An Unavoidable Mind-Set Reversal: Consciousness in Vision Science.

Summary

Seeing cannot be reduced to separate parts like stimuli, brain activity, or objective methods because subjective experience is an undivided whole. Traditional neuroscience and Gestalt psychology have studied visual perception by focusing on the percept—the object seen—while avoiding the question of what it means to be conscious as self-referentiality. This creates a logical trap similar to Baron Munchausen pulling himself from quicksand by his own hair. The paper proposes an experimental phenomenological approach that analyzes seeing as a unified whole, reversing the usual mindset. This reversal clarifies how phenomenology, psychophysics, and neuroscience relate to and depend on each other.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In recent decades, the debate on consciousness has been conditioned by the idea of bottom-up emergence, which has influenced scientific research and raised a few obstacles to any attempt to bridge the explanatory gap. The analysis and explanation of vision conducted according to the accredited methodologies of scientific research in terms of physical stimuli, objectivity, methods, and explanation has encountered the resistance of subjective experience. Moreover, original Gestalt research into vision has generally been merged with cognitive neuroscience. Experimental phenomenology, building on the legacy of Gestalt psychology, has obtained new results in the fields of amodal contours and color stratifications, light perception, figurality, space, so-called perceptual illusions, and subjective space and time. Notwithstanding the outcomes and the impulse given to neuroscientific analyses, the research carried out around these phenomena has never directly confronted the issue of what it means to be conscious or, in other words, the nature of consciousness as self-referentiality. Research has tended to focus on the percept. Therefore, explaining the non-detachability of parts in subjective experience risks becoming a sort of impossible achievement, similar to that of Baron Munchausen, who succeeds in escaping unharmed from this quicksand by pulling himself out by his hair. This paper addresses how to analyze seeing as an undivided whole by discussing several basic dimensions of phenomenal consciousness on an experimental basis and suggesting an alternative way of escaping this quicksand. This mind-set reversal also sheds light on the organization and dependence relationships between phenomenology, psychophysics, and neuroscience.