The experience-reality gap—the difference between how the world appears and its underlying reality—is recognized across cultures, yet Western philosophy has long struggled to explain it. This article proposes an anthropologically informed cultural neurophenomenology as a way to bridge that gap. The approach combines phenomenology that accounts for cultural differences in perception and interpretation with neuroscientific findings about brain structure. The authors argue that this integrated perspective offers a generative route to understanding the relationship between consciousness and reality.
Dilthey's descriptive psychology offers a framework for understanding consciousness, experience, and culture that can inform anthropological research. His concepts of experience, introspection, and objectified mind, along with the acquired psychic nexus, provide tools for examining phenomena like pain. The paper argues that Dilthey's ideas remain relevant for contemporary theoretical perspectives on the relationship between consciousness, culture, and experience in anthropology.
The longstanding debate between anthropologists and psychologists over nature versus nurture has been hampered by a mind-body schism. Anthropologists often assume culture replaced biology, while psychologists tend to ignore culture in favor of a naive scientism. Bridging this divide requires a language that can simultaneously address individual experience, culture, and extramental reality. The authors propose a cultural neurophenomenology and argue that the concept of 'information'—specifically Fisher information—provides a unifying framework. Fisher information allows modeling interactions among experience, culture, and reality in commensurable terms and suggests mechanisms by which individual psyche and societal culture remain 'trued-up' to reality and the individual's own being.