The neurophilosophical project, as envisioned by Churchland, involves interrheoretic reduction, moving from (or eliminating) theories formulated in terms of common sense and folk psychology, to theories that have stood the test of scientific experiment. In her view, folk psychology, as well as introspective phenomenology, will be eliminated in favor of neuroscience. Neurophenomenology holds that phenomenology (as a practice) is not only possible, but is in fact a useful tool for science; and that phenomenology is ineliminable if the project is to pursue a neurobiology of consciousness. Clarification of these issues rests on an understanding of how phenomenology can be an alternative source of testable theory, and can play a direct role in scientific experiment. Rather than talking in the abstract about the role of theory formation in science, I consider two specific issues to show the difference between a neurophilosophical approach and a neurophenomenlogical approach, namely, the issues of self and intersubjectivity. Neurophilosophy (which starts with theory that is continuous with common sense) and neurophenomenology (which generates theory in methodically controlled practices) lead to very different philosophical views on these issues.

Anthropologists and psychologists have long debated the relative importance of nature and nurture in human affairs. By and large anthropologists have opted for what might be called the ‘naïve culturological position’ that when our species developed culture, it left its biological roots behind. Psychologists, on the other hand, until relatively recently, have largely ignored the impact of culture upon the processes and functioning of the human mind. In their attempt to approximate the rigors of scientific methods practiced in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, it is often a naïve scientism that drives theorizing and research in the discipline. The single most decisive impediment to the emergence of a mature anthropology and psychology is the mind–body schism. We will argue that bridging the mind–body schism requires a language by means of which we can refer to individual experience, culture and extramental reality simultaneously. Our approach is that of a cultural neurophenomenology that allows us to speak about the social and biological factors that produce, potentiate and limit human experience. We show that one key concept in unifying the languages of these different domains is ‘information’. We trace the history of the concept of information, and demonstrate that from the perspective of Fisher information one may more easily conceive of the interactions among experience, culture and reality in commensurable terms. Fisher information also allows us to model the relationship between knowledge and reality, and to suggest some of the mechanisms by which the individual psyche and a society’s culture remain ‘trued-up’ relative to the reality of the world and the individual’s own being.

Key words: brain, cultural neurophenomenology, culture, experience–reality problem, husserl, information, psychological anthropology

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.

William James was a man 150 years ahead of his time; meaning, he is still beyond us even today. At the very end of his life, he enjoined science to study the “fall of the threshold of consciousness, ‘tho’ we may not understand what we are looking at either in this generation or the next.” Contemporary neuroscience is only now beginning to awaken to James’s metaphysics, particularly his radical empiricism, as central to addressing the so-called Hard Problem: the relation between the brain and the mind. These range from the “biochemical theology” of Francis Crick to Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology based on an embodied or enactive approach. Understood in the context of new developments in neurophenomenology, James’s radical empiricism then appears to have direct application to the future of scientific psychology.

Key words: phenomenology, consciousness, pragmatism, pluralism, radical empiricism, dynamic theories of the unconscious, neurophenomenology, phenomenology of the science making process itself, psychology as epistemology.