The Future of Consciousness Studies

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, No. 5-6, 1997, pp. 385-8

The Editors

The working group for the first Tucson conference and the first Oxford JCS editorial meeting took place around the same time (Spring 1993), and in both groups there was the same Davy Crockett pioneer feeling. However things have moved on a bit since then: Tucson II attracted over 1000 registrants along with worldwide media coverage and Andy Clark referred to 'the highly successful Journal of Consciousness Studies' in a recent New Scientist review. However, partly as a result of this success, along with the steady progress of dedicated journals like Consciousness and Cognition (launched in 1991) and Psyche, 1997 has seen a mushrooming of small focused meetings, and specialist journals are now publishing papers on consciousness. So how does this leave the broad interdisciplinary focus of JCS and of meetings like Tucson and Elsinore (see review on page 390)? As Bernie Baars put it recently:

From the attendance at ASSC1 it seems that mainstream psychology and brain science are now poised to take over scientific consciousness studies, as indeed they should. Major scientific journals like Nature and Science already publish frontier contributions on a monthly basis, especially on the brain basis of consciousness. When everybody in science is hard at work exploring human consciousness, what is going to be the role of JCS, the Tucson conference, and the University of Arizona Consciousness Center? I can think of some exciting possibilities, but we need to ask the question explicitly and see if we can arrive at plausible answers. It is a major challenge for the future.

Thomas Metzinger put this point rather more emphatically at the Elsinore meeting by claiming that consciousness studies was in a chaotic, pre-paradigm state -- somewhat akin to nuclear physics at the beginning of this century. He concluded that broad meetings like Elsinore did little to clarify the issues and illustrated this by dismissing Bruce Mangan's call for a renewed phenomenology as a discredited research programme that has been intellectually bankrupt for at least 50 years. He was looking forward to the establishment of a dominant (information-processing) paradigm, and the abandonment of all first-person approaches to the New Age Journal. In the same way that Francis Crick has expressed his frustration at the broad public interest in this field, Metzinger argued for the debate to be limited to a narrow band of specialists.

A number of people queried the use of the word 'narrow' when they read this editorial in proof, so let's have a go at unpacking this widespread view that only certain approaches should be included in the serious study of consciousness:

kosher taboo

Philosophy Physics Botany Hermeneutics

Neurobiology Phenomenology Healing Literature

Cognitive science Sociology Folk psychology Aesthetics

Anthropology Anomalies Religion

Feminism Psychotherapy Ethics

Ecology Transpersonal psychology

OK, like most classifications this is pretty crude, but it does represent a widespread body of opinion. It's interesting to note, in passing, that there is no correspondence between the above model and a Wilberesque 'reductionist-holist' taxonomy, as the 'taboo' column would include arch-reductionists like Penrose and Hameroff alongside advocates of strong emergence theories like Alwyn Scott. And individual scientists often will advocate the inclusion of some of the items in the right-hand column. But we would argue that the distinction is wrong in principle for the following reasons:

1. No-one has as yet come up with any evidence for a theory of consciousness that will satisfy the demands of the various sceptics, so the decision to focus the investigation at, say, the level of the neuronal network has to be for pre-theoretical reasons.

2. We only know consciousness through our own experience, so arguments against including a first-person phenomenological approach are a contradiction in terms.

3. The only form of consciousness that we know directly is human, and this is characteristically shaped by social, cultural and environmental factors.

JCS is subtitled controversies in science and the humanities and we consider that all the approaches listed above have something useful to offer. What is not acceptable, though, is when approaches that have their rightful centre of gravity in the humanities try to masquerade as science -- obvious examples here being psychoanalysis and certain schools of sociology. Thus the editors will tend to favour contributions from these disciplines that are explicitly hermeneutic in their approach. We will publish informed speculation in areas where little else is available (e.g. Penrose's views on the existence and importance of as yet unknown physical theories). However the meaning of 'informed' will depend on the context, but might for example include links to well established work, and should certainly include intellectual coherence -- one use of our 'Opinion' section is to provide a forum for more exploratory ideas. It's also the case that many believe the evidence from the study of anomalies has to be viewed against a historical background of fraud and poor scientific practice. But, with these caveats, it would be irresponsible for our editorial team to exclude any area.

But it is important not to confuse this argument for inclusiveness with a rejection of the scientific method. We should all be alarmed at the sharp rise in anti-scientism that we are witnessing at the moment, and it's no good just writing it off as a case of Pre-Millenial Tension that will somehow disappear on the first of January 2001. The main reason for this reaction is that the rampant, unconstrained march of scientific progress has had a profoundly dehumanising influence on modern life, and the image of the scientist as expert has taken quite a battering over crises like 'mad cow disease' (BSE). You really don't need a PhD in molecular biology to understand that it's probably not a good idea to feed herbivores on diseased sheeps' brains, and yet such views were just shrugged off by 'expert opinion'. The editors of this journal are keen that consciousness studies should not be hijacked by experts and that scientific progress in the field should be fully constrained by a lively humanistic input. Who knows, some of the aphorisms of folk psychology may even

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