Phenomenology and Cognitive Science: removing the gap?

If the “hard problem” of consciousness consists in the difficulty of including qualia in an objective third-person paradigm that determines an apparently unsolvable explanatory gap, the phenomenological method may turn out to be useful for discussing the concept of qualia as an appropriate description of conscious experience or even of an aspect of itself.

The concept of qualia derives from the tendency used by cognitive neuroscience until quite recently to distinguish two fundamental features of mental processes: on one hand their representative ability or intentionality and on the other their qualitative character or phenomenological quality. This separability appeared as an advantage to many because, despite the difficulties of developing a scientific theory of the qualitative experience and of the phenomenological mind, there was still the independent field of the cognitive mind that could be explored even without a solution to the “mystery of consciousness”. From this point of view, Jerry Fodor’s thesis is emblematic. According to it, even if functionalism and materialism do not seem to be capable of explaining the qualitative content of experience, it is possible to concentrate on the construction of theories about how the mind creates a representational system and, thus, how to attribute the possession of intentional content to a mental state .

Is this classical assumption of cognitive science truly irrefutable? Can the phenomenological quality of experience be abstracted from its intentional content? According to the phenomenological notion of consciousness, it can be interpreted as a “presence of objects”. We are not, in fact, conscious of something if it is not somehow present, for example perceptively, as memory, imagination and so forth. Consciousness is therefore a propriety of experiences (Erlebnisse); it consists in types of manifestations of objects and not only states of the conscious creature. This propriety can be defined as “intentionality”. The fundamental point is that, according to phenomenology it is not possible to abstract the qualitative character of experience from its intentional content. Brentano, who identified the essence of psychic phenomena in intentionality, has always sustained a strict connection between consciousness and intentionality.

The explanatory gap often discussed in philosophy of the mind today refers to a supposed “privateness” or subjectivity of consciousness, of those of its states defined as qualia, which would be the residue that objective paradigms can not explain. But this description of consciousness may be inadequate. Maybe no experience since it is in an intentional mode and thus always presents objects in certain ways is destined to remain private and inaccessible. Phenomenology is made current by its rejection of the Cartesian dichotomy of the mental and the physical, in some ways still present in the separation between external and internal.

This redefinition of consciousness, however, requires the analysis of another fundamental tenet of the phenomenological tradition: the idea that the substance of things resides in their phenomenon. In fact, an ontological revision is necessary in order to escape the explanatory gap. The hard problem of consciousness is an aspect of a form of scepticism regarding the immediate experience determined by the more general scepticism related to phenomena characteristic of contemporary scientific culture. It is this last form of scepticism that it seems necessary to reconsider, through a revolution in the way of conceiving the relationships between appearance and reality, in order to seek an authentic way out from the dead end of the explanatory gap.