Husserlian Meditations and Anthropological Reflections: Toward a Cultural Neurophenomenology of Experience and Reality

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.

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Abstract

ABSTRACTMost of us would agree that the world of our experience is different than the extramental reality of which we are a part. Indeed, the evidence pertaining to cultural cosmologies around the globe suggests that virtually all peoples recognize this distinction—hence the focus upon the “hidden” forces behind everyday events. That said, the struggle to comprehend the relationship between our consciousness and reality, even the reality of ourselves, has led to controversy and debate for centuries in Western philosophy. In this article, we address this problem from an anthropological perspective and argue that the generative route to a solution of the experience–reality “gap” is by way of an anthropologically informedcultural neurophenomenology. By this we mean a perspective and methodology that applies a phenomenology that controls for cultural variation in perception and interpretation, coupled with the latest information from the neurosciences about how the organ of experience—the brain—is structured.