From the View of Nowhere to Now- Here

This essay is a humble contribution to the great and exciting project of reconciling science with the immediate, sentient experience of life. It offers a critique of the physicalist outlook on mind, from an intercultural- philosophical perspective, arguing that an ontology of the mind- world relationship, as it is present in Husserlian Phenomenology and Buddhist Philosophy describes reality more accurately than the Physicalist- Cognitivist theory of mind. Our discussion is not limited to philosophical discourse, but includes recent research from Biology and cognitive science, notably from Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson, which is placed in the context of our philosophico- phenomenological investigation. Firstly, we clarify how the physicalist paradigm developed throughout the history of the natural sciences, from the emergence of the idea of a causally closed, mind- independent world onwards, terminating in the influence it came to have on...Show moreThis essay is a humble contribution to the great and exciting project of reconciling science with the immediate, sentient experience of life. It offers a critique of the physicalist outlook on mind, from an intercultural- philosophical perspective, arguing that an ontology of the mind- world relationship, as it is present in Husserlian Phenomenology and Buddhist Philosophy describes reality more accurately than the Physicalist- Cognitivist theory of mind. Our discussion is not limited to philosophical discourse, but includes recent research from Biology and cognitive science, notably from Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson, which is placed in the context of our philosophico- phenomenological investigation. Firstly, we clarify how the physicalist paradigm developed throughout the history of the natural sciences, from the emergence of the idea of a causally closed, mind- independent world onwards, terminating in the influence it came to have on scientific practise in cognitive science and Psychology. Afterwards we elucidate the core metaphysical assumptions, which underlie a physicalist understanding of mind. This serves as a preparation to disclose the anomalies and errors of the current paradigm in the mainstream branches of the sciences of mind. Showing how a physicalist understanding of mind fails to sufficiently explain the transformative capabilities of the human mind, from a scientific perspective, we move on to a phenomenological critique. We discuss Husserl’s demonstration that all science is fundamentally grounded in phenomenal experience, which implies that a scientific understanding of mind must be grounded in intersubjective experience, not in an idealized model of a mind- independent external world. As an alternative to a physicalist understanding of mind, we look at a phenomenological understanding of mind, inspired by Husserlian and Buddhist philosophy. This alternative paradigm accounts for the problems which a physicalist understanding of mind fails to address and considers the grounded- ness of science in the background of lived, phenomenal experience without losing in scientific rigour.Show less

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From the View of Nowhere to Now- Here