From Towards a Science of Consciousness 3         Section 9: Phenomenology        CogNet Proceedings


Biogenetic Structural Theory and the Neurophenomenology of Consciousness

Charles D. Laughlin


For those of you who are willing to accept that consciousness is a function of the nervous system, biogenetic structuralism offers a number of advantages. First, biogenetic structuralism is an interdisciplinary theory, integrating research in anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, physics, and phenomenology. Second, the theory provides a single perspective and language for addressing such issues as the evolution of consciousness, animal consciousness, consciousness in human fetuses and babies, alternative phases of consciousness, the cultural conditioning and transcendence of cultural conditioning of consciousness, and the relations between technology and consciousness. Third, the theory requires grounding in a methodology best described as neurophenomenology-a merger of trained phenomenological skill and an understanding of neuroscience. And fourth, the theory counters some of the more common limitations of other theories currently informing consciousness science-limitations that include the following:

1. Theories of consciousness are often ethnocentrically naivete.

There may be little or no recognition of the fact that a culture conditions the range of states of consciousness experienced by its members. Theories developed by psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists very often fail to tap the wealth of cross-cultural data on consciousness to be found in the ethnological literature, and in the personal experiences reported by ethnographers.

2. Theories are often phenomenologically naivete.

Theories often signal the theorist's limited personal understanding of the essential nature of their own consciousness. As Edmund Husserl (1977) put it, a theorist may be unaware of their conditioned "natural attitude" (or "natural thesis") toward their own states of consciousness. Few theorists in consciousness science are mature contemplatives, or trained phenomenologists, who have learned to examine the structures and properties of their mental acts from a fully empirical standpoint. More on this limitation later.

3. Theories are often neuroscientifically naivete.

Some theories do not take into account the more than hundred years of developments in the neurosciences. Such theories quite often make claims about consciousness that run counter to how we know the brain has evolved, how it develops during childhood and how it functions. Prior to twenty years ago one could for the most part ignore the neurosciences without contravening the findings of empirical research. But no longer. Modern neuroscience has burgeoned, and consciousness scientists ignore brain research at their peril.

4. Many theories are limited by mind-body dualism.

Theorists often treat mental and physical phenomena as distinct domains of reality without realizing the ethnocentrism of their dualistic "natural attitude." Consciousness may be defined as an epiphenomenon, as somehow detached from the brain, or as merely mediated by the brain like a radio mediates a program broadcast from another realm of existence. Such theories make it difficult to ground the structures of consciousness in physical reality, or in the processes of the body.

5. Some theories are hampered by scientistic methodology.

Some theories of consciousness are narrowly grounded upon experimental data, or computer modeling. The methodological strictures of such theories exclude other sources of data such as ethnographic, phenomenological, clinical and naturalistic accounts. Other theories derive from strictly humanistic or "New Age" methodologies that have little reference to scientific experimentation. Again, such theories restrict our point of view in such a way that valuable data and insights are excluded.

Biogenetic Structuralism


What is biogenetic structuralism and how does this formulation avoid these limitations? Biogenetic structuralism is a body of theory that integrates our understanding of consciousness, culture and nervous system in a single perspective. The theory is simultaneously neurobiological, phenomenological and sociocultural, incorporating all the avenues of scientific research relevant to the study of consciousness, with a particular emphasis upon ethnographic and neurophenomenological methodologies.1 The emphasis upon ethnography works to eliminate the ethnocentrism so common in Western scientific accounts of consciousness. Our understanding of the field is enriched by the full range of experiences and cultural models available to human beings. A neurophenomenological component assures the inclusion of the skills of mature contemplation, and wherever possible, links these phenomenological findings with how we are discovering the brain works.

Consciousness and the Cognized Environment


How does biogenetic structural theory conceive of consciousness? Well, we take the view that our everyday experience arises and passes away between our ears. Our everyday experience is mediated by our brain. Experience is the internally produced play by which the body enacts the world for its own consumption. The body is the producer, the projectionist, and the audience of this ongoing play, which unfolds within the functional space we call consciousness. Consciousness is the field of awareness mediated by a dynamic organization of neural structures we call the conscious network. What most of us usually mean by "being conscious" is our moment by moment shifting awareness within the field of experience(we are "conscious" of this or that feeling, thing, thought, sensation, etc. Our individual awareness at this moment may or may not include the sound of an air conditioner, the feeling of the pressure of the seat on our behinds, or the sensation of our tongue pressing against our teeth. When we do become aware of such a phenomenon, it means that a new neural model has become entrained to our conscious network.

All properties and qualities of consciousness are mediated by our body's neuroendocrine systems. These systems function individually and collectively to model reality. The sum total of these models in our individual brain is our cognized environment (as the late Roy Rappaport 2 called it). The on-going stream of consciousness is our neurophysiological enactment of our operational environment; that is, our local environment, including our physical body. The operational environment is the real world modeled between our ears in our cognized environment. But please be careful here. This is not a mind-body dualism for the very simple reason that the neural systems mediating our cognized environment are part of our operational environment. This is merely a structure-function discrimination, no different than distinguishing between the physiology of the hand and the act of grasping, or the physiology of the GI tract and digestion. There is our real operational body, and our cognized body(the latter being a model mediated by cortical networks in our brain 3.

The regulatory function of the organ of experience-the nervous system with its brain-manifests a polarity between the necessity to adapt to the external operational environment on the one hand, and the need to maintain the integrity of the body's own internal organization on the other hand. Our brain thus naturally strives to "autoregulate" its activities in a way that simultaneously answers these twin demands-the result being what Jean Piaget (1971) described as a dynamic state of "equilibration."

Reality Is Transcendental


It seems ridiculous that in science today we should have to mention that there is a real world "out there," that our notions about reality are the constructs of our knowing brain, and that the truth of our notions about reality is determined by their fit with experienced reality. Yet in this era of postmodern relativism, the ontological and epistemological status of reality often gets muddled, and reality as a set of limiting conditions on our knowing requires reiteration (see Krippner and Winkler 1995 for a useful discussion of this issue). In biogenetic structural terms, while the cognized environment is how we know and experience our organism and our world, the system of neurological transformations that produce the cognized environment is part of the operational environment within which we are embedded and to which we must adapt in order to survive. The operational environment, including our own organism, may thus be considered transcendental relative to our cognized environment in at least three senses:

1. The sense of part to whole.

There is always more to learn about the operational environment, or anything within it, than can ever actually be known. This is true because there is no knowing without the involvement of the "in-forming" process of neural modeling.

2. The sense of locality.

Cognized environments reflect the fact that organisms are located in the operational environment. Thus the demands of adaptation privilege local knowledge relative to universal knowledge. Moreover, the cognized environment is organized intentionally, whereas the operational environment is all there all the time, and exists independent of the "searchlight" focus of the knowing brain.

3. The sense of the invisible.

Much of reality is invisible to our senses, and thus can only be known by inference. We cannot see electromagnetic waves, only their effects upon our senses. This is especially true of complex causal processes. Causes may be invisible because the effective elements are too separated in space or time to be apprehended, or they may be invisible because they cannot be detected given the limitations of our senses or our technology (see Laughlin 1992a).

The operational environment is mysterious in all these senses. We lose track of the transcendental nature of things when we feel we are in control of events, but when we lose that sense of being in control, a kind of zone of uncertainty reasserts itself. The zone of uncertainty is the limit of our knowledge in any domain, and is the horizon (to use Edmund Husserl's term) beyond which we may discern the great mystery of existence and the greatest challenge to the cognitive imperative the biological drive to model and know. Most of reality is invisible to our direct sensory experience and must be imagined and conceptualized in our encounter with the world. By implication, we are each of us a transcendental being that is forever beyond either the grasp of our total self-knowledge, or comprehension of the nature of, and our effects upon the world.

The cognized environment is to the operational environment as a map is to a landscape. However, the cognized map is a living, breathing representation produced by transformations in the social life of the living cells that make up our body. At a micro-level of organization, these transformations have their material reality in patterned co-ordinations among neurons whose initial social interactions are largely genetically controlled, whose eventual developmental complexity will be variable, and whose evocation may or may not be environmentally triggered.

Experiencing the Operational Environment


The production of experience by and within our body is a complex process by which cells organize themselves under the simultaneous press of genetic endowment, sensory information about the environment, anticipatory operations in the world, feedback about the efficacy of their own actions in the world, and the lawful demands of autoregulation. The accuracy of immediate sensory experience relative to the operational environment is assured by information derived from past experiences-that is, information stored as developing neurocognitive structures. Developmentally speaking, the person builds an internal experiential world that provides an increasingly more complex informational standpoint from which to act in the world (Maturana and Varela 1980).

Built into this internal experiential world is a focusing function that spotlights aspects of the world for attention, and relegates the rest of the cognized environment to disattention. This spotlighting function is often called intentionality,which has been considered the sine qua non in definitions of consciousness since at least the time of Brentano. The intentional function of consciousness is probably the feature that exhibits the greatest evolutionary advance in humans relative to other animals. We know that many of the structures that mediate intentionality are located in the prefrontal cortical lobes, the area of the hominid brain that has exhibited the greatest allometric expansion over the past several million years. It is largely because of the advanced development of the prefrontal intentional structures that we humans are able to develop long-range plans, maintain attention and concentration, and modulate emotional responses (Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1990:105-108).

Neurognosis


Information from past experiences that becomes enfolded into our stream of consciousness is not limited to that of individual development, but is also enriched from the vast store of species, genus, even mammalian-typical experiences implicit in the initial organization of cells within our nervous system. These nascent structures that we all inherit by virtue of our mammalian, our primate, and our human genome we call neurognostic 4 models. The neurognostic models are the seed structures upon which all later development depends. Neurognostic models are the mechanism for what the late Earl Count (1973) liked to call the various levels of our biogram-the mammalian biogram, or the way of cognizing and adapting all we mammals share in common, the primate biogram, or the ways all we primates share in common, and the human biogram, the ways all we humans share in common.

Henry A. Murray perhaps said it best when he said "in some ways all humans are alike, in some ways some humans are alike, and in some ways no humans are alike"-or words to that effect. Neurognostic models account for the ways all humans are alike. Neurognostic structures are present in the pre- and perinatal nervous system, and because they are comprised of living cells, they function as soon as they grow and become interconnected (1991). Thus models function as neurognosis. That is, neurognostic models mediate genetically patterned, species-typical properties of sensing, perceiving, knowing, intuiting, feeling, etc., as well as of a nascent sense of social self and the intentional organization of consciousness. Neurognosis provides the archetypal framework of experience, which in the very young is very likely the predominant quality of consciousness. Neurognosis patterns our earliest experiences of the world, the archetypal "already there-ness" of our pre- and perinatal lifeworld.

Neurognosis also has a developmental dimension-producing, as Henry Murray said, the ways some humans are alike. Because neurognostic models are living cells, they develop their internal organization both from a plan that is inherent in the genetic makeup of the organism and that guides the maturation of the body, and from the adaptational press of the operational environment. This process begins early in pre- and perinatal life. As soon as neural structures begin to function as models, they begin to develop. Recent research for example has shown that fetal human beings hear and learn about what they hear as early as 20 weeks, well before the development of the cortex. The development of neurognostic models is subject to the tension between conservation of structure and adaptation to the operational environment. Primates are typically social animals, and social cognition is part of the primate biogram. Thus a major orientation of human adaptation is toward the social environment. Enculturation and socialization may be understood as processes of socially guiding the maturation of neurognostic structures. At the expense of appearing too simplistic, certain neurognostic structures are socially selected for development and others are not. Certain domains of experience are socially encouraged to develop while other domains are ignored or discouraged. There exists a great deal of overlap in the experiences of peoples everywhere, primarily because the brains of people all over the planet share the same species-typical neurognosis, which develops along similar lines in roughly the same planetary conditions. Of course the details of development and the entire complement of experiences will vary considerably across cultures and across local environments.

Quantum Relations


Incidentally, some of our recent work has explored neurological-quantum mechanical interactions-a promising avenue of research that may account for some of the universal aspects of traditional cosmologies around the planet. Many cosmologies recognize such phenomena as causation at a distance, co-dreaming, shamanic flying, etc., as well as an essential but hidden wholeness of the energies and forces behind all things. Recent developments in quantum physics 5 and biophysics 6 have layed the foundation for a cosmological understanding of energy relations in the operational environment. Recent explorations have suggested that living cells may interact directly with the sea of quantum energy in the vacuum (see Laughlin 1996a). If it turns out that neural systems may interact with physical reality directly through quantum transformations, it will shed a lot of light on the accuracy and efficacy of very ancient knowledge systems. It may turn out that adepts entering certain states may be able to exercise extraordinary effects owing to enhanced interaction with phenomena via the quantum sea.

Phases of Consciousness


In any event, the patterns of human experience seem to recur and to be distributed across a range of phases of consciousness from those principally oriented toward adaptation to the outer world to those expressing relations internal to the organism. Universal patterns of change in phases of consciousness are neurognostically "wired in," so to speak, to the functioning of the nervous system. The most common universal alternation is between what we call waking and sleeping/dreaming states (see Laughlin, McManus, and Shearer 1993). How such universal alternations develop and how they are interpreted is, of course, influenced by one's culture. In modern Euroamerican cultures, children are typically taught to ignore their dream states and to focus on adaptational interactions with the external world in the waking state. Moreover, ritual practices designed to evoke alternative phases of consciousness are generally discouraged or negatively sanctioned. Thus Euroamerican awareness is primarily concerned with tracking external events while in the waking state. Euroamerican culture thus tends to be monophasic in its orientation to experiences of the world.

This is in sharp contrast to the majority of cultures in which access to multiple phases of consciousness is positively sanctioned and enculturated. We term these polyphasic cultures. In these cultures, experiences had in dreams, in visions, under the influence of various psychotropic substances, and under various ritual circumstances are valued and inform the society's system of knowledge. The important thing to remember here is that the brains of people living in all societies, whether they are born into monophasic or polyphasic cultures, are neurognostically prepared to experience a stream of consciousness that flows, as it were, through multiple phases, and not merely in the discrete waking states valued and emphasized by materialist cultures such as our own.

Neurophenomenology


Thus far I have given you some notion of what biogenetic structural theory is about. Summarizing what I have said so far, biogenetic structuralism holds that the world of experience of all people everywhere is mediated by much the same complement of neurognostic models, derived from the human genome and developed throughout childhood in similar ways. Cultural variation in experience occurs because of the variations both in enculturation and in the details of the local operational environment, as well as the remarkable plasticity afforded by neural development. The ways all humans are alike in how they experience themselves and their world is due to the origins of their cognized environments in species-typical neurognosis. The ways some human beings are alike depends largely upon the social conditioning in the development of their individual cognized environments. And of course the ways no human beings are alike is due to the complexity and uniqueness of each individual's innate temperament and developmental path.

Biogenetic structuralism has focussed most intensively on the ways that all humans are alike as a counterbalance to a notable bias in anthropology toward cultural relativism-that is, a professional orientation toward the ways some humans are alike. Because of our concern for the universal properties of consciousness, we have incorporated within our methodological tool kit the advantages of a phenomenological approach. We use the term phenomenology in the Husserlian, or Buddhist sense of the study of the essential properties and structures of consciousness by the application of trained introspection. As I said in the beginning, consciousness science is hampered by a great deal of phenomenological naivete. Many of the folks working in consciousness science have not been trained to cultivate phenomenologically productive mind states, nor to systematically explore the structures and operations of their own consciousness. Because of this deficit in methodology, I want to spend the remainder of this chapter exploring this crucially important component of a fully fleshed out consciousness science.

The most direct method for ascertaining the relations between consciousness and the nervous system is by way of combining the methods of phenomenology and neuroscience into a kind of neurophenomenology. Neurophenomenology is a powerful method that relies upon a dialogue between descriptions of the essential properties of consciousness as ascertained through trained contemplation on the one hand, and the structures and processes of the brain discovered in neuroscience on the other hand. From the biogenetic structural point of view, phenomenology and neuroscientific research are but two points of view onto the same scope of inquiry. Both viewpoints are required, and neither reduces the other. This is important, for the most common criticism I have heard of a neuroscientific account of consciousness is that it is somehow "reductionistic." A neurophenomenology is reductionistic in neither the popular nor the technical sense. In the popular sense, neither phenomenology nor neuroscience can produce a complete account of consciousness. Therefore neither approach can reduce the other in any imperialistic way. In the more technical sense, neither phenomenological nor neuroscientific theories are sufficiently robust as explanatory frameworks to reduce the theories derived from the other. What combining the respective powers of both windows does do is to broaden the range of empirical observations requiring explanation, thus setting the stage for building a more complete account of consciousness. Again, as William James might well have argued, grounding neuroscience accounts in the phenomenology of experience requires neuroscientists to engage the broadest possible naturalistic scope. For example, phenomenology acts as a corrective to overly narrow conceptions of consciousness inherent in many cognitive science models-models frequently constrained by the limitations of the computer-as-metaphor for the human mind approach. On the other hand, requiring a neuroscience perspective inhibits the tendency toward metaphysical and epiphenomenal accounts of the structures of consciousness that run counter to how we know the brain works. I have already touched on one example of this above. Models of consciousness that deny the consciousness of fetuses and babies, as well as those that deny consciousness in nonhuman animals with brains, reveal both their narrow perspective and their ethnocentric bias, and in addition run counter to pre- and perinatal psychological, neuropsychological, and zoological evidence to the contrary.

Keep in mind that the word consciousness is a phenomenological concept. I know about consciousness because I am a conscious being capable of self-reflection. It would seem to be the most natural thing in the world to answer questions about consciousness by examining my own conscious processes. Yet to this day there exists in some scientific circles an outmoded, knee-jerk rejection of introspection as a legitimate source of information about consciousness. The proscription against introspection is as absurd as it is counterproductive to a fully mature consciousness science. The complaint is, of course, that introspection produces soft, inexact, nonobjective, nonpublic, and empirically nonconfirmable statements about the nature of consciousness. Our response is that untrained observation of any scope is marginally useful in science. The greater the training, the more exact and useful are the observations. And in these post-Kuhnian times in the philosophy of science, what objective means has shifted to connote more an intersubjective agreement-which is precisely what trained phenomenologists are able to do. Ken Wilber (1984) put it nicely when he noted that all forms of knowledge about the world are grounded on the injunction: if you want to know this, do this, then when you come to know what you know, you talk to others who have followed the same injunction and see to what extent you agree or disagree. This is what Charles Tart (1975) meant when he noted that all sciences are state-specific. The requisite mind states for whatever exploration must be cultivated, and phenomenology is no different. Mind you, the phenomenological literature is rife with naive philosophical discourses on the nature of consciousness. Phenomenologically speaking, the "as I sit in my study with pen poised and contemplate the qualia making up the tree in my garden" sort of philosophizing is not very productive. One of Edmund Husserl's greatest disappointments was the failure of many of his students to develop the requisite skills in self-reflection without which a deep, penetrating and sustained exploration of one's consciousness is impossible.

The details of training in phenomenology will vary with the school, but almost all approaches depend to some extent upon the practitioner learning to access an extraordinarily deep well of calm from which willful operations may proceed unimpeded by discursive thought, fantasy and the natural inclination of the more excited brain to leap from object to object in its intentionality. In the East the untrained mind is sometimes likened to a monkey holding on for dear life to the tail of a raging elephant, while the trained mind is depicted as the monkey seated on top of and guiding a more placid mount. From the vantage point of deep calm, the contemplative is able to focus the power of intentionality upon whatever property or activity of mind one wishes to examine. In phenomenological terms, the process of focusing upon and exploring attributes of consciousness is called reducing that attribute (not to be confused with the previous use of the term mentioned above-the word reduce comes from an ancient root meaning "to return to the beginning"). Some operations of mind are easier to reduce than others, some require more skill than others. And the reduction of some properties does not become relevant until others are realized.

Reductions in Biogenetic Structural Research


Over the last 20 years or so, the biogenetic structuralist group have reduced and offered neuropsychological explanations for a variety of properties and structures of consciousness, and have linked these with the structure of the human biogram. These properties include: (1) the granular texture of all sensory stimuli(what we have called the phenomenology of the "dot" (Laughlin 1992a; Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1990:108-112), (2) internal time consciousness and temporal awareness (Laughlin 1992a), (3) states of consciousness in meditation (Laughlin 1994b; Laughlin, McManus, and Webber 1984; Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1990), (4) the causal efficacy of warps over subsequent phases of consciousness (Laughlin, McManus and d'Aquili 1990:140-145), (5) dreaming (Laughlin, McManus, and Shearer 1983, McManus, Laughlin, and Shearer 1993), (6) the archetypes (Laughlin 1996a), (7) the efficacy of portals and skrying devices in transforming consciousness (McDonald, Cove, Laughlin and McManus 1989), (8) intentionality (Laughlin 1992b, Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1990:103-108), (9) the innate fuzziness of natural categories, especially those used to describe transpersonal experiences (Laughlin 1993a), (10) the nature of psychic energy (Laughlin 1994b), (11) the experience of certainty of knowledge (Laughlin 1994c), (12) intuition (Laughlin 1997a), (13) the body image (Laughlin 1997b), and (14) the effort after meaning and the effort after truth as distinct intentional states (Laughlin 1992a).

Because biogenetic structuralism incorporates an ethnological frame, we have also reduced and built neuroanthropological accounts of a number of sociocultural phenomena, including: (1) the relation between love and ritual gift giving (Laughlin 1985), (2) how ritual and ritual drivers are used by societies to orchestrate the experience of their members (d'Aquili 1983; d'Aquili and Laughlin 1975; d'Aquili, Laughlin, and McManus 1979; Laughlin 1989b, 1990a, 1993b; Laughlin, McManus, and Shearer 1983; Laughlin, McManus, and Webber 1984; Laughlin, McManus, Rubinstein, and Shearer 1986; MacDonald, Cove, Laughlin, and McManus 1989), (3) how symbols penetrate and evoke states of consciousness (Laughlin 1989b; Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1990:189-195), (4) how technology transforms consciousness (Laughlin 1997c; d'Aquili and Newberg 1996), (5) why gender attributions are used almost universally for aspects of consciousness (Laughlin 1990b), (6) how games sometimes reveal the hidden dimensions of cosmology (Laughlin 1990a, 1993b), (7) How to do transpersonal ethnography and how transpersonal experiences effect the consciousness of ethnographers (Laughlin 1989a, 1994a, 1994b, 1996b), (8) the role of transpersonal experiences in traditional cosmologies (Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1990:212-237), (9) the relation between abstraction and spirit in traditional and modern art (Laughlin 1997d, 1998), and (10) the use of masks in religious drama (Young-Laughlin and Laughlin 1988).

As we have been able to demonstrate in these various studies, there are numerous advantages of incorporating the reductive power of a mature phenomenology into consciousness science. The simple fact is that very little training in phenomenology is required before one encounters many of the universal properties of consciousness via one's own direct experience, rather than through theories, ideologies, and other cultural views. As Husserl taught, training in phenomenology is a straightforward means to free the mind from conditioned points of view about consciousness and the acts of consciousness. In effect, one learns to correct one's cultural and disciplinary biases in the crucible of ones own expanding self-awareness before unintentionally revealing the biases before the world.

And the curious thing is that the more skilled one becomes at performing reductions, and the more mature one's insight becomes into the essential properties of consciousness, the easier it becomes to map one's phenomenology onto current neuroscience, and even biophysics. As the "natural attitude" of one's conditioned view of consciousness falls away, the view one develops from the direct experience of consciousness looks very much as one would expect from a study of neuropsychology. When one realizes, for example, that one's entire sensory field is made up of waves of particles, or as we say "dots," it is far easier both to understand how neural structures mediate sensation, and to see where the particle-wave ambiguity comes from in quantum physics. Or to give another, perhaps more historically interesting example, when one has reduced the real "now point" in the stream of one's own consciousness, it is far easier to understand what William James meant by "pure experience."

Conclusion


In this brief chapter I have given you a glimpse of the kind of theorizing we have done in biogenetic structuralism over the years. I have indicated some of the limitations the theory is designed to avoid, and have suggested some of the advantages of this view over alternative theories of consciousness. What I have spent more time emphasizing is the crucial importance of incorporating a neurophenomenology into the tool kit of consciousness science. Incorporating such a methodology does not, of course, require adherence to biogenetic structural theory. In principle, any body of theory about consciousness may be tested using neurophenomenology. But it is true that biogenetic structural theory requires a neurophenomenology by logical extension of its fundamental tenets, for biogenetic structuralism is grounded in a "radical empiricism" (to use William James's term; see Laughlin and McManus 1995) that insists that all of science be grounded in experience, and that no experience is beyond the purview of scientific scrutiny. In the future I hope to see more of the properties of consciousness reduced and explained by the application of phenomenological methods (Laughlin 1996b). Whether you buy into a biogenetic structural perspective, or some other formulation that integrates experience and the brain, the incorporation of a full-blown neurophenomenology will certainly aid in bringing a mature consciousness science to fruition.

Acknowledgments


I wish to thank the many people who have made this study possible. I especially want to thank John McManus and Eugene G. d'Aquili who joined me in formulating biogenetic structuralism. Thanks also go to Harold E. Puthoff of the Institute of Advanced Research in Austin, Texas, who has taught me a great deal about the quantum universe. And many thanks to all my fellow members of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL) group who have taught me so much and who have supported my efforts over the last few years. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of my friend and colleague, Roy "Skip" Rappaport.

Notes


1. The best single entre into biogenetic structural theory is the book Brain, Symbol and Experience (Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1990).

2. We are indebted to Roy Rappaport (1968) for the concepts of cognized and operational environments. It is clear from Rappaport's (1979:97-144; 1984:337-352) later writings that the meanings we have constructed for these terms are even closer to his thinking than we initially thought. We originally interpreted him as simply equating cognized environment with the native world view and the operational environment with the world as viewed by science. And of course, we consider scientific theories of the world to also be cognized environments. In fact, Rappaport's (personal communication, May 1993) thinking does not differ substantially from our view. For our own development of these crucial concepts, see Laughlin and Brady (1978:6); d'Aquili, Laughlin, and McManus (1979:12ff); Rubenstein, Laughlin, and McManus (1984:21ff); and Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili (1990:82-90).

3.See Laughlin (1997b) on the neuropsychology of the body image.

4. The concept of neurognosis is discussed in Laughlin and d'Aquili (1974: chapter 5), Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili (1990: chapter 2), d'Aquili, Laughlin and McManus (1979:8ff) and Laughlin (1996a and b)

5. I am especially thinking here of the work by Harold Puthoff (1990) and others on the properties of the random fluctuations of vacuum energies in the so-called Zero Point Energy sea.

6. Here I am thinking of the work of Fritz Popp and his colleagues (Popp, Li, and Gu 1992) on biophoton emission from cells.

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