Introduction

The centre will host the first Consciousness and Intentionality conference at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus on Friday/Saturday, August 6th/7th 2010.

Call for presentations: The conference will reflect on our understanding of consciousness and intentionality – two topics that are highly elusive and difficult to make sense of when looking beyond the phenomenology of neural firing patterns. Contributions are invited that help clarify why contemporary approaches have so much difficulty in understanding these phenomena – and what approaches are needed to reach a more accurate understanding. One central issue will concern the opportunities and limitations of the experimental approach in dealing with consciousness. In psychological research we commonly deal with a phenomenon using a third-person (experimental) approach while disregarding first-person experience. For some areas this is suitable, for other areas, however, it is a restriction. Consciousness and intentionality, for instance, are inherently first-person experiences and a third-person approach can thus capture them only partially. How can these phenomena be examined more accurately? Presentations from psychology and other disciplines are welcome.

Scope and Background: When we pay attention to a phenomenon – e.g. a falling pebble setting off waves in water – there is a circumscribed physiological response in the observer’s brain (a neural firing pattern). There is also a conceptual response that is accessible to the observer’s thinking, e.g. the insight into cause and effect: The falling pebble is causing the waves, not the other way round. The concept of causality is brought forward by means of the observer’s thinking – we can understand it as a concept but we cannot observe or weigh or measure it. What is measured by the data-recording instruments are only correlations. Two domains thus inform our understanding of the phenomenon, that of observation (mediated through the senses/the brain) and that of concept (mediated through our thinking as described, for instance, in R. Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom). The observation-part is measurable via third-person experimentation (e.g. measurement of brain activity). The concept part is accessible via first-person experience (thought). Both go hand in hand, yet when investigating these phenomena psychologists tend to disregard the conceptual level and limit their investigation to that of the observation level (the neural firing pattern). This leads to a dilemma: Once the conceptual dimension has been dropped from the agenda of psychological enquiry it becomes difficult to develop a comprehensive understanding of phenomena such as consciousness or intentionality. The reason is that these phenomena are based precisely on first-person experience and any understanding must remain limited if it ignores such a dimension from the outset. How is it possible to re-integrate both dimensions without falling prey to the problem of subjectivity, as was the case with introspectionism?

Historic examples show that such an approach is indeed possible. The Gestalt psychologists, for example, brought the observation- and experience-dimensions together in describing the Gestalt-laws. Here, the experience is acknowledged as a reality rather than being defined as an appendix to the underlying neural firing patterns. This is because the Gestalt laws are precisely about how we experience objects in the outside world rather than how the sense organs communicate them. This approach did not stumble over the problem of subjectivity: The observer can inform him-/herself about a phenomenon as an independent individual without the need of external statistical validation. The respective laws are accessible to and verifiable by direct first-person experience. Building on such an approach, how can we deal with other imminent questions today – e.g. the ones about consciousness and intentionality? How can such an integrative approach be developed without getting lost in subjectivity on the one hand; and without getting out of touch with reality (by denying the conceptual experience and thus consciousness proper) on the other?

Presentations from Psychology and other disciplines are welcome. It is planned that contributions are compiled in a book to be published as “conference proceedings” afterwards.