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Mind, World and the Second Person| old_uid | 2862 |
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| title | Mind, World and the Second Person |
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| start_date | 2007/05/21 |
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| schedule | 11h45 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle F 106 |
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| details | suite à 14h30 |
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| summary | One major achievement of the embodiment, situational, “enactive” approach to cognition consists in making available for us some strong conceptual tools to understand the phenomena of cognition and mind. I think the phenomenological lineage of much of these tools accounts for a significant part of their usefulness in the context of this approach. But what is really crucial in a phenomenological account of the emergence of consciousness (the meaning-bestowing process that distinguishes the minded from the not-minded) is the evidence that this very same phenomenon is simultaneously the co-emergence of a world. The basic phenomenological evidence is that consciousness and world are inseparable correlates in that unified phenomenon that we call human cognition. This evidence supports the distinction between the environment and the world of an organism, advanced by F. Varela. The environment is the surrounding reality of some entity (a third-person phenomenon), while the world is always someone’s world, i.e., a first-person world, or, in other words, the meaningful configuration which constitutes the medium of existence for that entity. Thus, (conscious) mind and world are necessary correlates. If we accept this phenomenological evidence, then we should understand that the structuring of the conscious mind is the structuring of the correlative world as well. The shaping of experience by pre-noetic operations is thus simultaneously the shaping of the experienced (spatial, temporal) world. Not surprisingly, this view is not likely to be taken very seriously within the scientific community of the study of consciousness because of the non realistic, internalist thesis that it seems committed to espouse. Therefore, advocating for this mind-world correlation to be taken seriously by the scientific community means at least two things: firstly, to place the understanding that is gained by the uncovering of the pre-noetic performances that structure consciousness within the theoretical framework of the mind-world correlation and to show how this move helps us to better understand the precise way by which the world-life, and therefore our world-experience, becomes configured and shaped by those pre-noetic performances; and secondly, to show that despite this “subjective” structuring of the world of experience, cognition is always referred to an external, real world. In other words, it should be shown how the phenomenological inspiration leading, among other views, to the embodiment, situational approach to cognition is not necessarily committed to an anti (or non-) realist, idealistic stance concerning ontology and epistemology. In this talk I intend to partially set out some of the basis needed to bring support to this task. I will propose that a way to search deep insights into the highly puzzling relationship between the subjective, first-person nature of the experienced world and the objective, third-person perspective by which it is given to us through the natural sciences could take the form of a recovery of the missing person in this debate, namely the second person. I will try to sketch the view that the world as a correlate of consciousness is in fact neither a fully independent pre-configured world, nor a subjective, idealistic human creation, but actually a second-person constituted world, and that this is the only sense in which the concept of an “external reality” has an interesting and non-metaphysical role to play in the explanation of cognition. |
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| responsibles | Roy |
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