Varela’s Neurophenomenology

Neuroscientist and philosopher Francisco Varela proposes what he calls “neurophenomenology,” which seeks to articulate mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology and the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences (Vörös, 2023a).

He starts with one of Chalmers's basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. He claims there is no “theoretical fix” or “extra ingredient” in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena require a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics. It is a quest, he says, to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing himself in the lineage of the continental tradition of phenomenology (Varela, 1996).

Phenomenology and Human Experience

Varela calls for gathering a research community armed with new tools to develop a science of consciousness. He claims that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will do the job. He advocates turning to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself.

Varela's phenomenological approach starts with the irreducible nature of conscious experience. Lived experience, he says, is “where we start from and where all must link back to, like a guiding thread.” From a phenomenological standpoint, “conscious experience is quite at variance with that of mental content as it figures in the Anglo-American philosophy of mind.”

He advocates examining, “beyond the spook of subjectivity, the concrete possibilities of a disciplined examination of experience that is at the very core of the phenomenological inspiration.” He repeats: “it is the re-discovery of the primacy of human experience and its direct, lived quality that is phenomenology's foundational project” (Varela, 1996).

Bridging Phenomenology and Neuroscience

Varela's key point is that by emphasizing a co-determination of both accounts—phenomenological and neurobiological—one can explore the bridges, challenges, insights, and contradictions between them. This means that both domains have equal status in demanding full attention and respect for their specificity. It is quite easy, he says, to see how scientific accounts illuminate mental experience, but the reciprocal direction, from experience towards science, is what is typically ignored.

What do phenomenological accounts provide? Varela asks. “At least two main aspects of the larger picture. First, without them the firsthand quality of experience vanishes, or it becomes a mysterious riddle. Second, structural accounts provide constraints on empirical observations.” He stresses that “the study of experience is not a convenient stop on our way to a real explanation, but an active participant in its own right.” And while phenomenal experience is at an irreducible ontological level, “it retains its quality of immediacy because it plays a role in structural coherence via its intuitive contents, and thus keeps alive its direct connection to human experience, rather than pushing it into abstraction” (Varela, 1996).

A Research Program

This makes the whole difference, Varela argues: The “hardness” and riddle become an open-ended research program with the structure of human experience playing a central role in the scientific endeavor. “In all functionalistic accounts what is missing is not the coherent nature of the explanation but its alienation from human life. Only by putting human life back in, will that absence be erased” (Varela, 1996). (The common thread said to run through Varela's extensive and heterogeneous body of work is “the act of distinction”—distinctions as processes, distinctions in ways of distinguishing—“the aim of which was to address and supersede the challenges inherent in the dualist [modernist] thought style, especially the infamous two-pronged problem of the bifurcation and disenchantment of nature” [Vörös, 2023b].)

In the quarter century since Varela's neurophenomenology paper was published, its research program has made some advances and encountered some tensions; for example, investigating the experience of boundaries of the self, both phenomenologically and neurobiologically.

The biggest challenge remains first-person reporting and interpretation, such as subtle aspects of self-consciousness. The continuing hope is that neurophenomenology can inform the science of consciousness, that the ongoing interaction between human experience and neuroscience becomes “an act of art, a deep listening, an improvisational dance, which slowly develops into a skillful scientific dialogue” (Berkovich-Ohana et al., 2020).