also forced to modify certain points of Husserl's idea of the mind-body relationship somewhat in the direction of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. However, Husserl's concept of constitution offers an extremely effective and fruitful theoretical vehicle in this regard, as I endeavour to show here.

As we saw in the previous subsection, in Husserl's eyes, the subjective and objective aspects of the body, Leib and Korper, are constituted in an a priori necessary fashion in an a priori union with each other. In strong connection with this, the sensory achievements of sense organs, that is to say, sensations (Empfindungen), are also produced in an a priori necessary manner by bodily sense organs (Husserl, 1989a, 304, 2020, 52) This claim could be justified at a higher stage of constitutive analysis. The first crucial step is to conceive Leib and Korper as moments of one coherent unity, of the very same phenomenal system, as two sides of the same coin (cf. Husserl, 1973b, 414, 462; 1977, 150-151; 1989a, 152-154). In the case of a living, feeling, experiencing animate subject, in Husserl's opinion, there is no Leib without a Korper, and the Korper, as a physical body, necessarily has a Leib as its internal aspect. The phe-nomenological regard can disclose a priori necessary features of the relationship of Leib and Korper as a whole, as well as their certain specific parts. The next crucial step is to grasp one's physical body (Korper) as a system of bodily organs, each of which has a different function, which enable certain transcendent, bodily actions in the world, and each of which has internal and external (leibliche and korperliche) aspects, similar to the body in its entirety. The following third major step in the cons-titutive analysis of the self-constitution of the bodily ego is to realize that the functioning of these bodily organs--such as the sense-organs--and the results of this functioning, do not only have a merely empirical and causal relationship, but their relationship also has certain a priori features. If we abstract from this insight, Husserl's remarks on the relationship of sensory experiences and physical bodily functioning might seem merely descriptive assertions, rather than constitutive and phenomenological statements (Husserl, 1989a, 304). “As regards sensations, the dependence means that a certain Bodily state (or, rather, a certain form of Bodily states, admitting the process of me-tabolism, which removes the individual identity of the elements of one and the same organ, of the same nerves, ganglia, etc., though it maintains the same particular form) has, as its univocal and Objective consequence, a certain sensation in a determinate stream of consciousness bound to its respective Body” (Husserl, 2020, 52). “The appearances and other contents of consciousness (lived experiences) depend on the body (Leib)” (Husserl, 2020, 52). In my interpretation, however, these assertions imply that the relationship between sensation and the correlative bodily functioning is not entirely empirical and contingent, but at least at his lower level of mental life also has certain a priori necessary features.. However, the soul has certain higher capabilities, functions, and content which--according to Husserl--are partly independent from the body, and which have an empirical and contingent relationship to the latter. Elsewhere, I argued that in the light of the last hundred years of development in philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences, we can revise this Husserlian conception, and we can also extend the a priori connection of Leib and Korper to higher mental faculties (Maro- san, 2022). In this way, we can formulate a conception that might be called the “Embodied Manifestation Thesis,” according to which every mental capability, structure, and instance of content refers to a bodily basis as its carrier and realizer, and--based upon Husserl's idea of constitution--there is an a priori constitutive relationship between them.

Here we can raise the question: Does the mental sphere have an a priori necessary connection to the body? From time to time, Husserl meditates on the possibility of an ego without a body (Husserl, 1973b) “I can think, however, that I don't have a body at all” (Husserl, 1973b, 547). In Ideas III, Husserl speaks of the possibility that we can imagine a locomotive with consciousness (Husserl, 1980, 104).. This, however, turns out to be an abstract possibility for him. In other places, he is very emphatic that the concrete personal ego cannot be conceived without an actual physical body “A person cannot be concrete without having an objective body as a lived body”(„Eine Person kann konkret nicht sein, ohne einen Korper als Leib zu haben“) (Husserl, 2012, 380).

Here we should also mention that is a common misunderstanding concerning Husserl's notion of Kdrper that this term in his work refers to the externally appearing body. Generally, yes, the term has this meaning, but not always. In certain places, Husserl uses this expression explicitly to mean the physical body, which exists outside of our mind in nature.

The constitutive connection between the phenomenologically reduced, phenomenally appearing body and the physical body in nature is very complex, but it could evidently be reconstructed. Based upon the related analyses found in Ideas I concerning the constitution of transcendent objects, the relationship between the phenomenologically reduced Kdrper-phenomenon and the transcendent Kdrper in nature is pretty much the same, as in the case of any other phenomenologically reduced object as a noema and its transcendent physical correlate. Namely, according to Husserl, at the core of the objective sense (gegenstandlicher Sinn) of a certain phenomenon there is the “determinableX” that connects the subjective aspect of a particular thing directly to its objective transcendent aspect in an a priori necessary fashion (Husserl, 1983, 313-316).

And, in his view, the conception of the “determinable X” is not a peculiar “proof of the external reality”; rather, it is meant to be a phenomenologically accurate description of how the sense of the external, mind-transcendent, objective and physical reality is constituted. One can mention that Husserl's notion of “empirical necessity” could serve as a bridge between ide-al and motivated (empirical or real) possibilities (Husserl, 1983, 14-15, 103). “Empirical necessity” in Husserl's view is both characterized by the contingency of empirical facts and partially by the necessity of eidetic vision. To this see also: (Tengelyi, 2014, 171-191; Breuer, 2017).. This problem necessitates turning to Husserl's distinction between ideal and real or motivated possibilities (cf. Zhok, 2016). “Idealpossibilities” in Husserl refer to such possibilities that do not entail logical contradiction: to things, events, and situations that are purely imaginable and conceivable (cf. Husserl, 2002a, II, §30, 250-251, §62, 308-311). “Real” or “motivated possibilities,” on the other hand, are based upon our empirical knowledge of the world; such possibilities are motivated by this previous knowledge (Husserl, 1983, 107, 336-337)33.

Against this backdrop, we can imagine an ego without a real, actual physical body--like a ghost. Or, we can imagine a “conscious locomotive,” the possibility of which was mentioned by Husserl in Ideas III (1980, 104). Furthermore, we can imagine a completely functional body, an animate, living organism, who--despite her fully and perfectly functioning nervous system-does not have conscious experiences, like Chalmers' zombies (Chalmers, 1996). These ideas, based on the previously mentioned distinctions, could be conceived of as ideal possibilities. It also seems that our knowledge of the mind-body connection and the relationship between sensory experiences and particular neural functions and processes is based on empirical research. Consequently, the relationships between mind and body, sensory experience and neural functions and processes are ultimately empirical and contingent: we associate a certain conscious state with a certain neural process and state based on an empirical, real, and motivated possibility. We can always imagine that a certain neural process results in a different sensation or conscious state than it regularly does. The real question is whether we can truly imagine these things.

Here I would like to propose a relativization of this distinction between ideal and real or motivated possibilities. This “relativization” means that a closer analysis of the phenomenal and phenomenological microstructures of motivated or real possibilities could show ideal moments and features in the constitution of such possibilities. Moreover, it could turn out that the motivated possibility in question from a certain point of view could be considered as ideal. In the context of our present study, I choose to base this `relativization' of ideal and real or motivated possibilities on Husserl's idea of “doublephenomenological reduction” (cf. Husserl, 2006a; Tengelyi, 1998). In Husserl's view, under phenomenological reduction, we must exclude all “transcendent knowledge” and exclusively focus on what is evidently given in immanent experience (cf. Husserl, 1999) To be precise, Husserl spoke about two forms of transcendence in his lecture on The Idea of Phe-nomenology. Namely, the transcendence of the real--in relation to the purely immanent-and the transcendence of the ideal or general--in relation to the individual. In Husserl's opinion, although the ideal or the general in a certain way transcends the individual, it could still evidently be given under the phenomenological reduction, as the evidently intuitable general features of individual phenomena and their connections (cf. Husserl, 1999, 37-38, 41-42). There are phenomenologically reduced general or ideal objects (“eidetic” forms, “eide”), but as we make progress in our phenome-nological analyses, we are forced to incorporate elements of transcendent knowledge into the eidet-ic research. With this we arrived at the second important point of this remark.

The Idea of Phenomenology (1907) was originally introductory lecture to Thing and Space (1907), in which the phenomenological method was already used in a methodologically fully conscious and systematic way. In the phenomenological analyses of the body and the Leib-Kdrper relation-ship conducted in this lecture, Husserl consistently and steadily rejected using any transcendent. Husserl introduced and elaborated this idea of “double phenomenological reduction” in his 1910/11 winter semester lecture, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Guided by this idea, we implement a simple phenomenological reduction first on what is originally posited as something transcendent and existing outside of our minds, which is thus reduced to a transcendental phenomenon constituted by our consciousness. Then, in a following step, we execute a second reduction on the transcendentally reduced phenomenon in order to gain back its immanent content, its pure meaning, which we can thus use in a phenomenologically legitimate manner. Husserl used this method to enable him to speak intelligibly of other minds, of intersubjectivity under phenomenological reduction (Husserl, 2006a), although this method is also clearly applicable to empirical knowledge about the world, and natural scientific knowledge in particular.

Husserl apparently used this method in Ideas II (1989a), and also in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (2020)knowledge about the body, although he refers sometimes to empirical, natural scientific research on the body. Nevertheless, he emphasizes his investigations have nothing to do with experiential inquiries and empirical studies, but only relate to what is purely and evidently given in immanent experience, under the phenomenological reduction (Husserl, 1997, 117-119, 136). He accentuates that he speaks about phenomenal-phenomenological and not causal and empirical relations. In the concluding parts of the lecture, however (1997, 247-253), at least in my reading, he makes several remarks that indicate the possibility of reinterpreting empirical knowledge in a phenomenologi-cal manner (1997, 251). (“The force that grounds Being grows in the course of experience, with respect to its advancing rationalization, in the form of an experiential science which secures for every exception its reintegration under a rule and coordinates to every not-being a semblance that pertains to Being. In this way the force of the experience that constitutes the world grows to such an imposing potency (and this is a rational potency) that the possibilities which work toward the not-being of a real world constituted with strict lawfulness and unity in the nexus of appearance, and always determined ever more completely, precisely become empty possibilities--not meaning-less, but irrational and baseless ones.”). These hints, in my view, point towards his later conception of the “double reduction.”

³⁵ See: (Husserl, 2020, 47, 52, 57, 60-64). These pages are from 1909/10--approximately the same time as the publication of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Husserl, 2006a)., when speaking about the role of the nervous system^{36 More about this in the following subsection.} in the constitution of concrete consciousness and in the realization of the soul's psychological dependency on the body. Of course, “double reduction” is not a magic wand that you could use on anything under phenomenological reduction to make it something valid and real--thus making miraculously legitimate things like dragons, fairies and wraiths from a phenomenological perspective. Things that involve transcendent knowledge about the world could only have limited and hypothetical validity in the phenomenological attitude. A scientific hypothesis or theorem, however, which enjoys the support of the relative or absolute majority of a scientific community, reflects intersubjectively general knowledge of the research community concerning the mind-transcendent empirical and physical world, and, in a properly careful and circumspective manner, could be also used in the phenomenological attitude with relative and conditional validity. This, in turn, imposes on the phenomenologist the task of searching for pathways that connect the meaningful or purely semantic core of the theorem in question with what is directly given in experience; if this is possible, the conditional evidence can be gradually transformed into absolute and apodictic evidence.

For Husserl, a consciousness or a single conscious experience cannot be conceived of as concrete without conceiving of it as the experience of an embodied, in- tersubjective, practical subject in the world, (cf. Husserl, 2008a, 251-258, 2012, 380; Zahavi, 1994, 1996, 2003) As we noted in an earlier footnote 26, “concrete consciousness” should be conceived in a narrower and wider sense in Husserl. The narrower sense refers to an actual state of one's conscious being--the en-tirety of one's mental sphere, with all its specific contents, structures, and organic relations. The wider meaning refers to a coherent set of mental structures which makes a concrete conscious, embodied being in the world possible. In our interpretations, both meanings are implied in Husserl's conception of concrete “monadic subjectivity,” as presented in the 1920s and afterwards.. This “abstractness” means that we lack the full constitutive meaning of a conscious experience or event, or even consciousness as such in its entirety, if we abstract from its indications of embodiment, intersubjectivity and its worldly surroundings. Husserl believes that close analysis of the microstructure of experience can unfold many different, interrelated indications of our bodily, inter- subjective being in the world, and that if we do not follow these indications, we simply will not grasp the full constitutive meaning of conscious existence, nor the meaning of single, specific individual experiences.

Husserl, especially in his late period (the 1930s), was very determined that the full constitutive meaning of being a subject--even in the transcendental sense--implies having a body in the world, an intersubjective community and a history (cf. Husserl, 1973c, 361-386; Tengelyi, 2014, 184-187) At this point we would like to refer to our earlier footnote 7, where we examined certain details of Husserl's theory of self-constitution, its possible interpretations, its relationship to the opposition of transcendentalism and naturalism, and Husserl's strong anti-naturalistic commitment. At first reading, Husserl's analyses on the body might appear as parts of a descriptive-eidetic investiga-tion aimed at the empirical domain rather than the transcendental. This is, however, at least in my opinion, and especially in the context of texts that were written after 1920, an illusion. We should make two important remarks. Firstly, as said earlier (in footnote 26), from the beginnings of the 1920s Husserl started to work intensively and systematically on the details of his “genetic phenomenology,” which aimed at the a priori laws and principles of experiential genesis (cf. Hus-serl, 2001). With this achievement, boundaries between transcendental and empirical, eidetic and factual, transcendental and empirical essence became more flexible than ever. Husserl gained more methodological means to reinterpret empirical knowledge and essences that related to the empiri-cal domain in a phenomenologically legitimate way, within the transcendental realm. The second point is strongly connected to the first and it relates to Husserl's fundamental revision of the notion of transcendental ego. Earlier, in 1912, when Husserl was working on Ideas I-III, the transcendental subject was a pure, formal, empty, logical pole, to which acts and experiences were related as their origin or zero point. Back then the transcendental ego was “without any hidden inner richness” (Husserl, 1989a, 111). It changed drastically in the 1920s, as Husserl started to elaborate his notions of concrete monadic subjectivity and transcendental person, which were transcendental concepts, and which also implied structures of embodiment in a transcendental manner and meaning.. The structure of the ego's self-constitution has both variable--in fact, an infinite number of variable--and also invariable elements Cf. (Husserl, 1989b, 9-10): “Whether man has empirically constructed organs of perception, eyes, ears, etc., whether two or x eyes, whether these or those organs of movement, whether legs or wings, etc., is completely out of the question, undetermined and open in principle to considerations, such as those of pure reason. Only certain forms of corporeality and mental spirituality (seelische Geis- tigkeit) are presupposed and considered; it is a matter of consciously conducted scientific research into essence to highlight them as a priori necessary and to fix them conceptually.”. The concrete process of self-constitution relates to the eidos of the ego. The process also depends on the species and, ultimately, the fundamental type of subject--whether it is a rational or a non-rational animal subject. The specific subject and her specific way of self-constitution is a weave or fusion of variable and invariable components. According to Husserl, the subject is necessarily an embodied being even at the lowest level Elsewhere, I tried to show what a minimal subject would look like from the Husserlian perspective (Marosan, 2022)., and there are only certain a priori necessary ways in which she can access the world at all. From a Husserlian perspective, this conception also implies that the immanent aspect of our subjective capabilities and achievements could be connected to their bodily (leib- lich) aspect within the sphere of immanence, and this latter--the bodily (leiblich) carrier and realizer of our subjective capabilities and events in the immanent realm--to a transcendent, objective, and physical bodily basis. It also follows from Husserl's thoughts that this could be shown in the case of every particular subjective capability and event. In the next subsection, we try to show exactly how this can be accomplished.

4.3. The Role of the Nervous System in the Constitution of Our Concrete Embodied Being: An Internal Theoretical Vehicle for Bridging the Explanatory Gap

Husserl deals with the problem of the nervous system from a phenomenological perspective in a detailed way in at least two texts: Ideas II and Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (Husserl, 1989a, §63, 302-310; 2020, 47, 52, 57, 60-64). This might seem surprising because the nervous system is a transcendent entity that does not belong to the immanent sphere of consciousness, but rather to the transcendent realm of nature. It may seem that a phenomenologist would have excluded it through phenomenological reduction. Husserl, however, as we saw in the previous section, found ways to bring it back into accordance with the phenomenological attitude in a manner that he thought phenomenologically legitimate.

The key concept to understand the phenomenological role of the nervous system in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl is the notion of organ (cf. Claesges, 1964). For Husserl, as mentioned previously, the body--even from the subjective point of view, under the phenomenological reduction and within the realm of immanence--is constituted as a composite system of bodily parts--that is, of different organs. These organs enable certain activities by the ego; they render it capable of actually undertaking certain actions in the world. I walk with my feet, I grasp with my hands, I taste with my tongue, and “I see with my eyes” (Husserl, 2008a, 616), says Husserl. These organs, Husserl asserts, grant the ego access to its environment; they integrate the ego in a particular way into the world. A concrete bodily structure, a specific composition of bodily organs and their internal constitution reflect a specific way of life in the world. Like the body as a whole, each individual organ is also constituted as a unity of internal and external aspects. Our organs have subjective and objective, externally appearing, and--ultimately--physical aspects. There is a peculiar way in which we feel them on the inside and in which they appear on the outside.

According to Husserl, there exists a peculiar organ with a very specific functional role, one that he calls the “central organ” (Husserl, 1989a, 304). Its special task is to realize the “psychophysical dependency of the soul on the body” by connecting the subjective aspect of our body to the objective side (cf. Yoshimi, 2010). This organ is the nervous system, and the brain in particular. In Husserl's view, the functional role of the nervous system is to coordinate and harmonize the functioning and activity of every other organ and to connect the ego to its body, and through that to the world. For him, it is not the peculiar material composition--the “stuff”--that is interesting in the nervous sys- tem--that would be rather awkward from a phenomenological perspective--but rather its functional role: its constitutive meaning in the constitution of the body.

In Husserl's view, this is pertinent to the self-constitution of the ego in that the latter constitutes its bodily existence by means of a “central organ” that connects the soul to the body, and that coordinates organic functions and the functioning of sensory organs in particular Although Husserl did not say that this “central organ” pertains to the essence or eidos of a concrete bodily subject, nevertheless, I would venture the assumption--on Husserlian grounds--that this “central organ” belongs to the self-constitution of an embodied conscious subject with essential or eidetic necessity.

This, however, raises the question of whether we can imagine a conscious being without a nervous system. In the previous subsection, we saw that if we consider ideal possibilities, it is an option to separate consciousness or conscious capabilities from the actual bodily organization of living beings, and to connect consciousness--in imagination--to e.g. a locomotive (Husserl, 1980, 104). And, in fact, on the one hand Husserl eventually does speak about “plant monads,” “unicellular monads” (where the Leibnizian term “monad” refers to the “full concretion of the ego” (Husserl, 1960, 67-68)) (cf. Lee, 1993, 225-230). On the other hand, the philosophical standpoint of “biopsy-chism,” according to which the phenomenon of life and consciousness are overlapping realms, and every living being has a certain sort of consciousness of its own, is a real, existing position (more recently, see: (Thompson, 2022)).

We, however, would prefer to refer to the “relativization” of the Husserlian distinction of ideal and real possibilities that we proposed in the previous section. Namely, we believe that a closer phe-nomenological analysis of empirical “real” and “motivated” possibilities could disclose elements of a deeper necessity within them, such features that we could grasp as a form or elements of an ideal necessity.

So, we can, of course, imagine that there are conscious beings who do not actually have a nervous system--or living beings below the level of animals, such as plants, fungi, or bacteria, that possess a certain sort of consciousness (as Evan Thompson believes, or authors such as Lynn Margulis or Henri Bergson before him). However, even in these cases--if we stick to the Husserlian approach-- we must assume that there must be certain bodily parts in the organism that play the role of this “central organ,” which coordinates and harmonizes the functioning of other bodily organs and re-alizes the “psychophysical dependency of the soul on the body.”. Because the nervous system connects certain bodily organs to the soul and grants access to the ego to the world, it could be also conceived of as a functional architecture or skeleton My phrasing, not Husserl's. that reflects a concrete bodily being-in-the- world Sometimes, Husserl also used this Heideggerian term in his late period (cf. Husserl, 2008a, 462, 490). of the subject: her specific way of life. This functional architecture or “skeleton” could also be conceived of as a complex eidetic structure of the peculiar way in which the organism in question is connected to the world or communicates with it. This complex eidetic structure has different parts and components that could be relatively independent topics of eidetic analysis on their own In this regard, on Husserlian grounds, I would respectfully disagree with the opinion of certain radical proponents of embodied cognition, according to whom the specific material constitution is essential for the realization of consciousness as such. This is to say that according to these authors, an organism or a material system in general is rendered capable of conscious activity specifical-ly due to certain material components in its organization (cf. Fuchs, 2021; Shapiro, 2004). For a critical account of this view see: (Clark, 2008). Such views are partly directed against the idea of artificial intelligence, or in this particular context: artificial consciousness (esp. Fuchs, 2021, 13-48), and, strongly related to this, against the conception of the multiple realizability thesis (cf. Putnam, 1967), which posits that one and the same mental state or process could have different physical causes. For artificial intelligence developers, it is an important idea because it enables attaching the capability of consciousness to robots, even if they are composed of different matter than us, if they can be conceived of as functionally equivalent to us. Radical proponents of embodied cognition, in contrast, would prefer to delimit the capability of consciousness to organisms of a specific material constitution (cf. Gallagher, 2011). They believe that matter is an important factor in the realization of consciousness. (It should be noted that radical proponents of embodied cognition oppose the “multiple realizability thesis” in so far as it completely separates particular mental content from the particular matter that realizes that content.)

In this respect, the following should be noted. Under phenomenological reduction, from an eidetic attitude, we can--of course--also consider the particular causal powers and capabilities of different types of matter, such as iron, copper, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, sodium, calcium etc. We can legitimately analyse them from a phenomenological point of view, as I tried to show in the previous section when I was speaking about “double phenomenological reduction” and how it might help us to use “transcendent” and empirical knowledge under phenomenological reduction in a valid, phenomenologically acceptable way. We can also describe--still under phenomenolo-gical reduction--how different types of matter and their causal interactions facilitate or enable the realization of certain bodily functions and how they contribute, with their specific materiality, to the functional architecture of a living being.

I believe, however, in a phenomenological and, more particularly, Husserlian regard, that we should first and foremost rely upon the peculiar way of communication between an organism and her en-vironment and, specifically, the eidetic structure or features of that peculiar way. Moreover, from a phenomenological perspective, if a living being is organized as a conscious being, it has the func-tional architecture of a conscious being, its functional apparatus supports the realization of con-sciousness and it communicates with its environment like a conscious being, then it clearly exhibits the eidetic features of the embodiment of a conscious creature, and--again, from a phenomenolo-gical viewpoint--it should be considered conscious.

It is, of course, a plausible position even in the phenomenological attitude, that a difference in the material constitution of the living being causes a difference in the phenomenal quality of the con-scious experience. But under the phenomenological reduction we have no reason to believe two organisms, who have the very same functional architecture, and one of them is conscious, the other one can't be conscious because it is composed of different matter than the first one.. The bodily parts and organs, alongside their related neural structures, which render us capable of carrying out certain bodily and conscious activities in the world, such as sensory perception, could be treated as co-dependent and--in a thematic regard--still relatively independent moments of this eidetic complexity that mirrors the functional architecture of the living being in question. Related to the whole eidos of the creature's functional organization, the bodily parts, with their joined neural subsystem, also have their own eidetic substructures.

Based upon what we have said in the previous subsection, from a Husserlian perspective, there is the possibility of clarifying and integrating empirical knowledge about the functioning of the nervous system under phenomenological reduction, to use the purely semantic core of such knowledge in a hypothetical manner and to look for ways to connect the hypothetical validity that is immediately given in the phenomenological attitude with apodictic evidence. This means turning the hypothetical, presumptive and limited evidence into apodictic evidence in a slow, processual and gradual way. Through eidetic vision, the phenomenologist should unfold apodictic features and cores in available empirical knowledge regarding the functioning of the nervous system and its role in the realization of consciousness and connect these features and cores to the immediately given features of our directly appearing embodiment. This would be an attempt to bridge the explanatory gap in a Husserlian manner, one which would proceed from conscious immanence to external, bodily and physical transcendence What would an attempt to turn a motivated and empirical possibility into an ideal one look like? Let us consider the following example: “Tomorrow, the sun will rise.” This seems to be an eminent case of an empirical possibility. Nothing guarantees that the sun will rise tomorrow just as it did to-day. However, let us take a look at this sentence: “The sun remains in its place and the earth rotates 360 degrees around its axis, and we assume that there is no cosmic disaster which would inhibit either of these events”--and someone says that it is still an empirical possibility that the sun will not rise tomorrow. We would say that the person in question just does not understand the semantic content of this sentence. “The sun remains in its place and the earth rotates 360 degrees around its axis, and we assume that there is no cosmic disaster which would inhibit either of these events” means precisely that the sun will rise tomorrow. Of course, a cosmic disaster could always happen-- such as an asteroid or minor planet colliding with and destroying our entire planet. However, we restrict ourselves to referring to the formal aspects and implications of the sentence, “Tomorrow, the sun will rise,” which has a priori features.

In a related manner, it is possible that a philosophical and scientific analysis of the execution of cer-tain bodily functions that is detailed enough would demonstrate the necessary manner in which the bodily function in question leads to certain conscious experiences. In such a case, when one wants to speak about the ideal possibility of a “philosophical zombie,” according to which the entire causal chain is run through, the bodily function in question is executed flawlessly as it should be, and there is nevertheless no conscious experience, then we should say that the person in question, for whom the possibility of being a “philosophical zombie” is only assumed, simply did not understand what exactly happened to her body..

CONCLUSION

In this present article, we wanted to offer a way of approaching the problem of the explanatory gap from a Husserlian perspective. In the first main section, we examined the general outlines of some externally directed strategies to close the gap, and, in the second, we showed some characteristic features of certain other strategies that work with both the external and internal aspects of conscious experience, and which are primarily based on the research project of embodied cognition. In the third and final section, we attempted to clarify the elements of a Husserlian-based project that would follow an inside--outwards direction, starting from conscious immanence and, from there, striving to reach physical, bodily transcendence, following Husserl's theory of constitution as our guide, trying to disclose indications in the realm of immanence that refer to transcendent reality--or certain elements, relations, and connections in the transcendent world--in an a priori necessary fashion.