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Notes
See also Evan Thompson’s Mind and Life, (2007).
As Gallagher writes in his recent book Enactivist Interventions, … cognitive capacities depend on a “dynamic adjustment process in which the brain, as a part of and along with the larger organism, settles into the right kind of attunement with the environment – an environment that is physical but also social and cultural” (2017: 160).
The brain thus “recognizes faces”, “perceives with all senses”, “decides when to work and when to rest” “recognizes itself as the subject of recognition” and as Gazzaniga (2005) asserts, “this simple fact makes it clear that you are your brain”. But as Fuchs humorously notes, this is simply not the case, because “my brain is certainly not married, not a psychiatrist, and it has no children” (p.44). This brings to mind for me Nikolai Gogol’s superb story, “The Nose”.
For a critique, see Gallagher 2005, 237–240.
For a fine-grained analysis of the enactivist account of the role that dynamical, reciprocal, causal relations play in the constitution of consciousness, see Shaun Gallagher (2018). “New Mechanisms and the Enactivist Concept of Constitution”.
Fuchs wryly references a statement by neurobiologist and physician D. F. Swaab (2014) to the effect that the brain produces the mind as the kidneys produce urine! This ‘epiphenomenalism’ is one deeply problematic view (the other being reductive physicalism) that has currency and is informing theory and practice in psychiatry with all the inevitable woes.
The phenomenological interview was developed originally by Francisco Varela and refined by subsequent philosophers and psychiatrists (Vermersch, Parnas, Petitmengin). Parnas and his team (2005) have developed a phenomenological interview (EASE – Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience) specifically for schizophrenia. An extended phenomenological interview is a more extensive interview framed according to Gallagher’s PTS, which can be used across the spectrum of all anomalous experiences not only schizophrenia. This more extensive interview is still at the development stage. For a critical review of the psychiatric interview, see Nordgaard et al. (2013); and of the various phenomenological interviews see, Høffding and Martiny (2016).
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The writing of the review was initially supported by University College Dublin and the Irish Research Council.
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Daly, A. Review of Ecology of the Brain: The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind, Thomas Fuchs. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 627–636 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09619-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09619-4