In einer Handvoll Hirn lebe ich - das schrieb nicht etwa Wolf Singer oder gar Gerhard Roth. Dieses Zitat stammt vielmehr von Tommaso Campanella (1568- 1639). Es ist also gar nicht so neu, an das Hirn zu denken. Seinerzeit – und das mag zu denken geben – war die Idee, diesen im Hirn verlorenen Menschen so gegenüber Gott in Freiheit zu setzen. Diese Freiheit fand er, gerade da er an dieses Hirn gebunden und demnach der Unendlichkeit Gottes entwunden war. Dies wäre nun so natürlich keine Alternative zu der modernen Hirnforschung, die Freiheit gerade ganz andersherum zu denken sucht. Nur muss es zu denken geben, eine Diskussion um die Hirnfreiheit nun schon weit vor der Hirnphysiologie verankert zu finden. Was sind denn überhaupt die Konzepte mit denen eine Hirnforschung heute an den Menschen herangeht. So bietet Campanella einen Anlass einmal eingehender nach der Konzeption, den Vorgaben und den Eingrenzungen der Neurosciences zu fragen.

Excerpt: The capacity to engage in collective intentionality is a key aspect of human sociality. Social coordination might not be distinctive of humans – various nonhuman animals engage in forms of cooperative behavior (e.g., hunting together) – but humans seem to possess a specific capacity for intentionality that enables them to constitute forms of social reality far exceeding anything that can be achieved even by nonhuman primates. During the past few decades, collective intentionality has been discussed under various labels in a number of empirical disciplines including social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, ethology, and the social neurosciences. Despite all this work, however, many foundational issues remain controversial and unresolved. In particular, it is by no means clear exactly how to characterize the nature, structure, and diversity of the we to which intentions, beliefs, emotions, and actions are often attributed. Is the we or we-perspective independent of, and perhaps even prior to, individual subjectivity, or is it a developmental achievement that has a firstand second-person-singular perspective as its necessary precondition? Is it something that should be ascribed to a single owner, or does it perhaps have plural ownership? Is the we a single thing, or is there a plurality of types of we?

A review of the attempts at establishing neurophenomenology as a new research paradigm for neuroscientific research on music concludes that the integration of the first-person perspective of phenomenology and the third-person perspective of neuroscience remains an unfinished project. Relevance: This paper proposes methods for phenomenological investigation of music, and discussion of research in the neurosciences and music.

The paper proposes a renewal of the problem-space in which the relation between psychoanalysis and the cognitive neurosciences is played out, this is in response to the persistent embarrassment or stand-off that characterizes current attempts at dialogue. The authors suggest going beyond classical conceptual oppositions, (mind-body, subject-object etc.), and beyond the seduction of the idea of some ‘natural’ conceptual translation between the two practices. A process of reciprocal ‘transference’ becomes central to creating the space in which the “mixed,” (both biological and subjective), quality of our objects may be recognized and the pitfalls of reductionism be avoided. For psychoanalysis the hysteric was originally such a mixed or “quasiobject’ in which psyche and soma were in a relation of reciprocal representation. On the other hand, the cognitive neurosciences’ ‘embodied-enactive’ and neurophenomenological perspectives provide a philosophical framework for the place of subjectivity and interpretation in scientific work. This important epistemological shift in scientific thinking offers evocative conceptual tools (emergent processes, circular causality), which should transform the difficult dialogue between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis.

Key words: Cognitive Neurosciences, Quasi-object, Consciousness, Phenomenology, Lacan

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as a minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view by showing how direct learning, seen as an instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity.

I review three answers to the question: How can phenomenology contribute to the experimental cognitive neurosciences? The first approach, neurophenomenology, employs phenomenological method and training, and uses first-person reports not just as more data for analysis, but to generate descriptive categories that are intersubjectively and scientifically validated, and are then used to interpret results that correlate with objective measurements of behaviour and brain activity. A second approach, indirect phenomenology, is shown to be problematic in a number of ways. Indirect phenomenology is generally put to work after the experiment, in critical or creative interpretations of the scientific evidence. Ultimately, however, proposals for the indirect use of phenomenology lead back to methodological questions about the direct use of phenomenology in experimental design. The third approach, “front-loaded” phenomenology, suggests that the results of phenomenological investigations can be used in the design of empirical ones. Concepts or clarifications that have been worked out phenomenologically may operate as a partial framework for experimentation.

Extract: All the papers in this special issue sit at the intersection between work on predictive processing models in the neurosciences and embodied, enactive perspectives on mind. It is arguably one of the most cutting-edge and fast-moving intersections of research in the contemporary sciences of mind and brain. All contributions deal with questions of whether and how key assumptions of the predictive brain hypothesis can be reconciled with approaches to cognition that take embodiment and enaction as playing a central and constitutive role in our cognitive lives. While there is broad consensus that bodily and worldly aspects matter to cognition, predictive processing is often understood in epistemic, inferential and representational terms. Prima facie this makes is hard to see how it would be possible to square embodied and enactive views, many of which are in direct opposition to inferential and representational accounts of mind, with predictive processing models. Rather than stressing how these accounts differ, others such as Clark (2016) emphasize what they have in common, focusing on how predictive processing models provide “the perfect neuro-computational partner for work on the embodied mind.” (Clark 2016, p. 1; see also Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Kirchhoff 2015a, b, c, 2016, 2017) In this sense, the aim of this special issue is to nudge this particular area of research forward by examining how, if possible at all, to combine the best of these frameworks in a joint pursuit of the following question: how is the mind and its enabling conditions, respectively, characterized, and how are their relations to one another best understood?

Most 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 informed cultural 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.

This article has a double objective. The first is to present various proposals concerning an embodied approach to cognition make by the community of computer scientists and robotics. The second aim is to introduce a debate on their contributions and their limits, concerning the highly delicate questions of the construction of meaning, phenomenal consciousness or yet again the relations between mind, matter and organization. The first part of the article draws up a historical reminder of the initial aims of Artificial Intelligence, as well as the various orientations that have subsequently been adopted by this community. The next part positions the debate concerning the fundamental questions that Artificial Intelligence can, or cannot, study in order to reply to the hard questions in cognitive science, and in particular the interest or the limitations related to the use of an embodied approach in order to reply. The third part consists of detailing the embodied approach according to a structure in terms of families, defined by the domains or the various focal points of the neurosciences, psychology or biology. We provide a description of the principles on which each of them rests, and we identify the limits and the possibilities relative to the debate in question. The whole is synthesized by a conclusion which puts the presented research in perspective.

Up until only a few decades ago, not many scholars recognized scientific dignity in the problem of consciousness. In the last few years this scenario has changed. The rapid development of non-invasive research techniques that explore cerebral functions has not only increased our knowledge on the correlations between mental processes and cerebral structures, but it has fed our hopes for the possibility of facing the ancient and elusive question about the mind–brain relationship with a new way of thinking. The meeting between neurosciences and phenomenology represents one of the most promising frontiers of current research. Neurophenomenology, a paradigm of research inaugurated by the Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela, tries to indicate a remedy to the various explicatory philosophical and scientific gaps, establishing a methodological and epistemological bridge between the so-called phenomenological reports in “first person” and the scientific evidence in “third person,” incorporating the experience on neurodynamic levels in an explicit and rigorous way and, above all, avoiding every alternative in the direction of any form of ontological reduction.

Key words: Cerebral structures, consciousness, mental processes, mind–brain, neurophenomenology.