Evan Thompson - Empathy and Consciousness

Great article from Evan Thompson, one of the leading researchers in embodied consciousness d intersubjectivity. This is a very long and geeky article, but it's good stuff.

Evan Thompson
Empathy and Consciousness

This article makes five main points. (1) Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. (2) The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, understood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality. (3) Empathy is the precondition (the condition of possibility) of the science of consciousness. (4) Human empathy is inherently developmental: open to it are pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity. (5) Real progress in the understanding of intersubjectivity requires integrating the methods and findings of cognitive science, phenomenology, and contemplative and meditative psychologies of human transformation.

I: Preamble

My aim in this article is to set forth a context for the following essays and a framework for future research on the topic of intersubjectivity in the science of consciousness. To this end, I will present, in broad strokes, an overview of this topic, drawing from three main sources—cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, continental European phenomenology, and the psychology of contemplative or meditative experience. Since my aim is integrative and constructive, I will not offer detailed conceptual and empirical arguments for each step, though I will try to give a taste of some of these arguments along the way.

II: Introduction

The theme of this article is that the individual human mind is not confined within the head, but extends throughout the living body and includes the world beyond the biological membrane of the organism, especially the interpersonal, social world of self and other. This theme, long central to the tradition of continental European phenomenology, derived from Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), has lately begun to be heard in cognitive science. Indeed, there is a remarkable convergence between these two traditions, not simply on the topic of intersubjectivity, but on virtually every area of research within cognitive science, as a growing number of scientists and philosophers have discussed (Varela, 1996; Gallagher, 1997; Petitot et al., 1999). In the case of intersubjectivity, much of the convergence centres on the realization that one’s consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual in the world is founded on empathy—on one’s empathic cognition of others, and others’ empathic cognition of oneself. Yet despite this convergence, to be explored in this article, many questions remain about how to understand the relationship between the cognitive scientific and the phenomenological treatments of consciousness. In the end, these questions all come back to the question of what kind of science the science of consciousness is or can be. Put another way, if we are to have a cognitively and ethically satisfying understanding of consciousness, what form should this understanding take?

To frame my discussion here, let me propose two key points that go to the heart of the matter. I call these points the Core Dyad:

THE CORE DYAD
* Empathy is the precondition (the condition of possibility) for the science of consciousness.
* Empathy is an evolved, biological capacity of the human species, and probably of other mammalian species, such as the apes.

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Tags: consciousness, empathy, Psychology, Evan Thompson, Empathy and Consciousness, intersubjectivity, meditation, mind