Although the subject matter of religious studies is essentially phenomenal (e.g., conscious acts, attitudes, intentions, worldviews), the analysis of the basic datum, consciousness itself, remains of necessity incomplete because of the discipline’s restriction to the phenomenal envelope. Philosophical and psychological analysis contributed to our understanding of consciousness, but, lacking access to the neurological engine-room of consciousness, their explanatory power is compromised as well. Neuroscience, on the other hand, has moved beyond the behaviorist denial of consciousnessand recent research indicates that the evolutionary developmentof the brain’s representational capacity may well account for its ability to generate consciousness. These advances provide an opportunity to marry objectiveexplanation with phenomenological descriptions of the view from the inside, creating a powerful new analytic tool: Neuro-phenomenology. Comprised of an exaggerated differentiation between conscious state and informational content, and constituting an important phenomenological category within many Hindu and Buddhist programs, lucid consciousness makes an ideal subject with which to assess the analytic power of Neurophenomenology.

The great majority of scholarly definitions of “religion” center around some notion involving experience or awareness of a supernatural dimension ( forces, entities). This sense of the supernatural has been found in virtually all human societies extending back into paleolithic times. Advances in neuroscientific research technology have made it possible to assert that phenomenal experience is in fact a form of brain activity; the two are identical. This naturally leads us to inquire as to why and how a brain evolving to serve the needs of survival and replication in a harsh natural environment should have developed the capacity and evident propensity to generate a sense of the supernatural. Psychology has recently identified a set of three primitive interpretive modules dedicated to generating a sense of causative essence. These modules are located in areas of the brain whose representational output can be experienced as non-material, like the stream of thought, rather than as external physical landscape. These non-physical neurophenomenal essences are identical to the three forms of otherworldly spirit essence found throughout human religious history, and they form the basis of the multi-layered neurophenomenal complex comprising the sense of the supernatural.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the neurophenomenologi- cal project on epileptic seizure anticipation, and to sum up the methodological diffi- culties we met. The analysis of neuroelectric signals with new mathematical methods has provided strong evidence that it is possible to detect a pre-seizure state in the neu- ronal dynamics a few minutes before the seizure onset: do these neurodynamical modifications correspond to any modifications in the patients’ subjective experience, and which ones? This paper describes our attempt to correlate these two dimensions of seizure anticipation, the neuroelectric one and the phenomenological one. The em- phasis is put on the phenomenological dimension and the problems related with the description of the patients’ subjective experience. We also describe the different levels of correlation we explored between first person and third person data, stressing the methodological difficulties we met at each level. In conclusion, we evaluate the re- sults of the project and the relevance of the neuro-phenomenological approach on the therapeutic, methodological and epistemic levels…

Key words: Neurophenomenology, phenomenology, subjective experience, epilepsy, epileptogenesis, anticipation of epileptic seizures, cognitive therapy of epilepsy.

Can the “first person” point of view help in an assessment of the relevance of the theory of enaction, theory in which the inside and the outside, the knower and the known, the mind and the world, determine each other? On the basis of an exploration of the dynamic micro-structure of lived experience, we suggest some means of tackling this question.

Key words: Dynamic structure, enaction, explicitation, first person, lived experience, micro-genesis, neuro-phenomenology, transmodality

Contrary to a widespread belief, becoming aware of one’s lived experience is neither immediate nor easy, but supposes a real expertise which has to be learnt. Such training enables us to discover that lived experience associated to the realization of a given cognitive process, far from being a draft, has a very precise dynamic structure: it is constituted of a definite succession of sensations and operations that remains usually pre-reflective. Becoming aware of this dynamic structure opens up highly promising paths for transforming our experience in the medical, therapeutic and existential fields. This awareness also enables researchers to refine neurophysiological analysis, announcing the lifting of the ban that until now excluded subjective experience from the field of scientific investigation.

Key words: Cognitive therapy of epilepsy, epileptic seizure anticipation, epileptogenesis, first person, lived experience, neuro-phenomenology, phenomenology, pre-reflective experience, subjective experience.

This special issue commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of The View from Within (Varela & Shear, 1999), where Francisco Varela in collaboration with Jonathan Shear designed the foundations of a research program on lived experienced.

My comments on this pioneering book by Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel do not focus on the descriptions of experiences that it includes, but on the very process of description, which seems to me insufficiently highlighted, described and called into question. First I will rely on a few indications given by Melanie herself, the subject interviewed by the authors, to highlight an essential difficulty which the authors only touch upon: the not immediately recognized character of lived experience. Then I will look for clues about what Melanie does to come into contact with her experience and recognize it. These clues – completed by elements of description of this act collected through explicitation interviews – provide criteria enabling a more precise evaluation of what the authors do to guide Melanie in the real-ization of this act, and therefore the accuracy of Melanie’s descrip-tions. I will defend the idea that the description of the very process of becoming aware and describing is an essential condition for the understanding, refinement, teaching, and evaluation of introspection methods, as well as for the reproducibility of their results.

Context: The founding idea of neurophenomenology is that in order to progress in the understanding of the human mind, it is indispensable to integrate a disciplined study of human experience in cognitive neuroscience, an integration which is also presented as a methodological remedy for the “hard problem” of consciousness. Problem: Does neurophenomenology succeed in solving the hard problem? Method: I distinguish two interpretations and implementations of neurophenomenology: a light or “mild” neurophenomenology, which aims at building correlations between first-person descriptions and neural recordings, and tries to evaluate the validity of first-person descriptions through objective criteria; and a deep or radical neurophenomenology, which aims at investigating the process of co-constitution of the subjective and the objective poles, within lived experience, and tries to evaluate first-person descriptions through processual criteria. Results: While mild neurophenomenology does not solve the hard problem, radical neurophenomenology solves it by dissolving it. Exploring the early stages of phenomenal processes such as the emergence of a perception or an idea highlights: (1) a dimension of experience where the separation usually perceived between the subjective and the objective poles vanishes; (2) micro-actions that instant after instant create and support this process of co-constitution, which Varela called “enaction.” This involves on the one hand experiencing concretely the dissolution of the hard problem, and on the other hand verifying the theory of enaction in lived experience. Implications: Radical neurophenomenology is a research programme that enables us to investigate precisely the mutual unfolding of the subjective and objective poles, from its most primitive phases such as perceptual events, to its latest phases such as the co-construction of scientific objectivity and intersubjectivity.

The article by Froese, Gould and Seth is a survey rather than a commentary, dealing with the intertwined issues of the validity of first- person reports and of their interest for a science of consciousness. While acknowledging that experiential research has already produced promising results, the authors find that it has not yet produced ‘killer experiments’ providing a definitively positive answer to these two questions, and wonder what kind of experiment would allow it. Our response will address these two questions successively.