July 2024
The study of consciousness, long ignored in the West, is finally up to speed, but it’s dominated by neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers. Where are the psychologists, wonder Gregg Henriques of James Madison University and John Vervaeke of University of Toronto in an article in Psychology Today.
The science that deals with the inner life of humans is strangely absent from the growing field of consciousness research and its different positions on the classic mind-body problem: materialism/physicalism, idealism, dualism, panpsychism, quantum theories, and others.
Psychology’s absence is the more remarkable as it was framed as the science of consciousness in its earliest days in the 1870s, Henriques and Vervaeke point out. A couple of decades later, psychology left the question of what consciousness is to other disciplines and focused on how consciousness works. Most of the proposals about the nature of consciousness today come from those practicing biology, physics and philosophy.
“Can we imagine a situation where we get asked the question, ‘What is life?’ but only a few of the commentators were biologists, and this was because the biologists were busy studying how life works rather than being concerned with how it fits inside our understanding of the universe? That would be absurd. And yet, that is what has happened”, the two psychologists write.
“Psychology is defined by empirical application of methods to collect data, and it is now more or less cut off from philosophy of mind and questions about the fundamental nature of consciousness and where and how it fits in the universe. We believe this is a profound error”.
Henriques and Vervaeke characterize the prevailing knowledge system as broken and incomplete — an “enlightenment gap” — and call for a new approach: “One that can clarify the nature of the world we live in, the nature and function of human consciousness”.
Anders Bolling
