Putting the Neuro in Neurophenomenology

Abstract

How does the evolutionary developmental biology discussed in the previous chapter help explain, in Levine’s phrase, how anything like a first-person perspective could arise in the world (Levine, 2006; 2001)? In this chapter I argue that the outline of an account is emerging, with the resources to explain not only how animals navigate the environment but also why the phenomenology of the first-person should be as it is, namely, an identification free perspective in a world of affective salience. The neurobiological image depicts mental life as a matter of “embodiment”—that is, as caused by the particulars of morphology and development. The evo-devo framework treats animals as developmental systems composed of homologues. Thus, to explain an embodied mind within this framework would be to show how and why the activity and functional interaction of homologues form the causal basis of the first-person perspective. The evo-devo research introduced in the last chapter makes significant progress toward such a causal account.