TREATISE ON THE NEUROPHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

(Recapitulation) As noted at the Introduction of Volume I, “Neurophilosophy of Consciousness”, this treatise is all about an attempt to model a biopsychosocial (BPS) comprehensive understanding of self-consciousness seen from the perspective of theories of many types and hues encompassing the physical, metaphysical, neural, cognitive, functional, representational and higher-order aspects of consciousness. Each subset aims at different aspects of the problem and none of the theoretical perspectives in isolation suffice for explaining all of the self-evident features that we strive to understand. Consequently an ontologically rooted multidisciplinary synthesis grounded on real-time, existential ecological considerations may provide the best pluralistic map to guide future enquiries. Regardless of whether self-consciousness is inseparable from human life as we have defended or, as Jaynes suggested in 1974, based on ancient Greek linguistic evidence, it was not known before the pre-Homeric epics, the fact remains that thought and consciousness, in our view, play an essential role in the viability and perpetuation of the human species when confronted with an ever-changing inhospitable external environment it didn't choose to be born into. To achieve this survival goal man must harmonize his inherited biological endowments with his ongoing acquired psychic and social experiences. The brain, physical substrate of conscious activity, sorts out, categorizes and organizes the ongoing receptor sensory input such that any survival threat to the species is met with an adaptive Cannon response. The individual's psychic life is the resultant compromise between an inherited, not so flexible homeostatic body proper machinery and the constant social environmental challenges of an objective world of chaotic sensations about atemporal, acausal, asymmetric objects and events which must be given order and accommodated in a structure of time, space and causality of our choice to prevent BPS life-threatening alterations of the body dynamic equilibrium. Mental life has been charged with the psychosocial survival defense of the human species. The holistic epistemontological integration of these 3 BPS elements in a synthesis of neuro anatomico-physiological and physico-chemical data has been structured with the help of logico-mathematical tools of argumentation (see Merleau-Ponty 1945). It should not then be a surprise to find so many different piecemeal approaches to study the very different subsets of consciousness, that unique global feature so far only observed in the human living creature.