The Empirical Study of Brain States

Carl H. Flygt

March 2006

I am sympathetic with Alva Noe’s enactive externalism because it broadens, or at least can broaden, the empirical study of consciousness and states of consciousness in the first person. Noe objects to the subtraction methodology of contemporary behavioral and brain science, which wants to discover consciousness entirely within the brain and central nervous system, and to leave out or treat as substitutable external drivers of those states. For Noe, subtraction of the external causes of conscious states tends to subtract the responsibility one has, as a free and self-conscious agent, for extending and maintaining those states through time. Although he seems reluctant to put his finger on it, tending to confuse it with the external objects of which we have a three-dimensional, sensory-motor understanding, it is the constitutive role played by self-conscious responsibility for our conscious states that Noe wants, presumably, to introduce into our empirical methods of consciousness research.

Noe has no developed or original response to the question of how to study brain states empirically, as part of a unitary system distributed over both world and subject. Here he may take instruction from my forthcoming book on conversation, which is constructed with just this aim in view. On my theory, what matters is not settling ontological questions about the supervenience base of our conscious states, because technological intervention in human brains and minds is not the first order of business. The first order of business is to get the external drivers of self-consciousness, including their semantic characteristics, to cohere aesthetically and rigorously with the internal machinery. Once that is accomplished, it is a short, straight step to introduce the physiological metrics and interventions that would bring the enterprise into the domain of science. The empirical study of brain states follows once we have responsible control of them.

Responsible, dignified control of consciousness and states of consciousness really does entail an enactive externalism. Responsible and dignified states of consciousness really are constituted by their objects, together with the moral will necessary to sustain consciousness of those objects in time. The interesting and essential research questions then prove to be about freedom and dignity, not about neurons and drivers. How do we comport ourselves in three-dimensional space or in conversation in a way that our self-conscious states can be reasonably given an objective status? What institutional accommodations are required to give those states, and the fields around them, a full and explicit causal power, the effects of which can then be measured by various types of sensor array? What sort of individual study and entrainment is required to render those states salient enough to be picked up by measures of brain and blood and then given the appropriate analysis?

Philosophy does have a role to play in consciousness research, but it is not rhetorical and individualist. Rather, it is foundational and conversational. Once, in philosophy, the correct foundations of conversation are discovered and articulated, empirical science will take over, and adeptness with states of consciousness will come to be a matter of social background. The only kind of philosophy that will matter at that point will be moral philosophy, including the theory of religious ideas, of aesthetics and the philosophy of social science. It is these branches of philosophy, in their future forms, that enactive externalism and embodiment theories are trying to anticipate. Let us ensure that this anticipation develops into actual practice.