Analyzing the outline of the endless literature on consciousness, the separation between science and philosophy rather than being overcome, seems to come back in different shapes. According to this point of view, the hard problem seems to be how to study consciousness while avoiding a slip back to the old dualism. This article outlines the advantages of the phenomenological method. This method, more than getting over the mind-body separation, anticipates it through an open gaze, able to bring back the human presence as something structurally “ambiguous.” Reintroducing Husserl’s scientific project in a complete way, Francisco Varela opened up a research area yet to be explored, which promises to be fertile for neuroscience, provided that we accept that radicalism essential to phenomenology.

Key words: Ambiguity, consciousness, dualism, Husserl, phenomenological method, Varela

Sensory substitution constitutes an interesting domain of study to consider the philosopher’s classical question of distal attribution: how we can distinguish between a sensation and the perception of an object that causes this sensation. We tested the hypothesis that distal attribution consists of three distinct components: an object, a perceptual space, and a coupling between subjects’ movements and stimulation. We equipped sixty participants with a visual-to-auditory substitution device, without any information about it. The device converts the video stream produced by a head-mounted camera into a sound stream. We investigated several experimental conditions: the existence or not of a correlation between movements and resulting stimulation, the direct or indirect manipulation of an object, and the presence of a background environment. Participants were asked to describe their impressions by rating their experiences in terms of seven possible “scenarios”. These scenarios were carefully chosen to distinguish the degree to which the participants attributed their sensations to a distal cause. Participants rated the scenarios both before and after they were given the possibility to interrupt the stimulation with an obstacle. We were interested in several questions. Did participants extract laws of co-variation between their movements and resulting stimulation? Did they deduce the existence of a perceptual space originating from this coupling? Did they individuate objects that caused the sensations? Whatever the experimental conditions, participants were able to establish that there was a link between their movements and the resulting auditory stimulation. Detection of the existence of a coupling was more frequent than the inferences of distal space and object.

Key words: sensory substitution, distal attribution, space, object, objecthood, sensorimotor theory, sensorimotor coupling.

Open peer commentary on the article “Phenomenological Properties of Perceptual Presence: A Constructivist Grounded Theory Approach” by Aleš Oblak, Asena Boyadzhieva & Jure Bon. Abstract: Oblak et al. portray perceptual presence (PP) as an individually driven reflective operation. I question their account and suggest that PP involves a socially induced pre-reflective awareness of the lived environment. Within this primary framework, the wholeness of things is available to the subject, and deeper examination of perceived objects (if needed) comes to the fore.

Archetypal codes, genetic codes and neural codes represent different levels of illustrating the concepts of consciousness and unconsciousness. Symbolisations taking the form of myths tell us something about the development of the mutual relationship of the two realms. As a third element, myths represent a transitional space located between the individual and the collective. An outline will be given on the approaches developed by Jung, Neumann, Bischof, Jaynes, Singer and Reich. The dramatic increase in replacing natural processes by artificial ones and in the extent to which man is capable of interfering in such processes today leads to a situation where the side of the objects and the objective (as the natural laws that are given) is constantly receding and is thereby strengthening the productive character of the objective: there is no thing-in-itself any more, only its absence or presence. In both quality and quantity, it is the result of a man-made decision. At the same time, the part of the subjective is getting ever more differentiated: it is itself becoming the object of its own productive endeavours and is no longer identical with itself. It achieves its identity by recognizing the other as being different. The author draws up the myth of a ‘Zwitschermaschine’ (twittering machine; Paul Klee, 1922) as a present-day paradigm of intersubjectivity, centering the concepts of self-authorization and autopoiesis as the stock of existing problems: man is becoming an effect of the very discourses he gives on himself.

Key words: myth, archetypical code, autopoiesis, intersubjectivity, self-authorisation

Context: Radical constructivism claims that we have no final truth criteria for establishing one ontology over another. This leaves us with the question of how we can come to know anything in a viable manner. According to von Glasersfeld, radical constructivism is a theory of knowledge rather than a philosophy of the world in itself because we do not have access to a human-independent world. He considers knowledge as the ordering of experience to cope with situations in a satisfactory way. Problem: Von Foerster and Krippendorff show that the central goal of a constructivist theory of knowing must be to find a way of putting the knower into a known that is constructed so as to keep the knower, as well as the knowing process, viable in practice. Method: The conceptual and philosophical analysis of present theories and their necessary prerequisites suggests that such foundation for viable knowing can be built on the analysis of what the ontological prerequisites are for establishing viable observing, cognition, communication and observer-communicators, and communication media and vehicles. Results: The moment an observer chooses to accept his/her own embodied conscious presence in this world as well as language, he/she must accept other humans as partly independently existing conversation partners; if knowledge and knowing has to make sense, he/she must also accept as prerequisites for our observation and conversation a pre-linguistic reality from which our bodies come and which our conversation is often about. Furthermore, we can no longer claim that there is a reality that we do not know anything about: From being here in conversation, we know that the world can produce more or less stable embodied consciousnesses that can exchange and construct conceptual meanings through embodied conversations and actions that last over time and exist in space-time and mind, and are correlated to our embodied practices. We can also see that our communication works through signs for all living systems as well as in human language, understood as a structured and progressively developed system of communication. The prerequisite for this social semiotic production of meaning is the fourfold “semiotic star of cybersemiotics,” which includes at least four different worlds: our bodies, the combination of society, culture and language, our consciousness, and also an outer nature. Implications: The semiotic star in cybersemiotics claims that the internal subjective, the intersubjective linguistic, our living bodies, and nature are irreducible and equally necessary as epistemological prerequisites for knowing. The viable reality of any of them cannot be denied without self-refuting paradoxes. There is an obvious connectedness between the four worlds, which Peirce called “synechism.” It also points to Peirce’s conclusion that logic and rationality are part of the process of semiosis, and that meaning in the form of semiosis is a fundamental aspect of reality, not just a construction in our heads. Erratum: The paper erroneously refers to “pleroma.” The correct term is “plemora.”

Key words: ontology, embodiment, philosophy of observing, second-order cybernetics, autopoiesis, semiotics, language, phenomenology, radical constructivism, Edmund Husserl, Charles Sanders Peirce, George Spencer-Brown

Alva Noë (2004, 2008, 2012) understands what he calls “perceptual presence” (2004, 59) as the experience of whole, voluminous objects being ‘right there’, present for us in their entirety, even though not each and every part of them impinges directly on our senses at any given time. How is it possible that we perceptually experience voluminous objects as voluminous directly and apparently effortlessly, with no need of inferring their three-dimensionality from experience of the part of them that is directly stimulating our sense organs? For Noë, this is the ‘problem of perceptual presence’. In this paper, I integrate Noë’s view by articulating a different view of what perceptual presence at a more basic level amounts to. This new account of perceptual presence which, I believe, can clarify and make an enactive account of presence richer. The view I suggest revolves around the idea, developed especially by Merleau-Ponty (1945, 1947) and Kelly (2005, 2007, 2010), that perceptual experience is in an important sense indeterminate. Indeterminacy, I argue, is key if we want to understand perceptual presence and the ‘problem’ Noë solves.

Key words: perception, enactivism, perceptual presence, phenomenology, indeterminacy

The following basic question is studied here: In the relatively stable molecular environment of a vertebrate body, can a dynamic idiotypic immune network develop a natural tolerance to endogenous components? The approach is based on stability analyses and computer simulation using a model that takes into account the dynamics of two agents of the immune system, namely B-lymphocytes and antibodies. The study investigates the behavior of simple immune networks in interaction with an antigen whose concentration is held constant as a function of the symmetry properties of the connectivity matrix of the network. Current idiotypic network models typically become unstable in the presence of this type of antigen. It is shown that idiotypic networks of a particular connectivity show tolerance towards auto-antigen without the need for ad hoc mechanisms that prevent an immune response. These tolerant network structures are characterized by aperiodic behavior in the absence of auto-antigen. When coupled to an auto-antigen, the chaotic attractor degenerates into one of several periodic ones, and at least one of them is stable. The connectivity structure needed for this behavior allows the system to adopt particular dynamic concentration patterns which do not lead to an unbounded immune response. Possible implications for the understanding of autoimmune disease and its treatment are discussed.

This article investigates the following basic question: in the relatively stable molecular environment of a vertebrate body, can a dynamic idiotypic immune network develop a natural tolerance to endogenous components? Our approach is based on stability analysis and computer simulation using a model that takes into account the dynamics of two agents of the immune system, namely, B-lymphocytes and antibodies. We investigate the behavior of simple immune networks in interaction with an Ag whose concentration is being held constant as a function of the connectivity matrix of the network. The latter is characterized by the total number of clones, N, and the number of clones, C, with which each clone interacts. The idiotypic network models typically become unstable in the presence of this type of Ag. We show that idiotypic networks that can be found in particular connected regions of NC-space show tolerance towards auto-Ag without the need for ad hoc mechanisms that prevent an immune response. These tolerant network structures provide dynamical regimes in which the clone which interacts with the auto-Ag is suppressed instead of being excited such that an unbounded immune response does not occur. Possible implications for the future treatment of auto-immune disease such as IvIg-treatment are discussed in the light of these results. Moreover, we propose an experimental approach to verify the results of the present theoretical study.

Chilean biology covers a wide disciplinary spectrum, where evolutionary biology has been able to gain an outstanding presence, despite its notably small number of practitioners. In this regard, however, numbers may appear deceptive. For instance, a review of the papers published from 1983 to 1995 in the Revista Chilena de Historia Natural, which covers all naturalist disciplines, showed that only 4. 7 %dealt with evolutionary aspects sensu lato, a very low percent in comparison to dominant disciplines such as botany, zoology and ecology (Camus 1995) Of course, Chilean evolutionists publish in other Chilean and foreign journals, and thus the above figure is just a vague reference on the relative importance of evolution. Nevertheless, quantitative estimations could not capture the real importance or the impact of evolutionary knowledge on the formation of Chilean naturalists, regardless any explicit or implicit consideration in their own studies. Very likely, Chilean naturalists do see in evolution the ultimate foundation for their work, as an echo of that legendary statement by T. Dobzhansky, and partly as a result of a long darwinian tradition in Chilean universities. In fact, Manrfquez & Rothhammer ( 1997) documented that Darwin’s theory was already incorporated in some school texts as early as 1866, and in 1917 it was approved as part of the official educational program for public schools. This certainly lead to intense public debates between lay and catholic sectors, which lasted for about 60 years. However, Manrfquez & Rothhammer (1997) also mentioned that such a debate not only was virtually absent in Chilean universities, but darwinian theory, and even the basic tenets of the rising synthetic theory of evolution, were formally included in university curricula during the first decades of the 20�h century.

A psychological understanding of interpersonal processes in terms of complementarity is not new. It is enough to mention Buber (the title of our paper refers to an expression of his), as well as Bateson and his definitions of double description, binocular vision and complementary and symmetric relations. We would like to clarify the nature of complementarity, and to point out the presence of this framework in some philosophical and scientific discourses about the person. Moreover, we think that the adoption of a framework of complementarity becomes a metaphysical necessity within what we have called “hermeneutic constructivism,” and that other constructivisms fail to acknowledge it, thereby losing much of their metatheoretical, revolutionary potential. We will document the possibility of adopting a framework of complementarity with respect to different pairs of poles, which specify as many phenomenal domains: (1) the relation between any entity and its environment; (2) the relation between modes of description; (3) the relation between the person and the world; and (4) the relation between people. In the final part of the paper we outline some implications of a consideration of complementarity for the psychotherapy process. Relevance: The framework of complementarity is an essential feature of hermeneutic constructivism.