University of Warsaw

Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology

Institute of Philosophy

Leon Ciechanowski
Students book no.: 251658

Neurophenomenological aspects
of sense of agency
Second cycle degree thesis
major, Philosophy
speciality, Philosophy of Being, Cognition and Value

The thesis written under the supervision of:

Dr Marcin Mikowski
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN

Warsaw, 06.2012

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Summary

Autor

opisuje

podmiotowe

neurofenomenologii,

nowej,

poczucie
dopiero

sprawstwa,
rozwijajcej

ktre
si

jest

badane

dziedziny,

ramach

czcej

tradycj

fenomenologiczn z kognitywistyk. Tematem rozprawy jest rozwj i podstawy

neurofenomenologii, z uwzgldnieniem jej powiza z neurobiologi. Przedstawia si te
ostatnie osignicia tej dziedziny. W pracy rozpatrzono zarwno zarzuty stawiane
neurofenomenologii, jak i konkurencyjne teorie poczucia sprawstwa. Na koniec zarysowano
moliwe drogi jej dalszego rozwoju.

Keywords
Neurofenomenologia, po zu ie sp a st a, po zu ie as o i, fe o e ologia, kog it
Francisco Varela

Area of study (codes according to Erasmus Subject Area Codes List)

8.1 Philosophy

The title of the thesis in Polish

Neurofenomenologiczne Aspekty Poczucia Sprawstwa

ist ka,

Summary

The author describes the sense of agency as examined in the neurophenomenological system,
which is a recently developed methodology that draws extensively from the tradition of
phenomenology and cognitive studies. The thesis investigates the phenomenological roots of
the system, traces its stages of development, touches upon the neurobiological correlates of it
and discusses the latest achievements. Finally, some critique of neurophenomenology together
with a brief survey of rivalry approaches to the problem of sense of agency is presented and
the future possible ways of development is reflected upon.

Keywords
Neurophenomenology, sense of agency, sense of ownership, phenomenology, cognitive studies,
Francisco Varela

Area of study (codes according to Erasmus Subject Area Codes List)

8.1 Philosophy

The title of the thesis in English

Neurophenomenological Aspects of Sense of Agency

Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................................7
2. Husserl and the rise of the modern notion of phenomenology - a short history of the idea, its basis
and main elements ..............................................................................................................................9
3. Further development of the idea: Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology naturalized ......................... 16
3.1. Merleau-Ponty and the posthusserlian development of phenomenology .................................. 16
3.2. The bone of contention the hard problem .......................................................................... 20
3.3. Reductionist approaches ......................................................................................................... 21
3.4. Problem of naturalizing phenomenology ................................................................................. 24
3.5. Heterophenomenology of Dennett .......................................................................................... 27
3.6. Criticism of heterophenomenology by Chalmers and Gallagher. Why subjective experience is
so crucial? ..................................................................................................................................... 29
4. Varelas Neurophenomenology ..................................................................................................... 31
4.1. From autopoiesis, through enactivism and embodiment to neurophenomenology .................... 31
4.2. Neurophenomenology ............................................................................................................ 35
4.2.1. Methods of phenomenology ............................................................................................. 37
4.2.2. The neurophenomenological experiment .......................................................................... 41
4.2.3. Problems of neurophenomenology ................................................................................... 46
4.3. Summary................................................................................................................................ 48
5. Neurophenomenology and sense of agency ................................................................................... 50
5.1. Preliminary remarks on phenomenology of action .................................................................. 50
5.2. Kinds of actions and movements ............................................................................................ 51
5.3. Neurophenomenology and sense of agency ............................................................................. 53
6. Neurophenomenology and sense of agency case studies ............................................................. 58
6.1. Preliminary remarks ............................................................................................................... 58
6.2. Theories of agency put in practice .......................................................................................... 63
6.3. Comparator Model ................................................................................................................. 64
6.4. Other models of agency and the main idea of studies on sense of agency ................................ 66
6.5. Neurophenomenological improvement of the comparator model ............................................. 67
6.6. Feinberg-Friths model of sense of agency .............................................................................. 68
6.7. A neurophenomenological evaluation of comparator model .................................................... 72
5

6.7.1. A neurophenomenological improvement of the comparator model ................................... 75

6.7.2. Response from Frith ........................................................................................................ 78
7. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 81
8. Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... 85
9. Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 86

1. Introduction
In the study of consciousness and agency, there is a plethora of stances possible. Many
philosophers and scientists often claim that the differences are in the point of reference,
passing over the strongly naturalized positions of Francis Crick, Christof Koch and Paul
Churchland. The others, like Shaun Gallagher, Francisco Varela, Antonio Damasio etc., state
that in order to study consciousness and experience of agency successfully, we need to
combine methodologies of such sciences like neurobiology, psychology and cognitive
sciences, but also phenomenology and alike subjectivistic stances. The upshot of such
approach is neurophenomenology, which I will discuss in this thesis.

Phenomenology is contemporarily connected with cognitive sciences, and is combined into

such chimeras as neurophenomenology (with such proponents as Varela and Gallagher),
cognophenomenology (Tim van Gelder) and embodied mind or cognition (Lawrence Shapiro,
Colin Wilson), among others. In some of them the threat of naturalizing phenomenology is
present, but some try to deal with this drawback. Many of these combinatory approaches are
characterized by the aversion to mechanistic and computational theories, all of them stress the
huge role of subjective and bodily experience in the study of consciousness. The traditional
cognitive sciences assumed that thinking is a symbol-processing process, which
metaphorically can be put as saying that body is the hardware and mind or consciousness is
the software. This approach was criticized by Hubert Dreyfus in his famous book (Dreyfus
1979). There were, of course, some advantages in the traditional cognitive sciences methods
of research they had a clarity of algorithmic description of symbols, which represented our
thoughts and believes in the process of cognition. But there were also drawbacks in this
approach, according to Dreyfus cognitive sciences assumed that if cognition ends with input
7

data and output data then there is no point in studying the subjective and intimate relation
between the subject and the external world. Besides, even though the algorithmic description
of the symbols clarify a lot, it is hard to interpret them in comparison with their independent
meaning (if there is any). There were trials also as for the application of algorithmic
systematization in a phenomenological standpoint, undertaken by Marbach (Marbach 1993).

2. Husserl and the rise of the modern notion of phenomenology - a

short history of the idea, its basis and main elements
Neurophenomenology is based on the phenomenological tradition and draws extensively on
its insights and methodology. Therefore, in order to introduce the reader into this subject
matter, I will briefly describe the phenomenological model of analysis of consciousness and
its experiential aspects, like sense of agency.

The founder of phenomenology was Edmund Husserl (born in April 8, 1859 in Pronitz,
Moravia, Austrian Empire, died in April 27, 1938 in Freiburg, Germany). Husserl published
comparatively little throughout his life, and his publications were mostly cycles of
introductions to phenomenology of mainly methodological and programmatic nature and were
altogether merely a minuscule fraction of his colossal prolificacy. At the same time he had the
practice of noting down his thoughts every day, therefore at the moment of his death these socalled research manuscripts (jointly with his lectures manuscripts and unpublished volumes)
were equal to more than 45000 pages of unedited manuscripts taken down in shorthand. Soon
after Husserl's passing away, a young Franciscan Hermann Van Breda smuggled all of
Husserl's manuscripts and notes successfully out of Germany to a monastery in Belgium. As a
result of this deed, the Husserl Archives were established at the Institute of Philosophy in
Leuven, just before the commencement of the Second World War; the original manuscripts
remain there to date. At the same time Husserliana, the critical edition of Husserl's works,
started to be published. The critical edition involves never published works, lectures, articles
and research manuscripts, and not only the new editions of the papers and books published
throughout Husserl's life (Zahavi 2003: 1-2).

The motivations for phenomenology were, salient among other things, the threat of naturalism
and psychologism in the study of human consciousness. Naturalism, the naive inclusion
truths borrowed from other sciences into philosophy, is a view against which
phenomenology is opposed in particular. Husserl noted the problem of naturalism already in
the Logical Investigations (Husserl 1970a). Naturalism and psychologism were the two
eternal culprits appointed as the ones misrepresenting the factual nature of consciousness and
the domain of cognition. Consequently, in Ideas (Husserl 1983) Husserl laments over the
philosophical poverty of the worldview brought into being by natural sciences, and calls
attention to the fact that we will not perform an exploration of nature by transcendental
research into consciousness. This kind of anti-naturalism drew him closer to Neo-Kantianism,
according to Dermot Moran (Malpas 2003: 53).

A kind of naturalism regarding the nature of mental acts posed a constant threat for Husserl,
even when he had overcome psychologism. 1 Even if one sustained the view that cognitive
mental processes are purely factual processes taking place in nature he noticed that it was not
possible to comprehend the fundamental epistemological character of cognition.
Consciousness is in a different mode of existence dissimilar to beings in nature, an absolute
existence. Without consciousness there would be no world whatsoever, as he states in Ideas.2
However, it does not mean that the world is not created in any ontological sense by
He su
a ised it thus: I a sha pl e phasize f o the sta t that pu e phe o e olog , a ess to hi h e
shall prepare in the following essay the same phenomenology that made a first break-through in the
Logische Untersuchungen, and the sense of which has opened itself up to me more deeply and richly in the
continuing work of the last decade is not psychology and that neither accidental delimitations of its field nor
its terminologies, but most radical essential grounds, p e e t its i lusio i ps holog . (Husserl 1983: xviii).
1

O er agai st the positi g of the orld, hi h is a o ti ge t positi g, there sta ds the the positi g of
pure Ego and Ego-life hi h is a e essar , absolutely indubitable positing. Anything physical which is given
i perso a e o -e iste t; o e tal pro ess hi h is gi e i perso a e o -existent. This is the
eideti la defi i g this e essit a d that o ti ge . (Husserl 1983: 102).

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consciousness. In this case, he would fall under a title of subjective idealism that is an
outcome of a particular naturalising tendency consciousness being the cause, the world the
effect. Conversely, Husserl believes that the world is, through consciousness opened up,
made meaningful, or unveiled. It cannot be conceived of without consciousness. If we reify
consciousness, treat it as part of the world, and then we pay no attention to its disclosive role.
According to Husserl, that is why all natural science is naive about its origin. The appropriate
attitude to consciousness must be a transcendental one because it is presupposed in all
knowledge and science.

Phenomenology is a discipline studying the ideal essences of the objective correlates of

conscious acts and the essences of consciousness. The purpose of the phenomenological tools
on this path of studying consciousness epoch (the so-called bracketing) and the eidetic
and phenomenological reductions is to reach these essences without interpreting them
psychologistically. By the exercise of the epoch beliefs in the world-horizon is pushed out of
consideration altogether with all explanatory theories that depend on it. As a result, the
inclination to regard the domain of intentional correlation as an entity in the world (which we
could rate e.g., under the class of psychology) and to presuppose that its laws will be
discovered and described in a daily and scientific examination, being part of the natural
attitude, undergoes a deactivation, or neutralisation.

So as to reveal the deeper levels of consciousness the fundamentally negative epoch must be
enhanced with a transcendental/phenomenological reduction, where intentional correlation is
made thematic. Husserl describes it as a reduction to pure consciousness, 3 to be precise, to

the sphe e of pu e o s ious ess ith hate e is i sepa a le f o it (i ludi g the pu e Ego ) remains
as the phe o e ologi al esiduu , as a region of being which is essentially quite unique, a region which can

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intentionality filtered of all psychological, all naive and prejudiced construal and illustrated
just as it appears. The entities that appear in the natural attitude as clearly there for us, the
table we sit at or the dice with which we play, appear in our sight as a unity of meaning, a
pure phenomenon, that is what it is exactly because it occupies a specific place in the chain of
intentional acts and experiences in which it comes to givenness. In consequence, the
transcendental reduction lets phenomenology to examine the intentional structure of things.
That is to say, to examine the conditions that make possible the sense as existing of entities
and in fact their givenness as anything whatsoever, and not the conditions of their existence in
the world, since the question has been bracketed (Dreyfus & Wrathall, 2006: 19-22).

The first of the three Husserls reductions is the eidetic reduction. Its name is such because
takes us to the eidos (the essences) of things. I have mentioned it briefly when discussed the
epoch above. Now I shall scrutinize it more thoroughly. When someone is in front of the
dice (Husserls favourite example, quoted frequently in the philosophical literature), his
consciousness can focus on several various things or aspects: the dice itself or something
looking like a dice from his perspective (it could be a corner made of three square pieces),
etc., but the noema of the act must be aimed at objects being intact with the hyletic
experiences he has. Yet the person in front of the dice can focus on just one feature of the dice
as well, e.g. its cubic form. Thus, he will have predictions concerning what he will perceive in
different conditions (either affecting the perceiver or the object). For instance, he presumes
that counting the number of corners will give him eight and of edges twelve. Several of
these anticipations are alike those we possess when the object of our act is this actual dice.
Nevertheless, we have no anticipations concerning this specific dice. We may remove it and
become the field of a science of consciousness with a correspondingly novel an essentially novel sense:
phe o e olog . (Husserl 1983: 65, footnote #17).

12

replace with another dice, and none of our anticipations will be disturbed. Thus, our
anticipations consist of only a subset of the anticipations we have when the object of our act is
the concrete particular dice, when the object of our act is of the cubic form. Therefore, the
label reduction is granted for the transition from the experience of an actual specific object
to the experience of an eidos. An essence can be traced by looking for similarities between
things; for instance, shape, form, cubeness, doghood etc. Husserl thought of many eidetic
disciplines, besides mathematical ones, that would examine an essence or an interrelated
group of essences. One of the techniques they may use would be eidetic variation: one would
focus on an essence and proceed through several examples that instantiate this essence. We do
not need physical objects as illustration; it is faster to imagine new instances and investigate
what qualities this essence possesses and the relation with other ones. It is not important
whether objects exist, since when we are examining eidos, what is significant is essence, and
not exemplification of the essence. By altering the examples of things that exemplify the
essence, we may provide evidence for existence results: we may find an example that
instantiates a particular combination of features. However, other kind of reflection is needed
for negative results, stating that there are no objects fulfilling the defined combination of
features (Dreyfus and Wrathall 2006: 109-111).

At this point we can move to transcendental reduction. It is based on the reflection on the act,
not on its object. This fixation on the object bears three, already mentioned, elements linked
in a certain way: the structuring experiences in the act noeses, the correlated structure given
in the act the noema, and the filling and restricting experiences hyle. According to
Husserl, these elements can be studied systematically after some training. Such person will
ignore the common object of act. He will not think about its existence, nor investigate the
object further to check his expectations. This alteration of attitude Husserl calls epoch (i.e. to
13

refrain from judgement), as well as bracketing of an object. Thanks to this, we will focus on
the arrangement of the act in which we perceive something, and not on the object as such.
That is, we examine noema, noesis, and hyle of the act. That shift of attention is exactly the
transcendental reduction, the shift from the object-directed position to an act-directed one. So
from the things that are of interest to us in the eidetic (or natural) manner we are led to the
transcendental objects (i.e. noesis, noema, and hyle), as well as to the transcendental ego (i.e.
the feature of the ego that we are not conscious of when we are bearing in mind ourselves as
physical beings in the material world, but that we become conscious of when we find out the
structuring activity of our own consciousness). Because this reflective turn abandons the
objects in the world and the eide, which we were interested in before the process of reduction
began, this is called a reduction (Fllesdal 1969).

The phenomenological reduction is the eidetic and the transcendental reduction taken
together. With it, we are taken from the natural attitude to an eidetic transcendental one; we
no more aim at particular, physical objects but we investigate the noeses, noemata, and hyle
of acts directed toward essential features of acts directed toward essences. Objects of acts are
divided by the reductions into four realms. In the first realm we find physical objects (that is
the subject of the natural sciences). The eidetic reduction gets us to the eidos (i.e. the common
characteristics of objects), studied in eidetic sciences as, e.g. mathematics. Carrying out the
transcendental reduction on acts aimed at physical objects causes us to examine noeses,
noemata, and hyle of such acts (and thereby we get to the third realm). Husserl does not spend
much time discussing this realm; instead he suggests it be called metaphysics. He also
specifies that this realm embraces the analysis of the transcendental systematisation of what is
usually individual, like death in its uniqueness for an individual, as differentiated from death
as a universal feature of people and animals. In the fourth realm, there is noeses, noemata, and
14

hyle of acts aimed at essences, the study of which Husserl calls phenomenology. The term
reduction is added because it directs us from the natural attitude to the things studied in
phenomenology: the phenomenological reduction (Fllesdal 1990).

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3. Further development of the idea: Merleau-Ponty and

phenomenology naturalized
3.1. Merleau-Ponty and the posthusserlian development of phenomenology
Phenomenology has perhaps as much proponents as adversaries in its possible connection
with cognitive studies. This is why some assess it as low as Thomas Metzinger:
Neurophenomenology is possible; phenomenology is impossible (Metzinger 2004: 83); or
as positively as by Gallagher:
phenomenology might offer correctives to various cognitive analyses, but also
phenomenology might benefit from some of the more sophisticated cognitive
approaches (Gallagher and Varela 2001: 26).

These are merely a miniscule dose of examples in that area. It is worthy to note that Gallagher
stresses that phenomenology does not explain how the brain generates consciousness but it
has produced a description of features of consciousness, which we try to explain
phenomenology limits the reductionist inclinations of neurological sciences, which
supposedly try to rule out the specific nature of conscious experience from the
neurobiological description of consciousness development, according to Gallagher.

Many thinkers have presented an internal critique of phenomenology; these were for instance
Gadamer, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. There has also been an external critique
challenging phenomenology, which was presented by the Vienna Circle and positivism.
Heidegger developed the most significant internal critique he rejected three main aspects of
Husserls phenomenology. In the essay entitled Philosophy as a Rigorous Science (1911),
Husserl argued against the life philosophy and philosophy of world views. Heidegger, on the
16

other hand, in spite of his reproach to these philosophical streams, assumed that
phenomenology has to be focused on historicity (or temporality), the facticity of human living
in time. Moreover, it should not describe only the internal consciousness of time. What is
more, Heidegger, following Friedrich Schleiermacher and hermeneutics, stated that every
description entails interpretation description being only a derivation of interpretation. The
project of pure description devised by Husserl becomes unmanageable in the context of
description being placed outside a radically historicised hermeneutics. Finally, Heidegger did
not accept the first philosophy as an egology and Husserlian notion of transcendental
idealism. Against these theories, Heidegger proposed that phenomenology raises the question
of Being. For this reason, he claimed that ontology is possible solely as phenomenology. In
the period after publication of Being and Time, Heidegger did not reject the core of
phenomenological approach (even though he changed his way of philosophizing), i.e. the
phenomenological focus on things themselves. Hence in 1962, he wrote to William
Richardson that he switched to thinking (Denken) through phenomenology, under the
condition that phenomenology means the process of letting things manifest themselves (als
das Sichzeigenlassen der Sache selbst) (Moran, 2002: 20-21).

As for the possibility of applying the already discussed phenomenological methods in

scientific examination of consciousness, it should be mentioned, for instance, that many
succeeding phenomenologists regarded epoch as redundant or impracticable whereas Husserl
claimed it to be utterly vital to phenomenology. Heidegger, for example, believed it to be
redundant; phenomenology was ordained by him to be ontology, and as a bracketing of
existence the reduction is in principle inappropriate for supplying a positive description of
being (Heidegger 1985: 109; quote after: Dreyfus and Wrathall 2006: 21). Merleau-Ponty
claimed that the epoch is a break with our familiar acceptance of the world with the aim of
17

thematising it. But he claimed that a complete reduction was impracticable: the endeavour
of bracketing the world exposes only its unmotivated upsurge (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xiv;
quote after: ibidem). Both objections seem to challenge the thought that phenomenology can
be ontologically neutral. But these objections are tough to evaluate. They frequently link
aspects of reductions that Husserl separated. It seems adequate to say that the question of
ontological commitment is an open one in phenomenological philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty was similar to Heidegger in that he focused his phenomenology on action.

However, phenomenology of the former is different in that it is not only granting the status of
social agent as embodied (as did Heidegger); Merleau-Ponty is indeed situating this
embodiment as the main point of his theory.

Merleau-Ponty was strongly inspired by Husserl. In his project of phenomenology, he tried to

overcome, as he called it, the twin tendencies of Western philosophy. These were connected
with the problems of idealism (in his terms intellectualism) and empiricism. He wanted to
reformulate the relation between numerous dualistic pairs (e.g. subject and object, self and
world). In his early works, such as Phenomenology of Perception (M. Merleau-Ponty 2005)
from the 1945, he achieved that goal by an account of the lived and existential body. His point
was that the importance of body (occasionally called by him body-subject) is not sufficiently
appreciated in the philosophical systems that treat the body as an object fully controlled by a
transcendent mind. Hence, his project takes a lot from accounts of perception, inclining
towards the underlining of the embodied inherence in the world which is more basic than our
mental capacities. Still, Merleau-Ponty asserts that perception is itself intrinsically cognitive.
Even though Merleau-Ponty did not try to reject scientific and analytic ways of investigating
the world, there is a tendency to make a connection between his theory and the concept of
18

primacy of perception. What was his aim was to show that this kind of knowledge is always
a consequence of more practical exigencies of the bodys exposure to the world (Dreyfus &
Wrathall, 2006: 133-134).

Merleau-Ponty had a role in developing arguments against behaviorism in psychology and

investigating Husserlian depiction of the nature of the living body, as well as in criticizing the
scientism of the manuscript of Ideas II (Husserl 1990) and the Crisis (Husserl 1970b) which
he had accessed in Husserl Archives in Leuven. Merleau-Ponty, inspired by Aron Gurwitsch,
used Gestalt psychology when dealing with Husserlian phenomenology. He tried to cope with
positivism, nave empiricism, and behaviorism. Merleau-Ponty strongly criticized the
mechanistic stimulus-response mode of explanation concerning human beings in his first
work The Structure of Behavior (M. Merleau-Ponty 1965). In Phenomenology of Perception
he made a thorough phenomenological study of perception. In this book, he makes a point that
the body possesses some simple form of intentionality and it is impossible to describe or
explicate this intentionality in purely mechanistic terms. Merleau-Ponty presented
dialectically the symbiotic (as it appeared) relation between the act of perception and the
surroundings of the perceiver. He was the first one to show how to examine relations between
consciousness and embodiment that recently have been widely discussed. The late works of
Merleau-Ponty concern language; he focused on merging his understanding of structuralism
and semiotics with Heideggerian theories of language (Moran, 2002: 20).

Certainly, Merleau-Ponty is the most important thinker of embodiment. However, there were
many other phenomenologists working on the concept of the lived body. There are other
French phenomenologists (for example Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Henry) that also
discussed the subject of the body. However, these two branches of philosophy should not be
19

equated. French phenomenology and phenomenology of embodiment are two distinct

traditions.

Furthermore, we can encounter phenomenological examination of the sensing and moving

body as early as 1907 in Husserls Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Merleau-Ponty was
inspired while writing Phenomenology of Perception by the second volume of Husserlian
Ideas in which he analyzed the body. Merleau-Ponty had a chance to see the manuscript in the
Husserl archives just before the Second World War, as the manuscript had not been published
before 1952. There are theories that Husserl is in fact not the first one. According to Michel
Henry, the real beginnings of theorizing about the lived body can be found already in the
theory of the father of dualists Descartes. Later, we can find traces of this philosophical
project in the theory of a different French philosopher Maine de Biran (1766-1824). Henry
suggests that this thinker presents a superior description of the body in phenomenological
tradition in comparison with what we can read in Husserls, Sartres and Merleau-Pontys
works (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008: 134-135).

3.2. The bone of contention the hard problem

I believe that what is most preliminary in the discussion is the terminological and definitional
quarrel, was defined in Chalmers essay The Hard Problem of Consciousness. The way in
which many philosophers understand the idea of hard problems seems to make it almost
impossible to study consciousness without committing oneself to some sort of vicious
subjectivism or even solipsism. But is it so?

First, let us begin with a concise restatement of Chalmers concept. He divided the problems
associated with consciousness into easy and hard. The easy problems are quite successfully
20

dealt with by cognitive and neurobiological sciences. These issues concern objective
mechanisms of cognitive apparatus functions, like perception of the external and internal
reality, attention and wakefulness, control of behaviour etc. They are reducible to the
biological or, ultimately, physical level. But the hard problem is irreducible and asks what is
consciousness and why the brain produces it (Jakowski 2009: 165).

Chalmers general point might be illustrated by quite imaginative arguments for the
irreducibility of consciousness presented by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson. Nagel claimed
that we will never know how is it to be a bat unless we become one the bats consciousness
is something inherent only to it (Nagel 1974). Jackson, in turn, told us a story about Mary, the
neurobiologist, who perceives the world in grey scale of colours only. Nonetheless, her
knowledge, as a scientist, about the neurological level of brain processing perception of
colours is complete. Yet, according to Jackson, she does not know what it takes to distinguish
the experience of redness from the experience of greenness on a phenomenological level. A
brute knowledge about brain processing is insufficient for actual experiencing colours
(Jackson 1982).

3.3. Reductionist approaches

One of the breakthroughs in the history of empirical (but naturalised!) research of
consciousness is due to Francis Crick and Christof Koch. They proposed to leave theoretical
disputes behind and deal with that, which can be scrutinised. For instance, in order to study
the visual consciousness, they suggested finding neuronal correlates of visual awareness. It
came down to establishing which brain processes allow particular perceptions to become the
content of consciousness, which neuronal processes accompany conscious sight experiences.
Thus, they did not simply wish to establish what happens in the brain when we observe
21

something or focus our attention. This research brought extremely interesting outcomes, like
experiences of visual perception devoid of visual awareness, like in the case of blindsight, but
here in non-pathological subjects.4

But how is Crick and Kochs theory important for our deliberations about consciousness? At
this point we can point to the neurobiological theory of consciousness that is proposed by
them. Some specific 35-75 Hz neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex are the most important
in this theory. According to the initial version of the theory (which was soon abandoned) the
scientists assumed that these can be the core of consciousness. To some extent it was
supposed to be so because awareness is correlated with the oscillations in many different
modalities within sensual systems; it is also to some extent caused by the mechanism that
binds the information contents being able to achieve. The process of binding consists in
individually represented fragments of information concerning some entity, combined to be
used by later processing; similarly, data about shape and colour of an object is integrated from
various visual pathways. In the more recent version of the theory, Crick and Koch pose also a
hypothesis that one can achieve binding through synchronized oscillations of relevant
contents represented by neuronal groups. The neural groups in question will oscillate with the
same phase and frequency when two pieces of information are connected (Crick and Koch
2007).

The specifics describing how this binding can be attained are not yet well understood, but if
we suppose that they can be accounted for, then a resulting theory could clarify the binding of
4

Crick and Koch analyzed the process of visual awareness in a series of interesting experiments. These include
binocular rivalry a phenomenon taking place when each eye receives different impulses, and the subject is
aware of one perceptual input at a time, and not two inputs superimposed, as intuitively we might think. See
more in (Crick and Koch 1992).

22

information contents. Probably it would also produce a wider interpretation of the integration
of information in the brain. Crick and Koch believe that the oscillations trigger the
mechanisms of working memory that enables us to produce a description of the working, and
other forms of, memory. The ultimate effect of such a theory can be a general account of how
the data acquired through senses is kept in memory. However, as Chalmers claims, these
attempts still do not meet the requirements of a proper answer to the explanatory question:
why consciousness is produced at all by the integration of information on the neurological
level? We learn only that the integrations are merely the correlates of experience and not the
causes, to say nothing about them being the consciousness itself (Chalmers 2007: 229).

The described approach is reductionist and according to Chalmers leave out the core of our
problem the subjective experience as studied by phenomenology. Generally, sciences
inspect only such elements and events that are to some extent universal, repeatable and
objective. On the other hand, our phenomenal mind 5 is by definition based on subjective
experience.

The problem with Chalmers approach is that he seems to reject any explanation of the hard
problem of consciousness and experience that would be of non-experiential or
phenomenological character. He says that no set of facts about physical structure and
dynamics can amount to facts about phenomenology. Only non-reductive theories are
supposed to explain consciousness and experience (Chalmers 1996). This attitude seems hard
to support it scientifically, since sciences in general take a naturalistic standpoint towards the
phenomena they study and they treat consciousness as one of the objects to be examined.
This is a a e o i g f o Chal e s division of mind or mental properties into phenomenal and
psychological, which can be found in his book (D. J. Chalmers 1996: 21-23).

23

Besides, Chalmers radical point does not exclude the possibility of finding objective
neurological basis of consciousness, at least in the future.

3.4. Problem of naturalizing phenomenology

How can we redefine cognitive sciences in order to include phenomenology in their domain?
The minimum is to accept a part of phenomenology that can be presented to reach the
theoretical boundaries that divide phenomenology from science. One method of achieving it
would be accepting the naturalizing phenomenology. However, for many phenomenologists it
would appear as self-contradictory; phenomenology is after all non-naturalistic a priori.
Others would question the way of achieving it, retaining at the same time the specificity of
phenomenology. All this is based on the meaning of the term naturalization. There are quite
a few programs of understanding this key term; I will focus on two of them, following the
systematization proposed by Gallagher and Varela (Gallagher and Varela 2001: 19).

The first project interprets data worked on in phenomenology as to be transferred from being
subjective to objective. It would be then open for scientific study. This is the notion of
objective phenomenology that permits abstraction to some extent from the particularism of
personal reports. Other project in a similar mode is Daniel Dennetts heterophenomenology
that grants the status of phenomenological reports to be in the objective realm of science.
However, it should be remembered that Dennett sets himself far from any phenomenological
models, and moreover claims that phenomenology as an analysis of first-person, subjective
data

is

impossible

and

therefore

all

allegedly

phenomenological

methods

are

heterophenomenological, gathering only third-person data, i.e. objective and comparable

reports from subjects of studies/experiments.

24

The second project understands naturalization as not being committed to a dualistic kind of
ontology (Roy et al. 1999: 19; quoted after Chalmers 1996). It means that phenomenology
must not be just descriptive but it should be explanatory. The explanatory gap 6 would be
dealt with using phenomenology. The latter would also add to the description of how nonphysical properties, which are phenomenological properties, are constituted by brain and
processes in the body.

Even though phenomenology is presented by Husserl as a non-naturalistic project, it is not

void to try to look for the possibility of influence of natural sciences by phenomenology. For
Husserl said straight forwardly: every analysis or theory of transcendental phenomenology
including the theory of transcendental constitution of an Objective worldcan be produced in
the natural realm, when we give up the transcendental attitude (Husserl 1960: 20; quoted
after Chalmers 1996). Moreover, phenomenology in order to be able to add something to the
sciences needs to be at least weakly naturalized, for several reasons. First, it is not yet a
fully objective and rigorous science, it suffers from some methodological problems that I
describe later (in the section devoted to the problems of neurophenomenology, which even
though is a naturalized phenomenology, uses purely phenomenological methods in some of its
proceedings). Second, transcendental phenomenology is a useful analytic tool for studying
experience, sciences may gain profits from using it (that I show in the section The
neurophenomenological experiment). Third, phenomenology, even in its classical
formulation, is supposed to be mutually assessed and validated intersubjectively. So we can
expect a mutual enlightenment of phenomenology and empirical data from the sciences. In
this understanding of naturalization, phenomenology will retain its transcendental character
6

It amounts to a problem that physicalist and reductionist theories have with providing an account of how
physical structure causes first-person or phenomenological experience.

25

but at the same time will engage into a reciprocally profitable dialogue with the other
sciences. In this sense phenomenology would not become just a reducible extension of natural
sciences.

If we wish to examine sense of agency along the lines of naturalized phenomenology, then at
the beginning of our study of consciousness we should bracket all theories in a particular
science concerning action and motor control, and turn our attention to our experience. It
would depend on our understanding of the sense of agency and the sense of ownership. If
we take the former to mean that I am a cause or generator of the action, and the latter that I
am the one going through experience, then both of these expressions mean the same in the
phenomenology of voluntary or willed action. There is accordance between agency and
ownership. These phenomena may be exactly what makes observers to present the owning of
action as agency. This means that usually the one that has a sense of ownership of her action
is causally connected to its production. When we consider the involuntary action, on the other
hand, is still possible to phenomenologically differentiate the sense of agency and ownership,
at least in some cases. I can feel that I am moving or I am being moved, and this enables me
to recognize who is the owner of the movement. It is possible to self-ascribe it as a personal
movement (my or someone elses). Yet it is possible that I would not have a feeling of being
the originator or controller of the movement, so have no sense of agency. The agent may be
some other person someone who manipulates me, e.g. a physician during a medical
inspection. The two states are completely consistent feeling ownership, so a deep feeling that
I am having that experience, but having no feeling of agency (Chalmers 1996).

Proofs for this phenomenological division on sense of agency and sense of ownership can be
found in experimental data. Gallagher and Varela present some pathological cases where there
26

is a lack of a sense of agency in the patient under study. For instance, a patient with
schizophrenia with delusions of control may declare that his hand is moving (having a sense
of ownership the movement), yet it is not him that is moving it (there is no sense of agency).
These persons in experiments can influence their movement via sensory-feedback, yet not
through the quicker forward mechanism. The connection between the phenomenological
division (sense of ownership for movement and sense of agency) and neurological distinction
(forward control mechanism and sensory-feedback mechanism) should be analyzed more
deeply, say Gallagher and Varela. If this correlation is valid, it will supply us with
scientifically proven differentiation that would make clear many philosophical debates that
strongly call for it as well as provide a neurological foundation for the two phases of bodily
self-consciousness (Gallagher and Varela 2001).

3.5. Heterophenomenology of Dennett

Let us turn to the account presented by Dennett to his project of heterophenomenology. He
proposed the scientific way of coming from objective exact science combined with the thirdperson point of view to the method of phenomenological description that deals with the
subjective experiences, bearing in the background the methods of science (Dennet 1991: 72).
Dennett admits himself that he does not invent anything new he has only organized data, it
is not an explanation, but a catalogue of what must be explained (Dennett 2005: 40).

There are certain issues with cognitive sciences, relaxing its boundaries in order to allow for
phenomenological reports, which make them impossible to remain scientific, as Dennett
claims. Dennett presents a number of worries that can help with the place of introspective
methods in cognitive sciences, which slightly formalizes the debate concerning the two.

27

As Dennett believes, it is impossible to retain a proper scientific attitude in our research

concerning the mind if the basis of the science is the pure, not verbalized subjective
experience. To keep the covenant between scientists, the methods of description, analysis
and explanation that were universally accepted are required. It was sometimes complained
about phenomenology that the descriptions are construed with the use of expressions used in
different, often idiosyncratic, ways. In phenomenology, there has always been used something
what Dennett calls the first-person plural presumption. It remains in the power of the
intersubjective communication to decide the meaning of a word. Nevertheless, this
assumption leads us to grant that people are similar to a great extent, and in the end it leads to
a generalization about the nature of every human being. Dennett criticized phenomenology for
the assumption that our introspection is never wrong and that our reflection is always right in
a phenomenological sense. Lastly, Dennett sees here an inclination to exchange theory for
mere description, and such predisposition is supposed to remain hidden in phenomenology.

With all these setbacks to phenomenology, Dennett puts forward a new method named by him
heterophenomenology. Science requires a third-person attitude that involves detachment of
subject and scientist. Phenomenology, in contrast, is based on the first-person approach, so on
the equality between scientist and her/his subject. In heterophenomenology, we encounter an
intentional approach to the subjects actions in the prearranged experimental conditions. Thus,
only analysis of how others describe their personal states gives the scientist insight to
phenomenological realm. In such circumstances, what the subject is declaring does not have
to be taken as truth concerning the theory that explains the data. It would be only treated as a
neutral statement, as some sort of data which is to be connected with other data, e.g., acquired
in a different way or from a different source, in such a way as to give a full and combined
picture of the researched subject.
28

Yet it is not clear whether there is any improvement of heterophenomenology in contrast to

phenomenology concerning the case of meaning. According to Gallagher, the problem
concerning understanding between two phenomenologists is just moved to the problem of
understanding between the scientist and the subject. Gallagher states that since
heterophenomenology consists in dependence on isolated interpretation, not communication,
it could be suggested that the possibility to clarify the meaning of acquired data is reduced
(Gallagher 1997: 198-199). However, some theorists, together with Dennett, would say that
Gallagher misunderstood Dennetts point, who does not reject any subjective experience but
believes that we have access only to the third-person reports of subjects. Therefore every
(neuro)phenomenological methodology involving the analysis of reports on experience would
be heterophenomenology (Mikowski 2003).

3.6. Criticism of heterophenomenology by Chalmers and Gallagher. Why

subjective experience is so crucial?
David Chalmers made of the subjective experience the core of his philosophy. It is expressed
in his idea of a philosophical zombie, which can possibly exist, he believes. According to
Chalmers zombies have internal states with contents, which the zombie can report sincerely.
Internal states have pseudo-conscious contents (not conscious ones). Chalmers is sure that he
described a real problem the Zombic Hunch, as Dennett calls it. Chalmers presents a
problematic aspect that may appear of how to explain the difference between him and his
zombie twin. My cognitive mechanisms and my direct evidence justify my belief that I am
conscious. Zombies do not have that evidence, so their mistake does not threaten the grounds
for our beliefs. (It is also evident that we do not share beliefs with zombies; this is caused by
the role that experience plays in constituting the contents of those beliefs.) This speech act is
29

peculiar, when we try to interpret it, we have to find and appropriate, benevolent
interpretation. In his direct evidence, Chalmers says that zombie does not have the
evidence, yet zombie thinks he has it, just like Chalmers himself. They both are
heterophenomenological twins: the same heterophenomenological worlds are attributed to all
data we have. Chalmers and his zombie twin each believe they are not zombies. Each of them
believes also that their justification is acquired from direct evidence of their consciousness.
However, Chalmers has to keep that the zombies belief is false. The zombie does not have
the same beliefs as we do because of the role that experience plays in constituting the
contents of those beliefs. Experience (in the sense Chalmers used this term) has no role in
establishing contents of those beliefs, for ex hypothesi, if experience were eliminated (that
would mean that he was zombified), it would be not possible to find out he would behave
just as he behaves. Nothing would change even if his phenomenological beliefs
disappeared. He would not notice that these beliefs ceased to be phenomenological (Dennet
2001).

However, zombies are not physically possible, so this argument is not useful for natural
sciences. Besides, there is no methodology that would prove there is a difference between the
zombie twins, Chalmers theory included. Therefore, even if there were zombies, we would
not be able to know that.

30

4. Varelas Neurophenomenology
4.1. From autopoiesis, through enactivism and embodiment to
neurophenomenology
We can notice an entirely different approach to the problem of marriage of Phenomenology
with Cognitive Sciences in Francisco Varelas thought. In contrast to Chalmers (with whom
Varela placed himself in the same place of his well-known Varela Four-Axes Diagram.
(Varela 1996)), he does not postulate any extra ingredient in the explanation, in order to
account for consciousness. Even though such an extra ingredient could be played by popular
quantum physics, Varela strived rather to reformulate the problem of consciousness. But let us
start from the beginning.

The theory of neurophenomenology was formulated and introduced by Francisco Varela, a

biologist interested in the creation of consciousness in the human mind and the relation
between mind, body and environment. His idea underwent a process of slow development
beginning with his biological and mechanistic conception of autopoiesis and ultimately
supposedly filling the explanatory gap between subjective experience and neural events, or
finding a methodological solution to the hard problem, in the form of neurophenomenology,
which I will now briefly sketch.

Originally, Varela could be labelled as an Emergentist (Maturana and Varela 1980), and even,
as Daniel Hillis remarked of a mystical sort (Varela 1995: 7). Nevertheless, Varela is far
from being an advocate of Mysterianism as he called Nagel and Colin McGinn in his FourAxes Diagram.

31

Varela starts his mature theory from a statement that phenomenological reduction is a basis
for phenomenological approach, even though it is often used as a category of empirical
questions about mental correlates (as Dreyfus did according to Varela). In Varelas opinion,
phenomenological description of experience and their counterparts from Cognitive Sciences
are strictly bound together via mutual conditioning. This statement constitutes the
neurophenomenological hypothesis (Varela 1996). And it is important to understand that
phenomenological reduction does not reveal any objective or ontological foundations but
enables us to reveal modalities of experience in phenomena just what was the original
Husserls project.

Now, the neurophenomenological project proposed by Varela lies on a few fundamental

points. Varela agrees with Chalmers, and the adherents to the phenomenological and firstperson approach in studying consciousness, that consciousness is irreducible, but he claims
that there are no any extra ingredients in the reality that could account for it. Varelas research
project comes down to a formulation of mutual or reciprocal conditioning between
phenomena given in experience, cognitive phenomena, and functioning of the neurobiological
structures correlated with it.

Varela identified an individual with an autonomous, living system, which manifests itself as a
whole, a total and closed self-contained system (Varela 1976). Due to these features, the
system undergoes constant structural changes but preserves its organizational invariance,
behaving as a dynamical system7. The systems identity is defined by this very
7

The dynamical approach to cognition is a confederation of research efforts bound together by the idea that
natural cognition is a dynamical phenomenon and best understood in dynamical terms. This contrasts with the
la of ualitative st u tu e go e i g o thodo o lassi al og iti e s ie e, which holds that cognition
is a fo of digital COMPUTATION (van Gelder 1999: 244-246).

32

organizationally invariant process (Varela 1984). The system does not lose its identity unless
the amount of deformations it is subjected to exceeds its limits. The identity of the system is
therefore formulated as the smallest organizational unity, which can preserve this unity while
undergoing certain amount of transformations (Varela 1979).

This autopoietic system is mechanistic, dynamical and defined by its organization. There is no
fundamental essence that the system is built on (this view is later transferred to his idea of the
self, which he names, after some Eastern philosophical systems selfless self). The major
defining trait of the autonomy of living machines is, according to Varela, self-production.
An autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of
production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components
that: 1) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the
network of processes (relations) that produce them; and 2) constitute it (the machine) as a
concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its
realization as such a network (Varela 1979). These networks, or wholenesses, are
submitted to organizational and functional closure. And the wholeness of a system is precisely
defined by the organizational closure. Varela talked about embodied and lived description
of the processes, and defied purely computational (and later purely connectionist) views of the
mind. It should be mentioned here that by closure he did not mean a system closed from the
entire environment, it may be closed organizationally but at the same time opened to the
surroundings. A closed system is always in a struggle between preserving its identity and
exchanging information/energy/matter with the environment (Varela usually gave an instance
of a cell, which he treated as an exemplary autopoietic system). This goes along his enactive
approach to cognitive sciences that organisms actively generate and maintain their identities
being autonomous systems (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991).
33

Now, turning to more complex and abstract systems like the mind, Varela was still applying
his previously worked out methodology of autopoiesis and enactivism. However, at this point
we can also observe his strong adherence to emergentism. Treating the nervous system as an
enactive, autonomous system, we can observe an emergence of cognitive structures springing
up from the operation of organizationally closed sensorimotor network of interacting neurons.
But mere observation of brain structures is not enough to account for the appearance of mind,
even though the structures imply its functioning, and some substructures of the nervous
system are essential for the presence of consciousness. The mind is not in the head (Varela
1999) famously states Varela and claims that the substructures are significant only for the
functioning of the mind and they are not identical with the mind per se. Mind is an embodied
system and therefore should be studied in relation to the whole body and environment, and
not pure neural events.

Varela went as far as to assert that we are bound to our embodied environments, and they are
a sort of a prison for us, no brain in a vat is possible. Our cognitive systems define us and
our possibilities of perception, their beginning, end and operation. Again along the enactive
approach Varela defines the systems operation as working in continuous sensory-motor loops
and due to the continual endogenous pattern of its brain activity, which delineates the possible
connection of the system with its environment (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991).

As the result of the above-mentioned reasoning, Varela together with Evan Thompson
suggested an idea of cycles of operation, which describe the coupling of situated conscious
higher primates with their neural dynamics. There are three kinds of them:
(1) cycles of organismic regulation of the entire body;
34

(2) cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment;

(3) cycles of intersubjective interaction, involving the recognition of the intentional meaning
of actions and linguistic communication (in humans). (Varela and Thompson 2001: 424)
The cycles are supposed to show the phenomenology of individual action in the sense that
consciousness and brain dynamics, due to their enactive and radically-embodied character,
remains in a mutually conditioning relationship. The claim is therefore that consciousness is a
significant and causal element in the cycles of operation constituting individuals lives.
However, this suggestion demands further analysis and empirical studies.

4.2. Neurophenomenology
The enactive approach makes the surroundings of a particular embodied system a significant
factor, as was stated above. The system is carved out from the environment due to its
organizational closure and gains a new feature, absent until now creates a new meaningful
microworld. The microworld becomes a subject and experiences the reality from the firstperson perspective. The system, now an individual, is a bundle of cognitive and mental events
connected with lived experience. At this level we can see the emergence of the
neurophenomenological reflection.

Neurophenomenological methods include experience of the subjects as one of the scientific

parameters under examination. The subject is treated by the observer as a situated and
embodied individual with a certain point of view. In this sense Varela rejects eliminativism
and, as he claims, adopts a non-reductionist stance towards subjective experience; he is
interested in the relation between the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) and
phenomenological data rather than just NCCs alone, since this approach would adopt the
stance of mysterianism simple listing neurobiological processes and their supposed
35

phenomenological correlates would leave out the most interesting thing: their probable causal
association, unexamined (Varela 1997). Therefore Varela advocated attentive analysis of
phenomenological data in empirical experiments.

Before scrutinizing more painstakingly the methods used in neurophenomenology I will

mention two traditions that influenced Varela in his research on this topic. First, we can see
direct inspiration drawn from Husserlian phenomenology, modified by Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty, in their effort to formulate a methodology that would allow for a precise
account of subjective experience and its nature (Spiegelberg 1994). From among these
methods Varela focused most extensively on the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl
treated as a tool for attentive examination of consciousness. Due to the similarity of their
programs

Varela

used

to

call

Husserlian

research

program

Husserlian

neurophenomenology, while his own he used to name experiential neuroscience(Rudrauf,

Lutz, Cosmelli, & Lachaux, 2003: 42).

The other influential traditions for Varela were Eastern contemplative traditions, like
Buddhism (Wallace 1999). Varela praised these traditions for developing disciplined and
accurate methods of observation of subjective experiences, especially the one of mindful
meditation (Rudrauf, Lutz, Cosmelli, & Lachaux, 2003: 43).8

As Varela himself stated: We believe that the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and of nondualism that grew out
of this method have a significant contribution to make in a dialogue with cognitive science: (1) The no-self
doctrine contributes to understanding the fragmentation of self portrayed in cognitivism and connectionism.
(2) Buddhist nondualism, particularly as it is presented in the Madhyamika (which literally means "middle way")
philosophy of Nagarjuna, may be juxtaposed with the entre-deux of Merleau-Ponty and with the more recent
ideas of cognition as enaction. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: 21-22).

36

4.2.1. Methods of phenomenology

As I mentioned above, (neuro)phenomenology focuses on practice/experience than on theory.
Now I will consider the methodology of neurophenomenology and how can it be applied in
scientific experimentation. There are three components that this approach combines: 1)
analysis of experience carried out along phenomenological lines, 2) dynamical systems
theory, and 3) biological systems under the scrutiny of empirical experimentation. In order to
succeed in neurophenomenological examination, it is held that the scientist and the
experimental subject cooperate and achieve some skillfulness in phenomenological methods.
These include the already mentioned phenomenological reduction and the practice of epoch
(bracketing or refraining from judgment), where beliefs in the world-horizon are erased of
consideration altogether with all explanatory theories that depend on it and that consider the
experience or consciousness of the subject. The subject ceases to pay attention to the observed
object, and gradually turns to the structure of the act in which he experiences the object, to the
acts noesis (the mental act that intends the object), noema (the object as experienced) and
hyle (which underdetermines the experienced object) (Fllesdal 2006). Next, after gathering
the first-person data from the phenomenologically trained subject, the data is combined with
the description of quantified physiological processes that are supposed to correlate with
consciousness.

Thus, neurophenomenology is focused on gathering enriched first-person data from subjects

trained in phenomenological method of attentive examination of their own experience, and
after collating it with correlative physiological processes it is supposed to find some new
third-person data. So neurophenomenology supplements experimental procedures of
neurosciences with improved, disciplined phenomenological descriptions of experience.

37

In a more technical jargon, we may say that the phenomenological method provides
neurophenomenology with a disciplined characterization of the phenomenal invariants of
lived experience in all of its multifarious forms. By lived experience we mean experiences
as they are lived and verbally articulated in the first-person, whether it be lived experiences of
perception, action, memory, mental imagery, emotion, attention, empathy, self-consciousness,
contemplative states, dreaming, and so forth. By phenomenal invariants we mean
categorical features of experience that are phenomenologically describable both across and
within the various forms of lived experience. By disciplined characterization we mean a
phenomenological mapping of experience grounded on the use of first-person methods for
increasing ones sensitivity to ones own lived experience (Lutz and Thompson 2003: 32).

One of the main presuppositions in neurophenomenology is that there is a diversification

among humans considering the ability to examine ones own experience and provide a report
on it, but these abilities can be highly improved by employment of diverse methods.
Neurophenomenology developed various disciplined first-person methods, like organized
training of reflective attention and self-regulation of emotions, that allow the subjects to be
more observant of and sensitive to their experience at various time-scales. By applying these
methods and a gradual and careful examination of noema and noesis the subjects attain such a
level of expertise that they are able to notice and provide verbal report on these aspects of
experience that were previously transcendental in a phenomenological sense, or cognitively
unnoticeable. Among these aspects we can count quality of reflective attention and transient
affective state. As for the experimentalist, she gains access to these parameters of
neurobiological experiments that are usually omitted and erased from the outcomes whenever
possible, parameters and physiological processes like variability in brain response as recorded
in neuroimaging experiments (Thompson et al. 2005: 8).
38

The so called working hypothesis of neurophenomenology is the supposition that there is a

mutual or reciprocal constrain between the analysis of physiological processes that are the
framework to consciousness and the first- and second-person methods producing the
phenomenological or first-person data. So these dynamic reciprocal constraints motivate the
experimentalist to use the first-person data as guidelines in her analysis and interpretation of
physiological data. Additionally, they make the subject a trained and active participant of
experiments, who produces his phenomenal invariants of experience in a controlled manner
(so that the third-person data constrains first-person data). In this process, the subject becomes
mindful of formerly unanalyzable or phenomenally unobtainable aspects of her mental life
and this enhances phenomenologically the neurobiological examination, which in turn allows
for reconsideration and improvement of the phenomenological accounts.

Summing up what I have mentioned so far, neurophenomenology is in consequence grounded

in the analysis of three elements:
1. (NPh1 [Neurophenomenology 1]) First-person data from the careful examination of
experience with specific first-person methods.
2. (NPh2) Formal models and analytic tools from dynamic systems theory, grounded on an
enactive approach to cognition.
3. (NPh3) Neurophysiological data from measurements of large-scale, integrative processes in
the brain (Thompson et al. 2005: 9).

Now I will show in more detail how and what methods of phenomenology are applied in
neurophenomenology. It is often said in phenomenological analysis that we are caught up in
the world, that is we have a lot of beliefs, judgments and fixed considerations and theories on
39

the reality around us (and in us). This is a feature of our unreflective attitude towards the
world, called the natural attitude (Husserl 1983: 7, 51). Phenomenologists developed the
already mentioned epoch in order to bracket or abstain from these belief-constructs and
through the phenomenological attitude turn ones attention towards the aspects of direct
experience, or towards the things themselves (Husserl 1965). And in order to examine
constitutive structures and categories of experience one needs to implement this disciplined
phenomenological attitude.

The specific characterization of first-person methods may depend on the tradition in which it
is employed (contemplative, psychological or phenomenological). However, as (Thompson et
al. 2005: 37) report, there are some general steps common to all types of first-person methods.
In experimental conditions, epoch has usually four stages, leading to reflective selfawareness and description of experience. These include suspension, redirection, receptivity
and verbalization. During the suspension phase we may observe the already discussed
bracketing or temporary suspension of habitual beliefs and theories concerning the actual
experience and adopting a phenomenological attitude, i.e. unprejudiced and descriptive one.
This allows the access to prereflective lived experience. During the redirection stage the aim
is to redirect ones attention from the engagement in the noema (object of experience) to
noesis (the lived aspects of the process of experience it also involves signals coming from
the lived body). The third stage, receptivity, is responsible for acquiring new categories or
invariants of experience. Speaking in phenomenological terms, receptivity requires opening to
new horizons of experience and thus increases the possible area of examination. However, it
calls for a certain amount of training, the new fields of study do not arise in consciousness
immediately, the searchlight of attention needs to swipe over the accessible areas of the
horizon. Therefore, repetition is actually one more tacit method that requires here its
40

application. Only then new contrasts will possibly arise in consciousness and will be able to
stabilize themselves in attention. The last stage in a neurophenomenological experiment is
verbalization, when the subject shares intersubjectively his observations of phenomenal
invariants and allows the experimenter to confront these first-person data with the objective
third-person data (Lutz and Thompson 2003: 37-38).

4.2.2. The neurophenomenological experiment

In order to present the neurophenomenological theory applied in practice, I will discuss an
experiment which is a flagship one in this tradition. Lutz with his colleagues (Lutz et al. 2002)
has trained subjects in phenomenological method, and thereby successfully combined the
three before-mentioned methodologies: phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and
experimental brain science.

There is a problem with variability of brain activity recorded by brain imagining equipment in
neurobiological experiments. It occurs in experimental conditions when subjects perform
certain cognitive activities and the scientist reads the corresponding responses of their
cerebral cortex to the same and repetitive stimulations. It is assumed that this variability
comes from the unstable nature of human attention even being focused on a cognitive task
we are liable to distraction, tiredness, spontaneous and uncontrolled thoughts, series of
decision and plans concerning a concrete steps in the task and so on. These subjective
parameters influence the outcomes of an experiment and it is impossible to rule them out
entirely, most often they are treated as unintelligible noise and e.g., are erased from the EEG
recording or counterbalanced by a method of averaging results. The idea of
neurophenomenological methodology is not to eliminate them but to control them, even
though it is very problematic, since we do not know yet the full specification of human mind
41

and its all correlations with brain. This was the strategy of Lutz et al., they developed an
experiment where subjects were presented with 3D objects emerging from a 2D environment.
Then the scientists linked the first-person data and the dynamical examination of neural
processes. However, the first-person data was not used merely as an analysis datum but was
an important factor for formulation of the experimental paradigm.

As a sort of phenomenological preparation the subjects were asked to observe a certain visual
stimuli and describe some features of it. Additionally, they were trained to be reflective of
specific subjective parameters like distractions occurring during the task. The novel language
that the subjects developed was formalized and employed in the main experiment, where it
was used to report on subjective parameters and then correlated with reaction times to stimuli
and EEG record of brain activity.

Lutz and his colleagues applied the three step phenomenological method, as developed by
Varela (Varela 1996):
(1) suspending beliefs or theories about experience (the epoch)
(2) gaining intimacy with the domain of investigation (focused description)
(3) offering descriptions and using intersubjective validations (intersubjective corroboration).
(Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 34)

The epoch may be employed in two different ways, it can be evoked by the experimenter
through a series of open questions concerning experience, or can be self-induced by the
subject. The experimenter may directly ask about the subjects experience and request to
describe it in her/his own terms, without using any predefined thought constructs. The
purpose of these open questions is to guide subjects to find their experiential invariants in
42

order to provide them with analytic tools allowing for descriptions concerning particular
aspects of experience., that are employed in the main experiment. 9 Therefore, experimenter
puts the questions directly after the end of a cognitive task, so that the subject can redirect her
attention from her performance to the implicit aspects of her consciousness appearing during
the task, aspects like the level of attention she experienced (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 34).

In Lutz et al. experiment, series of experiments were clustered with respect to first-person
reports regarding the experience of subjective parameters, and distinct dynamical analyses of
brain activity visualized by EEG accompanied each of these clusters. The outcomes of this
methodological procedure were significantly different than a simple method of averaging
results across a series of trials and across subjects. In the phenomenological part of the
experiment subjects, due to cycles of training trials using depth perception task, developed
their own refined verbal reports of the subjective parameters (Lutz et al. 2002: 1586).

The preliminary training process came down to showing random-dot static images on a digital
monitor to the subjects, who had to fixate their eyes on the center of the screen, on the dotpattern with no binocular disparity. After hearing an auditory signal, the subjects were fusing
two squares at the bottom of the screen and then remained in this eye position for seven
seconds. Next, random-dot pattern was then reformed to a different random-dot pattern with
binocular disparities (an autostereogram), which allowed the subjects for seeing a 3D illusory
geometric shape. When the shape emerged they were asked to press a button with their right

An example of such open question session: Experimenter, What did you feel before and after the image
appeared? u je t 1, I had a growing sense of expectation but not for a specific object; however, when the
figure appeared, I had a feeling of confirmation, no surprise at all; or subject S4, It was as if the image
appeared in the periphery of my attention, but then my attention was suddenly swallowed up by the shape.
Citation after (Lutz et al. 2002: 1587).

43

hand. Finally, the verbalization stage of the experiment would come, where the subjects
provided a verbal report of their experiences in an open question session (Figure 1).

Fig. 1. (I) Protocol. Tasks: (A) Fixation of the center of the screen; (B) fusion of the two dots and refixation of
the center of the screen; (C) motor response; and (D) phenomenological report. Events: (1) Presentation of an
image without binocular disparities; (2) auditory warning at the beginning of B; (3) presentation of the
autostereogram. (II) Reaction times. Mean reaction times between (3) and the motor response (D) with two
standard errors. PhCs [Phenomenological Clusters]: SR [Steady Readiness] and SR, FR [fragmented readiness],
SU [spontaneous unreadiness] and SIU [self-induced unreadiness]. (III) Evoked oscillatory responses. For each
subject and each PhC, time-frequency power of evoked potential was normalized compared with baseline B1 and
average across electrodes, time intervals [50, 150 ms], and frequencies (2064 Hz).
Source: (Lutz et al. 2002: 1587).

This procedure provided subjects with descriptive tools for categorizing their subjective
parameters like presence or absence or degree of distractions, inattentiveness etc. Thus, they
are more aware of and informed about their own experiences. Thereby, experimenters divided
so defined categories of experience into phenomenologically-based clusters, like the
degrees of subjects experienced readiness for a stimulus (Figure 2):
1) Steady readiness (SR): subjects reported that they were ready, present, here, or wellprepared when the image appeared on the screen and that they responded immediately and
decidedly.

44

2) Fragmented readiness (FR): subjects reported that they had made a voluntary effort to be
ready, but were prepared either less sharply (due to a momentary tiredness) or less
focally (due to small distractions, inner speech, or discursive thoughts).
3) Unreadiness (SU): subjects reported that they were unprepared and that they saw the 3D
image only because their eyes were correctly positioned. They were surprised by it and
reported that they were interrupted by the image in the middle of an unrelated thought.
(Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 36)

Fig. 2. DNS for S1 [Subject S1] during readiness with immediate perception SR (154 trials) and SU with
surprise during stimulation (38 trials). Color coding indicates scalp distribution of time-frequency gamma power
around 35 Hz normalized compared with distant baseline B0 average for trials and for time windows indicated
by an arrow. In prepared trials, gamma power in frontal electrodes (FP1-FT8) during B1 increased significantly
(P0.01) compared with distant baseline B0 and was significantly higher (P0.005) than in the unprepared trials.
Black and white lines correspond to significant increase and decrease in synchrony, respectively. For each pair
of electrodes, the density of long-distance synchrony above a surrogate threshold was calculated. This measure
was normalized compared with the distribution for trials in baseline B0. A significant threshold was estimated
with white-noise surrogates.
Source: (Lutz et al. 2002: 1588).

45

These categories were later used by subjects in the main trials in their reports of their
experiences. After recording the EEG signal and collecting first-person data, experimenters
linked these with reaction times and dynamic descriptions of the transient patterns of local
and long-distance synchrony occurring between oscillating neural populations, specified as a
dynamic neural signature (DNS) (Lutz et al. 2002: 1586). The occurrence and variability of
the subjective parameters turned out to be a cause for changes in the subjects experience.
These oscillations and variability are supposed to be captured by the idea of DNS, which
indicates the amount of transient patterns of synchronous oscillations between functionally
separate and widely distributed brain areas. Neurophenomenology is occupied with
examination of dynamic links and emergent and changing patterns among these integrated
areas using mathematical and dynamical system models. So the assumption of dynamical
systems approach, taken up by neurophenomenology and proven experimentally, is that the
neural activation that underlies our experience employs fast and transient integration of
functionally dissimilar and widely distributed brain areas, and is not restricted to some
determined brain areas (Varela et al. 2001).

The outcomes of the experiment has shown that patterns of synchrony recorded by EEG
preceding the stimulus was determined by the degree of readiness as reported by subjects.
Thus, we may observe a correlation and mutual dependence between dynamic neural
signatures and distinct subjective parameters, described in reports of phenomenologically
trained subjects (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 35-38).

4.2.3. Problems of neurophenomenology

In the end, I will briefly present a few problems that still beset neurophenomenology. First of
all, it links quantitative measurements of brain activity and a dynamical system interpretation
46

of the data with qualitative phenomenological methods. However, such methodological type
of proceeding is not always successful. Sometimes it is even impossible, especially in case of
experiments concerning the sense of agency, where many processes can be intentional but
unconscious or unnoticeable, moreover it is still unclear how different aspects of
phenomenology of agency are connected (Pacherie 2007: 2). For instance in experiments
involving priming, studying blindsight, or methods devoted to examine the effect of
unconscious processing, phenomenological aspects are extremely difficult to trace down.
Most often the only data available in such studies are third-person, neurobiological data,
regardless of how precisely we define and employ phenomenological procedures. There are
also experimental cases where the subjects are patients with severe cognitive and mental
disabilities and cannot be trained phenomenologically. In such circumstances, the best
experimental tools may be front-loaded phenomenology, but for lack of space I will not
discuss it here. For more information see (Gallagher and Sasma 2003; Gallagher and Brsted
Srensen 2006; Gallagher and Schmicking 2010).

Other problems are as well quite vital. The first one is a claim that first-person reports can be
inaccurate or biased. The next one says that in the process of phenomenological training and
production of a phenomenological report the subject is exposed to the danger of distortion or
modification of their experiences. As Gallagher and Zahavi note, this problem is connected to
the relation between meta-awareness and first-order experience (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008:
38). The third issue is the already mentioned problem of a proper solution to the explanatory
gap. Neurophenomenology offers one, but it still can fall prey to an uncritical acceptance of
phenomenological categorization, as the neutral and entirely objective tool for gathering data.
The idea of Dennett was supposed to answer to this challenge. His heterophenomenology is
an attempt to provide experimenters with neutral tools of collecting third-person data, as I
47

have already noted. However, neurophenomenologists are well aware of the problem; they do
not claim that they cannot assume a critical approach or that their subjects are infallible about
their own experiences. Neurophenomenology allows its subjects for refining descriptions of
their experiences and thematize significant and otherwise ungraspable aspects of them. At the
same time, first-person data are an important factor of an experiment in this methodology,
while heterophenomenology treats it as third-person data, according to Gallagher and Zahavi,
and therefore it is a limited method for the cognitive science of consciousness. And if
heterophenomenology accepted first-person data, it would fall prey to the same objections
(Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 39).

4.3. Summary
According to Francisco Varela phenomenology plays a crucial role in, for instance,
neurobiology in the fact that phenomenology binds its theoretical investigations with
experience, showing its first-person character. It is not a simple fixation on detached
representations of experience or experimental neural correlates. When we consider
neurophenomenology, we encounter an emphasis of neural correlates of experience and the
phenomenological data being able to act as reciprocal constraints. Explanations in
neurophenomenology go along two corresponding ways. Initially, from phenomenology of
direct experience it proceeds to neurobiology. Then, the process is reversed, but all proceeds
along the ways describable by formal dynamical models. Reductive materialism is rejected by
neurophenomenology. In its place, according to (Rudrauf et al. 2003), neurophenomenology
advocates a non-reductive naturalism, which is a new biological variety of dual aspect theory.
This theory assumes that neurobiological and phenomenological, or mental, properties are two
mutually irreducible aspects of every individual.

48

There are two crucial concepts in neurophenomenology embodiment and emergence. The
former enables us to establish a bridge for the explanatory gap between third-person
neuroscience and first-person phenomenology. It is there to let us move productively between
domains by another domain a mediating one (dynamical systems), and not just closing the
gap with the help of reductionism. Emergence, on the other hand, is the extension of the
concept of natural causation, but in a way that it does not break the causal closure of physics
that is believed to hold.

What is the benefit of neurophenomenology? Certainly, it is phenomenological reduction

which gives an interesting account of the structure of the mental life (like its experientially
temporal character). Nevertheless, its main advantage lies in the allowance of recognition of
direct, or first-person experience.

49

5. Neurophenomenology and sense of agency

5.1. Preliminary remarks on phenomenology of action
One of Heideggers most important contributions to philosophy was his attempt to show that
we are not mainly engaged in theorizing on perceptual objects; we actually, Heidegger says,
are occupied with handling, using, and taking care of things. The objects that we face when
we take care of things are specified by Heidegger as equipment, useful things, or
gear. Their mode of being is readiness-to-hand (Heidegger 1962: 98). The things we
encounter in the world can be manipulated or used by us, or may resist to be acted on.
Theorizing upon these objects is possible just on the ground of the coping engagement with
the ready-to-hand. If a tool that we use happens to be dysfunctional for any reason, it is the
exact moment when we can analyze it in the subject-object relation (we concentrate on its
properties: extension, color, weight, etc.). Therefore, we see the objects of the world as what
they are in practical use, not in theoretical inquiry. That is to say, the relation between self and
the world is not set up by cognition (cognition in the sense of theoretical detached
observation), but cognition lets the self obtain a different relation to the objects in the
disclosed world. Our primary Being-in-the-world is modified by cognition, which is
secondary. It is so solely on the basis of our being in the world already. In our everyday
interactions, we do not face ideal theoretical objects; we only act upon tools and things that
are either important because of their aesthetic, personal, or emotional value, as Husserl and
Heidegger claim. We are focused on social and practical worries. Similarly, we are influenced
in acting by patterns of normality, by the das Man, by the habitual way the others act. Our
actions are to some extent limited by the intersubjective structure, when we use devices and
tools (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 154).
50

5.2. Kinds of actions and movements

First, we should ponder over intentional action. It is a hard task to describe and explicate it.
To put it very simplistically it is an action done by a subject due to some reason he or she
has. According to Anscombe, intentional action is a behavior to which one can apply the
why-question in a specific sense, which provides some specific reason as an answer
(Anscombe 1963). For sure, not all behavior is intentional these are only aspects which are
done for a reason and the person doing it is aware of that. Anscombe presents three
prerequisites for the intentional action to occur:
a) the person acting has to be aware of acting,
b) this cannot be a third-person-observer-like awareness,
c) the person has to feel and be convinced that he controls this action (sense of agency
must occur).

This seems to be an effective theoretical background, yet there appear problems when we
inquire into, e.g. the relations between these prerequisites, one can see that they strictly
interconnected and cannot be separated. Awareness of ones own action is inseparable from
the experience of agency. The latter is well depicted by the awareness of specific features of
the action; moreover, this is, as said above, not observational.

Even though there are a few seemingly complete theories of agency, the notion of agency is
still being discussed in the current philosophical and psychological literature. Davidson, for
instance, claims that it would be the phenomenon we ascribe to agents. When we say that
someone did something (some action), it is equal to ascribing agency to him taking into the

51

account the behavioral event, as well as the results and consequences of it in the world
(Gallagher and Schmicking 2010: 337-341).

In the model described above, there is always a reason to the actions (acting for a reason). A
simple answer for asking why I opened the door would be: Because you asked me to.
However, there are other kinds of movements, and some of them are not considered actions.
For instance, reflex movement is explained that when the knee is kicked, it is led to move, but
it is not an action. We can distinguish other movements between intentional action and reflex
movement. Some of them are categorized outside of the mentioned categories.
OShaughnessy has coined the term subintentional in regard to some movements
(OShaughnessy 1980). For instance, a person while talking to somebody can be rubbing her
forehead, or scratching her nose. There is no aim in doing that, it is not an intentional action,
and it is not a reflex movement as well, even though it may have a reason ascribed from a
third-person perspective (like reducing a psychological tension).

There is also another category of movements that can be placed on the border of intentional
and subintentional movements. In Mark Rowlands terminology these are preintentional
movements (Rowlands 2006); prenoetic may be a proper term here these movements
happen without our awareness. It is difficult, however, to distinguish the preintentional from
intentional movements; this is visible in one of Rowlands examples. He states that our belief
about how a pianist is playing is mistaken because we think his movements are
preintentional. It is sure, that a well trained, skilled pianist is not aware of every movement of
each finger while playing a well-known piece to him. However, if the pianist is stopped at
some specific moment and asked whether he knows that she hit a specific key, he would most
probably say yes. Another preintentional movement presented by Rowlands, is saccadic eye
52

movements. It has been proved that this kind of movements come along with intentional
action. Rowlands presents a conception that saccades are controlled by the action one is
performing at a moment. There are different saccades for different tasks there has been
devised several scenarios for the subjects in experimental conditions; they were asked to view
a specific group of individuals and, for example, to judge how old they are, placing them in
different contexts, among objects, or remembering their attire etc. Each time the saccades
were different. This task was to make the subjects scan the surroundings in different tasks,
and these are not reflex movements; still, they are non-conscious and completely automatic.
There is no intentionality here, but it is employed to complete the given task so they are in
opposition to subintentional movements (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 156).

Not every movement is an action. It must meet two prerequisites intentionality and goaldirectedness. So the ones that lack these two factors (passive, subintentional, preintentional,
and reflex movements) cannot be treated as actions; however, they are sometimes
misinterpreted in such a way by an observer. This view does not allow for anything like
unintentional action; still there are unintentional results or movements of an action. If
someone chooses to act for some reason, that is, if there is some aim in mind before an action,
then the action can be said to be intentional. Due to that fact, motivation or justification is
necessary to gain understanding of an action, and not a physical cause of it. The reason for an
action can be explained in numerous ways, what is suggested by the already mentioned
Davidson (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 155-156).

5.3. Neurophenomenology and sense of agency

Agency does not require an excessive and extraordinary conscious knowledge. Indeed, in
most instances there is just a prereflective awareness. There are, however, cases when an
53

explicit consciousness of acting for specific purposes occurs. Nevertheless, usually we have
an impression that we act for a reason, and at times they are preceded by a decision-making
process. In situations like that, we have an established sense that we are the ones that control
what is happening; we are the main actors of our actions. There could be a pre-reflective
awareness of what we do (during the very act) involved in the sense of agency, or even a more
prominent consciousness full of well-built goals.

When there is actually an intention (we are thinking about something, of doing something), it
is clearly noticeable. But purposeful decision-making does not evidently precede every
intentional action. The action may take place before the decision is made. In that case, we do
not feel that we decide, even though post factum we may admit that we did, or that our
decision is in the action. John Searle uses the notion intention-in-action to describe such
situation (Searle 1983). At any rate, the intention-in-action is inescapable; it appears even in
action that involves an explicit decision. If we decide on doing something, like going out for a
dinner to a restaurant, we do not have to effortfully decide on each subsequent action like
moving our feet, leaving a room etc. The intention is already contained in the action. Any
observer would have certainly registered the intention being conveyed by the action. We put
no attention to these movements; but there is no doubt that we are conscious of doing these
things. We move in the pre-reflective sense; our thinking of what should we do next is not
distorting it. What does that pre-reflectivity carry with itself in this context? Awareness here
is blurred and recessive and there is no need of an effortful attention (Gallagher and Zahavi
2008: 159).

There is a strict connection between all of these elements: the way we analyze our actions, the
time when reasons come into play, intentions and awareness while performing an action (at
54

the pre-reflective and the reflective level), when can we say that we act intentionally. We
must still differentiate two types of relations between agency and intentional action. One of
them is an experiential sense of agency (it appears with the action at the pre-reflective level, at
the first-order level of consciousness). This is a state at which we feel our movement; any
detailed awareness of movement is not needed. The other type is the reflective attribution of
agency which may take place after an action (like a why-question). If someone asks
somebody if she did something she can say yes post factum. Thus, the action is attributed to
herself. This can also arise in memory, yet the experience is still necessary. This shows that
the attribution of agency depends on the more elementary experiential sense of agency.
The experiential sense of agency, to be obtained, should be differentiated from the state of
ownership of movement. It happens that we have an experience of moving along with the
sense of ownership of it (to say it is our movement), but we lack sense of agency for it (that
can occur in involuntary and reflex movement, or in some pathological cases like
schizophrenia). For schizophrenics, in their symptoms of delusions of control or thought
insertion there is no sense of agency, yet some sense of ownership remains. People afflicted
by this disease say their body is moving, but that they are not the cause of the movement.
Similar situation occurs with the thoughts they are not the creators of their own thoughts
(yet, they confirm these thoughts are in their minds).

All these comments about sense of agency can be applied in a wider sense to the distinction
between sense of ownership and sense of agency. Ownership of bodily movement and selfagency can be differentiated with the use of first-order phenomenal experience and higherorder, attributional levels of consciousness, say (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 160-161).

55

Gallagher and Zahavi mention Graham and Stephens who devised two types of selfattribution that they claim appropriately present the lack of sense of agency in schizophrenic
patients (Graham and Stephens 1994):
Attributions of subjectivity (ownership): a person knows that he is moving, and can
state it.
Attributions of agency: a person knows he is the originator of the action. It is a
reflective process.

Another division can serve as a complementary to the one presented above Gallagher
distinguishes the already mentioned two levels of first-order phenomenal consciousness
(Gallagher 2000b):
Sense of ownership: the person has the pre-reflective feeling that he is the subject of
the movement.
Sense of agency: the person has the pre-reflective feeling that he is the author of the
action, and feels that he controls the action.

The temporal structure of consciousness has non-conceptual experiences connected to itself;

more specifically, these are the first-order experiences of agency and ownership (one can say,
that higher-order, conceptually informed attributions of agency or ownership depend on it).
According to (Stephens and Graham 2000), it is possible that the sense of agency appears at a
conceptual thus, higher level of attribution. Following Dennett, they say we can describe our
behavior retrospectively by the sense of agency with the aid of self-referential narratives; they
say that these explanations produce a kind of theory of the persons agency. If we accept such
theory, then the appropriately ordered second-order interpretations determine the final form of
the non-schizophrenic first-order phenomenal experience; similarly, the second-order
56

misinterpretation determines the final form of schizophrenic first-order experience. This type
of approach to agency is methodologically a top down one.

We have also a converse, bottom-up account at our disposal, based on the first-order
phenomenology. As has been stated above, the pre-reflective sense of ownership and the prereflective experience of agency are two different and separate states. If someone pushes us,
then this movement is involuntary, but still, we know that we move. Therefore, there is sense
of ownership for the movement, but the sense of us as being agents is lacking. To categorize
the movement as an action, intentionality is needed, as has been said before, as well as my
sense of self-agency and a sense of ownership. As these conditions are fulfilled, we know that
we are the cause and author of the action. Thus, this radical bottom-up attitude shows the
neural processes that control the physical side of an action as the basis for the sense of
agency; this is an opposite view to the radical top-down attitude. There are many supporters
of an account that sees the origin of a phenomenal experience of agency in the efference
signals (the brain signals sent to muscles to cause them to move), or in specific forward motor
control mechanisms, the processes that ensure our actions to develop on a certain track
(Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 162). These I will describe in the next chapter.

57

6. Neurophenomenology and sense of agency case studies

6.1. Preliminary remarks
Summing up the deliberations from the previous chapter we can say that the sense of agency
is the subjective sense of being an agent that causes an action. It is noteworthy that we can be
active agents in the external and internal sense: we can produce a particular movement of
ourselves or of some object and we can generate thoughts in our horizon of consciousness.
Additionally, it should be stressed that the sense of agency is different from the sense of
ownership, which helps us to discriminate between actions produced by ourselves and those
done by others. This sense is thus a part of the mechanism generating the subjective feeling of
self-consciousness, since it allows us to distinguish, along the lines of action, between
ourselves and the others (Gallagher 2000b; E. Pacherie and Jeannerod 2004). So the sense of
agency assumes that the agent feels that she is acting and undergoing the experience and the
movement irrespective of whether it is voluntary or involuntary. For instance, when
somebody moves our hand (case of a passive movement) we know that this is the movement
of our limb (sense of ownership), but not we are the cause of the movement (sense of agency
indicates to us that somebody moved our body). In that case, we can claim the ownership of a
movement, because we are the ones moving. It is our movement even if we are being moved.
But we are not the originator of the movement, so we have no feeling of causing or
controlling it, and thus we have no sense of agency.

Even though these two senses should be held apart in experimental conditions they are often
mistaken or put together, since they are indiscernible and overlap in normal circumstances. It
is a recent discovery that there are various degrees of sense of agency (Tsakiris, Schtz58

Bosbach, and Gallagher 2007). As for the example of mistakes, in some cases the
experimenters measured a sense of ownership instead of that of agency, because they did not
know that self-recognition is not a more basic mechanism than the senses.

Some scientists and philosophers (Synofzik, Vosgerau, and Newen 2007) also distinguish
between sense of agency and judgment of agency, where the former is identified with lowerlevel, sensorimotor, pre-reflective processes, while the latter with higher-order, beliefconstructs or reflective processes, and this notion is crucial in the so called comparator
model of agency but amended by neurophenomenology, which I will discuss later. Thus,
judgment of agency would be supposed to allow for identification of the who system, who
causes the action (and the who system can be identified here with the self, the other
individual, etc.). Of course, the notion of the pre-reflective sense of agency answers our
common-sense understanding of agency, since we typically do not reflect on an action during
performing it. This thought can be enclosed in a slogan that is phenomenological in its nature:
we do not think, we act. The idea is also similar to Gallaghers and Damasios conception
of a basic form of self-consciousness which would be pre-reflective (Gallagher 2000b;
Damasio 2010). It is supposed that sensorimotor processes that lead to the feeling of agency
may be pre- or unconscious but available to awareness, and there is a need for a higher-order
belief processing for the appearance of judgment of agency. This mechanism springs up in
psychological experiments, where very short, less than 250ms temporal delays in sensory
feedback are produced by experimenters, and are not noticed consciously by the subjects, but
are observable at the brain imagery records, since neural signatures appear in response to the
delays (David, Newen, & Vogeley, 2008: 524).

59

Moreover, even though awareness of action and sense of agency are usually connected,
experimental evidence suggests that occasionally they go apart. Thus, is it enough to have an
awareness of action done by us to have a sense of that action as being done by us? As I have
mentioned in the previous chapter, Dennett (D. Dennett 1991) suggests that we should not be
treated as the infallible reporters of our own experiences: we may be mistaken or unaware of
the phenomenological occurrences in us. After all, we are often not capable of providing a
reflective and precise description of our experiences, e.g. due to emotional commitment. In
such situations, we can describe our experience and action but we may not be able to tell the
different aspects of the agency apart, what are the contents of our awareness of the action.
Moreover, the spotlight of our attention is limited and many phenomenological events may
escape our consciousness. In cases of disturbances in the sense of agency, like in
schizophrenia or some kinds of anarchic hand syndrome (Saccoa and Calabrese 2010),
subjects are aware of the content of the action, they feel the ownership of the action but they
lack the sense of agency, they reject the fact that they are causing the action. It is also possible
to produce a disconnection of awareness of action and sense of agency artificially, in
laboratory conditions, in non-pathological subjects, in the alien-hand syndrome experiment
(Nielsen 1963; Brsted Srensen 2005). It is experimentally proven that it is possible to
produce illusions of control (subjects experience a sense of agency for actions performed by
someone else) and illusions of action (where subjects do not feel sense of agency in situations
where they perform an action) in healthy subjects (Balconi 2010: 5).

60

In such trials where the awareness of action and the

sense of agency are examined, the experimenters
usually tinker with the sensory, mostly visual,
outcomes of a subjects actions. The subjects are
asked to draw a line on a paper and observe their
hand. However, in some trials the subjects observe
their hand, but in other the alien hand a hand of
another person, which they still recognize as their
own, but which deviates from the movements done
by the subjects real hand (Figure 3). In
consequence, subjects most often correct their
actual movement in accordance to the false visual
information without being aware of the adjustment,
so they respond to the so-called visual re-

Fig. 3. The alien-hand experiments layout.

Source: (Nielsen 1963).

afferences. Yet, sense of agency is not simply

defined with the use of visual re-afferences so external signals of agency, but there is a
scarcity of experiments that introduce internal signals (intentions, proprioceptive and motor
signals, motor plans, motor programs, efference copies etc.) into the framework of trials, so
the influence of them on subjects is not fully examined.

The interconnectedness of and differences between the sense of agency and the awareness of
action is therefore still to be investigated. At the same time the sense of agency is not
reducible to the sense of ownership, as I have previously mentioned, even though they are
correlated as well. The shortage of experiments examining internal signals of action
monitoring may be caused by the difficulty of parameterizing them they are automatic and
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consciousness has a limited access to them. However, it is possible to get an access to prior
intentions and visual feedback, and it was experimentally scrutinized. At this ground the
division between a feeling and judgment level may be juxtaposed with internal signals
correlated with implicit and pre-reflective feeling of agency. Obviously, visual re-afferences
are not the only defining elements of sense of agency, but still they may influence to some
extent the judgments of experimental subjects, so if they are asked to judge the agency
attribution they will use both internal and external signals (David, Newen, & Vogeley, 2008:
527).

One last preliminary remark on the nature of sense of agency is in order. Another aspect of
phenomenology of agency closely linked to sense of agency is the sense of causality. It is
fueled by the fact that we perceive actions as initiated, inhibited and controlled, and there is
an intentional binding of actions, intentions and sensory feedback, which furthermore
strengthens our feeling of their causal interconnectedness. We need to learn what are the
causes of an action and its stages of performance in order to comprehend it fully. It is not
enough to know that sense of action is an experience of an act of will distinguishing bodily
movements from actions. It is also crucial that the aspect of intention is not a one-time event,
at the beginning of an action, but remains continuously present in the intention-in-action,
throughout the whole performance of an action. The same holds for the sense of agency it is
a feeling of a continuous control of action execution. For these reasons in anosognosic
patients the sense of initiation is disrupted, while de-afferented patients suffer from a deficit
of the sense of their own movements. Anosognosic patients do not try to initiate any action
and do not send any efference copy that could be compared to sensory feedback and that
would inform them that the intended movement has not been performed (Balconi 2010: 6).
The efference copy is a part of comparator model, which I will present in the next sections.
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6.2. Theories of agency put in practice

How does the theoretical model of sense of agency look like on the cognitive ground?
Graham and Stephens claim that sense of agency can be generated on the conceptual, nonfirst-person (non-phenomenological) level of attribution. Following Dennett, they propose the
explanation of the sense of agency as a tendency for auto-interpretation. This factor enables us
to present our actions retrospectively. Such solutions are brought down to a theory of action
or intentional psychology (Graham and Stephens 1994). Yet Gallagher together with Varela,
Zahavi and others (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Gallagher and Varela 2001; Gallagher 2000a;
Gallagher 2004; Gallagher and Schmicking 2010) present an alternative to this psychological
presentation a neurophenomenological one, which is supposed to be more effective in the
description of, for instance, people suffering from schizophrenia.

The first-person (phenomenological) sense of ownership and agency are to be corporeal, nonconceptual experiences and are strictly connected with a temporal structure of consciousness.
The structure of movement is reflected in the sense of control over ones own actions and
bodily movements that is, in the sense of agency. One can say that conceptualized
attributions of ownership, which can be metarepresentations of other states, are based on firstperson experience of ownership or agency. The first-person experience seems to be the basis
of our consciousness that enables us to refer to ourselves and to metapresentation of our
actions and thoughts (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008).

The concept of sense of agency on the ground of cognitive studies can be examined also with
the use of Friths model (Frith 1992). Here, thinking is understood as a sort of action. Frith
based his research on Feinbergs work (Feinberg 1978), who worked on self-control of the
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actions of schizophrenics. He used that data in the analysis of mental experiences, and what
was later on developed by Campbell, among others (Campbell 1999a; Campbell 1999b). Frith
works on a certain kind of acting that stems from intention, analogically to motoric acts in
other studies. His concept assumes that thinking is a necessary factor for sense of agency of
thought.

However, this assumption applies only to mechanisms arising from the unconscious level. If
the thought arises intentionally, there appears a conscious thought and a signal from the level
of unconscious, the so called efference copy, which is sent to the so called comparator
mechanism. The mechanism can be compared to a central monitoring system, which
catalogues every appearance of a thought, and checks the compatibility of thoughts with
intentions (Gallagher and Varela 2001).

6.3. Comparator Model

The comparator model or central monitoring theory as a theory of motor learning and
motor control is one of the main theories in neuropsychology and cognitive studies treating of
the sense of agency of our own actions (Frith 1992; Blakemore, Frith, and Wolpert 2001).
There are two internal models inverse and forward models of motor learning and motor
control in the central motor system, the role of which is to control and adjust motor behavior,
but experimenters also assume that they can also be in part responsible for action awareness.
The forward model employs the notion of efference copy (a copy of a motor command
predicting respective sensory consequences; they are produced by our own movement and not
by those of other people). When an efferent copy is created, it is compared with the actual
consequences of a movement, and it is compared most often unconsciously. If the two are
congruent, the movement, its originator and the sense of agency are attributed to ourselves. If
64

they are incongruent we attribute these aspects of agency to the others (Figure 4). As (David,
Newen, & Vogeley, 2008: 524-525) state, there is a lot of empirical evidence that supposedly
supports thesis that the judgment of agency is determined by the level of congruence.
However, as we remember from the alien-hand experiment, sometimes it is the agent who
adjusts to the incongruence and still claims that he is the actual mover. Therefore, as I have
previously noted, visual signals cannot take precedence to proprioceptive or motor signals,
and the sense of agency is not influenced uniquely by visual re-afferences. This and other
counterarguments against the comparator models explanatory power, appeared besides a
general objection that thoughts are not motor processes and hence cannot be described by the
comparator model (Vosgerau and Newen 2007; Synofzik, Vosgerau, and Newen 2007).

Fig. 4. A comparator model. Source: (David, Newen, & Vogeley, 2008: 527)

The comparator model is used by some scientists (Frith 1992; Frith 2004; Blakemore,
Wolpert, and Frith 2002) to explain the behavior of pathological subjects. In case of
schizophrenia the subjects attribute their own actions and movements to other agents or
65

attribute their intentions to consequences of the others actions. However, the others suggest
that schizophrenia patients have no problems with visual-motor adaptation, so there their
comparator mechanism is working properly, the complications appear only on the level of
attribution of agency (David, Newen, & Vogeley, 2008: 525-527).

6.4. Other models of agency and the main idea of studies on sense of agency
(David, Newen, and Vogeley 2008) present a review of the main cognitive models of sense of
agency that appear in the literature. These include the already discussed comparator model,
simulation theory, intentional binding and related processes. They enumerate a number of
elements from these various models that should be examined in order to get a proper theory of
the sense of agency: (i) efferent or central motor signals, (ii) reafferent feedback signals 10
from proprioception, or, (iii) vision, (iv) action intentions or prior action-relevant thoughts,
(v) knowledge, and, (vi) cues from context or environment (David, Newen, & Vogeley,
2008: 529). These are mutually complementary and each of them is assumed to be a sufficient
but not necessary aspect of sense of agency, depending on the situation.

Experiments involving the examination of sense of agency are increasing in number and
complexity, but there are many controversial issues in this domain over which theorists and
scientists still quarrel. One of such issues is really a fundamental one how we differentiate
between us and the others as the originators of actions, how the distinction is correlated
phenomenologically in our minds and neurologically in our brains. Depending on the given
framework or model of agency we are presented with diverse mechanisms and their supposed
realizations and outcomes, like dissimilarities in activation patterns between existing

10

These are sensory signals contingent on self-movement.

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neuroimaging studies. There are, nevertheless, accounts that seem to lead the way. One of
them is a multifactorial two-step account of agency (Synofzik, Vosgerau, and Newen 2007),
which distinguishes a pre-reflective and a reflective levels of agency, and successfully faces
up to the problems of the other models of sense of agency (David, Newen, & Vogeley, 2008:
531). The other model which successfully copes with many problems present in the others is
the neurophenomenological model, which I will now describe.

6.5. Neurophenomenological improvement of the comparator model

There are many models of schizophrenic symptoms, as I have already mentioned, and one of
the most prominent in cognitive neuroscience is the model developed by Christopher Frith
(Frith 1992). However, since the issue of agency and its attribution is very controversial, it is
understandably one of the most criticized

models.

Out of this criticism the

neurophenomenological account of sense of agency came to existence. Some basic criticism is

offered by (Stephens and Graham 2000), who point to three objections, which all come down
to a major problem of lack of proper explanation of attribution of agency to ones self or to
the others. Friths model does not explain appropriately the phenomenon of thought insertion
why schizophrenic patients misattribute their thoughts to the others. Besides, what is the
phenomenological and neurological difference between thought influence and thought
insertion. Finally, how can schizophrenics possess sense of ownership in case of thoughts
(they insist that they are the subjects thinking a thought), and at the same time do not have the
sense of agency (they insist that someone else inserted the thought in their mind).

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6.6. Feinberg-Friths model of sense of agency

The neurophenomenological approach to the sense of agency as presented by (Gallagher and
Varela 2001; Gallagher 2004) bases on the Feinberg-Friths model, so before looking closer at
the neurophenomenological proposal I will describe briefly this model.

Frith combines the aforementioned top-down and bottom up strategies of explaining agency
and in his hybrid approach he uses the efferent, neural or motoric signals to explain
distortions of sense of agency like thought insertion, verbal hallucinations etc. In his theory,
he moves from particular neurological mechanisms that cause motor control to cognitive
mechanisms that manage monitoring and controlling thought processes. The model explains
schizophrenic patients misattributions as a disruption of basic self-monitoring processes that
operate on the notions of sense of agency and sense of ownership, which in turn are part of the
prereflective self-awareness. As I have also mentioned before, these two senses are
indiscernible from each other in usual circumstances. Only in pathological instances or in case
of unintended or involuntary movement these can be easily told apart. Frith claims that the
same case holds for cognitive processes, where we can claim the ownership of some thoughts
but at the same time feel that we did not intend them, so we did not generate them. Someone
or something else did it. Unbidden thoughts, memories and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
(OCD) are sometimes given as a supposed example of this strange situation. These
phenomena base on their appearance in our consciousness even though we did not intend
them or even repelled them (Jones and Fernyhough 2007). For instance, we unintentionally
direct our thoughts to vacation even though we try to focuse on work. Obviously, it does not
mean that in such cases we are not the originators of the thoughts, and that these are inserted
thoughts in any sense. But still on the phenomenological level we experience the sense of
ownership but not the sense of agency, attributed to ourselves.
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Similarly in case of schizophrenia, we deal with thought insertion and delusions of control
caused by disorders of the sense of agency. Frith attempted to provide a cognitive model of
schizophrenia as based on malfunctioning comparator or the basic self-monitoring process,
which would explain the misidentification of a proper agent producing thoughts and actions
(Gallagher 2004: 8-9).

The cognitive model of Frith is based on the analysis of motor behavior in schizophrenia,
since some of the patients struggle with movement disorders in addition to incorrect ascription
of movement agency. Symptoms of delusion of control makes them misattribute their own
movements to external agents. Frith explains this behavior by appeal to the already described,
hypothetical brain mechanism the comparator that receives the copy (the efference copy) of
the information sent to muscles; information that the agent commands the body to move. It is
supposed that the efference copy is kept in the comparator, which compares it with the
proprioceptive or visual re-afferent information about the actual movement. Thus, the sensory
feedback is the verification element of the movement, and the actual attribution of agency
depends on it. Therefore, in pathological cases of disorder the comparator does not see that
the efference copy and the actual movement were the same (Gallagher 2004: 9-10).

As I stated before, the empirical evidence suggests that schizophrenic patients do not have
problems with motor control based on sensory feedback but the forward monitoring of
movement is distorted in them. Interesting results are gathered in experiments involving
perception (versus no perception) of a subjects hand, with which she moves a joystick.
Subjects in these experiments are asked to follow a target on a screen. If non-pathological
subjects have visual perception of their hand and find out that they make an error, they use
69

visual feedback in order to correct their movement. If they cannot see their hands they base on
preaction, i.e. automatic processes, which allow for faster corrections of movement. It is
assumed that this increase in speed is caused by the usage of forward monitoring of motor
intention and does not have to wait for the comparator juxtaposing the predicted state with the
sensory feedback. In contrast, it is really problematic for schizophrenic subjects to correct
their errors if they have no visual perception of their hands available, because it is challenging
for them to monitor their own motor intentions without any visual feedback (Blakemore
2000).

Thus, Frith explains the lack of sense of agency in pathological cases by distortion of the
efference copy in the comparator, which is a problem with the forward, preaction element of
the motor system. Such model works explanatorily for non-pathological unintended or
involuntary action, since the comparator in these situations does not receive any intention to
process because there was no preaction preparation. But in pathological subjects there must be
some problems either with the forward comparator mechanism or the efference copy, since
the agent has no sense of agency when she should. When such persons have an access to
sensory feedback it is possible for them to correct movement errors; the same holds for
healthy subjects. Therefore, it may seem plausible that sense of agency and sense of
ownership are correlated with the input/output and proceedings of forward preaction control
and sensory feedback control. So the sense of ownership of an action is provided by the
sensory feedback system in both pathological and nonpathological (for instances of
involuntary action) cases. The subject is unsuccessful in registering a sense of agency when
there are disturbances of efference copy at the forward comparator.

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However, what Gallagher and other thinkers criticize is that Frith tries to employ his system
to explain higher-order cognitive distortions like thought insertion and auditory hallucination,
while the comparator mechanism (formulated in the way Frith did) can only be used in
explaining motor, perceptual, and linguistic behavior, they claim. In turn, Frith suggests that a
similar procedure may take place in case of cognition, like thinking and inner speech
(Gallagher 2004: 10).

His suggestion comes from the assumption that thinking is an action similar to motor action,
in the sense that we feel an effortful intention in both cases, and this intention to think is
supposed to be providing a sense of agency for the thought. In the system, it looks like this
(Figure 5): the comparator receives an efference copy of the intentional generation of thought
together with the information of the actual thought, so that it compares intention with thought.
Therefore, if something happens to the efference copy or it is not recorded by the comparator
then it is supposed that the produced thought is not experienced by a subject as produced by
herself, it seems as being not under her control and inserted from the outside. This happens in
case of so-called positive symptoms of schizophrenia: verbal hallucinations, delusions of
control, and thought insertion. Obviously, this phenomenological layer is based on the
neurological layer. Nevertheless, Frith claims that functioning of this corresponding
neurological layer is positively feedbacked between these layers, so none of them is especially
privileged. This idea stands in accordance with his hybrid approach connecting the bottom up
and top-down ones, as I mentioned before. Friths model requires that we have a conscious
experience of effortful intention to think, and the comparator must consciously register the
efference copy. So in order to make the procedure work properly we need an awareness of the
intention to act in addition to an intention to act. The awareness is defined as
metarepresentation, which is a second-order reflective consciousness, and provides us with
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a skill of reflective thinking of our way of representing our thoughts and our environment.
Thus, the ability of registering and controlling our own actions and thoughts is something that
distinguishes healthy individuals from the pathological ones. Schizophrenic patients suffering
from delusions of control and inserted thoughts suffer from the distortion of proper
functioning of metarepresentation monitoring of movement and thought (Gallagher and
Varela 2001: 27-28).

Fig. 5. The Feinberg-Frith Model (a comparator model) and the production of thought process. Source:
(Gallagher and Varela 2001: 27).

6.7. A neurophenomenological evaluation of comparator model

The subpersonal, nonconscious process therefore comprises the intention to think, as Frith
claims, and must function well in order to produce a sense of agency for our thoughts.
However, it is not so obvious whether a malfunction of the model explains the problem of
inserted thoughts. Not every time our thought process is intended (the same with movement)
and these are the unbidden thoughts. While thinking we may be even surprised with what
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memories come to our minds and distract our line of thought. It would be problematic to
automatically attribute intention of thinking to the agent in such cases. Schizophrenic patients
tend to attribute the agency of their thoughts to other sources, but in the just mentioned
example of unbidden thoughts, we do not do so. Therefore, it is not enough to explain
pathological cases with an absence of an intention to think or problems with an efference
copy; it only explains the absence of a sense of agency, which happens on a daily basis.
Hence, Friths theory does not account for the thought attribution to other agents, nor thought
insertion phenomenon. So the lack of intention to think is one of the causes of unbidden
thoughts and not inserted thoughts in this model (Gallagher 2004: 11).

Other problem is that the model of Frith is static, i.e. it does not take into the consideration the
temporal structure of thought. Obviously, Frith admits that the subpersonal comparator
functions in time, and monitoring time of efference copy and thoughts are correlative, but the
thinking process also has a temporal structure, which is what plays a crucial role in the
neurophenomenologically amended model of comparator, according to (Gallagher and Varela
2001). According to them, it is crucial that there are restraints put on the functioning of the
comparator by the temporal structure of consciousness. Possibly the inclusion of temporality
would allow to find out the reasons of comparators malfunction with monitoring selfgenerated thought. (Gallagher and Varela 2001: 29) call this the problem of the episodic
nature of positive symptoms, and claim that Friths model does not respond to it successfully,
since he states that schizophrenic symptoms are caused by the lack of connections between
brain regions which do not exchange the information about the willed action and the
perception of it. But this happens sometimes and selectively only in some patients, because
the pathological patients do not perceive all of their thoughts as inserted. This issue is related
to a similar unanswered problem of selectivity. That is, only particular types of thoughts are
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experienced as inserted in schizophrenic minds. Thus, in the approach to both presented

problems we must appeal to phenomenology of this experience and restrain neurological
explanations, since a mere description on the subpersonal level is not sufficient. What is
specific for schizophrenic patients is that they occasionally associate the inserted thoughts
with particular sources, not just with anybody/anything. These attributions manifest a specific
semantic and experiential uniformity, like hearing the same voice uttering the same sentence
or some thought seem to be inserted by a particular person (Gallagher and Varela 2001: 29).

In general, if something prevents the efference copy from reaching the central monitoring
system, the subject experiences a thought that is accompanied with a feeling that the thought
has been implemented from the outside. If the copy is blocked, lost or generated incorrectly,
the thinking is not stopped, but ceases to be registered as being under the control of the
subject. There is no correlation then of the intention and thought, but the subject has an
impression that the thought does not belong to him, but is imprinted in his mind.

(Gallagher 2000a) tries to prove on phenomenological grounds that some aspects of Friths
model are hard to sustain if we accept the conceptual apparatus of phenomenology. For one,
the description of intention of thinking presented by Frith is unclear. Based on it, we cannot
establish the task of intention of thinking or its efference copy during conscious
experiencing or thinking. The intention of thinking cannot precede thinking itself. This
happens only when we consciously prepare; for example, when we make a decision about
stopping for a moment and re-thinking some issue. However, we should differentiate intention
from thinking in this interpretation, intention of thinking is already thinking per se.
Therefore, we face a danger of ad infinitum regress, where intention of thinking is a necessary
antecedent of thinking.
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In a volitional intention to think, Frith presents a conscious feeling of effort and states that it
is identical with conscious control of the efference copy. We have here an intention to think as
an important element of a theory, but also with metapresentation of the intention to think.
However, according to Gallagher and Varela, the assumptions do not give a full picture of the
sense of agency of thought. Firth believes that partly thanks to that ability of
metapresentation, i.e., the ability to reflect on our representation of own thoughts and external
objects, we control our deeds and thoughts. Moreover, this ability is supposed to be the very
element, which is lost by schizophrenics in their experience (Gallagher and Varela 2001).

6.7.1. A neurophenomenological improvement of the comparator model

The neurophenomenological model does not have a response to all the presented problems but
it provides a wider and deeper perspective of the different levels of explanation entangled
with the problems. (Gallagher 2004: 15) presents three preliminary assumptions concerning
different levels involved in the examination of sense of agency that allow for more precise
further analyses: (1) first-order phenomenal experience, (2) higher-order cognition (which
supports the ability to make attributive judgments about ones own experience) and (3)
nonconscious, subpersonal processes that are best described as neuronal or brain processes.

The relations between these levels can be coached in three theoretical attitudes towards firstorder phenomenal experience, as I mentioned before. These are top down approach, which
assigns the leading role in explanation and causation of agency to higher-order cognition;
another one is a bottom-up stance, which favors neurological processes, and claims that
cognitions role is to monitor and attribute agency in a second-order manner. The third
attitude, a connection of the previous two, is characteristic of Friths model. (Gallagher 2004:
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16) in turn, proposes another approach, also a hybrid one, but begins with a bottom-up
neurophenomenological investigation of agency, and suggests that a successful model of
schizophrenia should include the answer to six problems:
The neurological failure to generate a sense of agency.

The lack of a sense of agency in first-order phenomenal experience.

The lack of a higher-order attribution of self-agency.

The fact that the subject misattributes the agency to another person (or thing).
The selective or episodic nature of positive symptoms.
The specificity of delusional and inserted thoughts.

Thus, in this model it is not enough to provide a simple description of neurobiological

correlates of sense of agency, both in pathological and nonpathological situations. Friths
model supposes that sense of agency arises from preaction, i.e. a forward automatic process,
which allow for corrections of movement by comparing motor intention and efference copy of
the motor command. This mechanism bases on processing in the supplementary motor area,
the premotor, and prefrontal cortexes, and it has been experimentally suggested that if there
are some problems in communication between these brain areas responsible for motor action
then the disturbances of schizophrenic character occur in subjects. However, mere motor
action mechanisms do not explain sufficiently the sense of agency disorders, on the higherorder basis, like cognition, as I argued before. Besides, there are disorders of other brain
regions that probably cause problems not only with the sense of agency for motor action but
also for cognitive experiences, like thought insertion. (Gallagher and Varela 2001: 30-32)
suggest that this sort of delusions of control may be caused by complications on the level of
anticipatory aspect of working memory, which is crucial at the stage of forming prereflective

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structure of experience. And as experimental evidence shows, schizophrenics suffer exactly

from these complications (Berthoz 2000).

Obviously then, the nature of phenomenal experience depends on the way specific brain areas
work and cooperate. If there are some neurological problems then the first-order experience is
produced, which contains no sense of agency in the case of some actions and thoughts. If such
account of pathological experience of sense of agency is correct then at the level of first-order
phenomenal consciousness the subjects may seem having problems with identifying agency,
but at the second-order cognitive level they properly attribute agency. That is, they properly
attribute the sense of ownership of a thought to themselves and properly (on the
phenomenological level what they actually experience) attribute the agency of the thought
to some other source. (Gallagher 2004: 17), in spite of the criticism of Stephens and Graham,
claims that the subject gives a correct account of his experience, so far as he says that he
experiences that he is not the originator of his thoughts. Gallagher claims that there are
behavioral research studies which support this phenomenological explanation (Frith and Done
1988; Posada et al. 2001). The problem appears on a different level, when the subject insists
that it is a particular person that inserts the thoughts or controls the movement. And this is the
pathological element, the misattribution of movements/thoughts to someone or something that
actually is not the cause of them. It is not a problem of a lack of agency in the first place,
because in such situation schizophrenic symptoms would not have been different from
involuntary or unintended movement/thoughts.

Therefore, (Gallagher 2004: 17) presumes that there are two potential interpretations of the
situation:

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(a) The cause of the misattribution is based on inferences made at the higher-order level of
attributive consciousness.
(b) Some neurological component responsible for the differentiation between self and other is
disrupted, and as a result, some sense of alterity is already implicit in the first-order
experience.

Gallagher supports his theory with the experimental evidence of a few brain imaging studies.
They suggest that in cases involving action of the subjects, observation of the others action
and imagining performing action by the subjects themselves or action of the others, the
activation of somewhat overlapping cortical and subcortical network, i.e. structures connected
with motor execution and action planning areas, can be observed. In other words when we
perform some intentional action or observe the others performing the same action, similar
areas in our brain activate. Some scientists suppose that these shared representations may be
responsible for the ability to simulate the thoughts of other people, and composes a sort of a
who system which keeps track of the experience of the agent who performs an action in our
opinion. It is supposed that this very system malfunctions in schizophrenic patients (Gallagher
2004: 17-18).

6.7.2. Response from Frith

Frith has written a response (Frith 2004) to Gallaghers criticism, where he admits that his
notion of agency was changing throughout his studies, neurology- and phenomenologywise. In the earliest research, he attributed lack of awareness to the pathological subjects, and
thereby explained the delusions of control, i.e., the patients did not expect the consequences
of their own movements since they have had no awareness of their intention, thus they could
not attribute agency to themselves. In the improved approach, Frith claims that delusions of
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control are caused by an excessive awareness, which the patients experience of the sensory
consequences of their actions. We produce a prediction, or a forward model, concerning
sensory consequences of an action, stemming from an intention to act. According to Frith, we
usually do not trace the sensory consequences of our actions, unless it is a case of action that
does not match our predictions, but in pathological subjects there seems to be a problem with
prediction mechanism and they excessively trace the sensory consequences, the experience of
them is not naturally put out, therefore phenomenologically it is experienced as a passive
movement, i.e., a movement not self-generated (Frith 2004: 20).

There is a neurological and a phenomenological difference between the patients suffering

from the anarchic-hand syndrome and schizophrenia. The former, after failing to take the
control of their hand, pronounce that there is a problem with their hand and do not attribute
agency of the unintended movement to some external sources. In contrast, the schizophrenic
patients conclude that their actions are of some external origin; thus, they are aware of their
own intention, but it is transformed in their experience into a movement that in normal
subjects is felt as a passive one. Gallagher says that this model cannot explain the external
agency attribution, but Frith claims that delusional patients experience themselves as being
moved in accordance with their initial intentions, so the illusory originator of the movement
has to, by some means, have the knowledge of their intention. Neurological evidence shows
that differentiating between self-generated actions and actions generated by the others is
correlated with the activity in the parietal cortex. Additionally, patients experiencing
delusions of control and healthy subjects under hypnosis displayed overactivity in these areas
of parietal cortex, which would support Friths thesis (Frith 2004: 21).

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Gallagher stated that Friths model is successfully explanatory in cases of motor action
delusions, but useless in thought insertion examples, where there are no sensory outcomes of
agency. However, his model is in turn devoid of the cognitive level of description and makes
an unjustified jump straightly from the neural level to phenomenology of action. He just
claims that complications on the neural level give rise to a first-order experience devoid of
sense of agency in some cases, but he does not deliberate more thoroughly on the nature of
the neurological processes. However, more introspective data concerning thought insertion is
necessary to answer this problem, and so far there is not much of it (Frith 2004: 21).

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7. Conclusion
What can be the conclusion of these deliberations? First, it should be remembered that the
sense of agency cannot be brought down to a simple sensory feedback coming from bodily
movement, or to awareness of bodily movement. As follows from the phenomenology of
embodiment, a paradigm adopted by neurophenomenology, a common action has its sensoryfeedback or afferent signals weakened, thus the consciousness of our body is treated as
recessive. Usually, one does not focus on the movements of his body in an action. Walking
does not require ones looking at his own legs. The majority of such activities (body
schematic and motor control) are automatic and non-conscious. Nevertheless, it is possible
that if the action was not embodied, the sense of agency would look differently (this nature of
action may cause that sense of agency is built upon just such processes). Moreover, if the way
we describe our action in is the pragmatic one (I am going to a restaurant, instead of I am
walking), then the intentional factor would be connected to the sense of agency for the action
and located in the world and non-physically described events. Thus, our sense of agency
should be reinforced by the intentional feedback of some sort, not an afferent one that
concerns the bodily movements, though; it should be a perceptual feeling that the action
originated from us imposes some impact on the external world. At the first-order level of
experience, the sense of agency is the result of many constituting features:

intentional

(perceptual in nature) and sensory (afferent) feedbacks, as well as efferent signals; this is the
reason why sense of agency is phenomenologically and neurologically a complex occurrence.
If we lack some of the presented features, or they are unsuitably combined, a disorder in the
sense of agency may appear (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008: 153).

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We should precisely see the points of disagreement between the presented types of
explanations of sense of agency at this stage. It has been said that neuronal or causal
explanations are not able to account for action fully. This also applies to the neuronal
underlining of action awareness ones awareness of ones own or of someone elses action.
One very successful and promising neuronal model of action identification has been presented
by (Georgieff and Jeannerod 1998), which they called the who system. This can be
successful in differentiating our actions from someone elses, a sub-personal process of our
cognitive system. This is visible by the use of neurological terminology in similar
experiments as the ones presented above. The problem appears when there is an activation of
the same areas of the brain in two different situations: us performing an intentional action, and
the others us seeing someone performing such action (a shared representations occur in a
number of areas, not merely in case of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex). This was the
basis for a statement that the activation is neutral concerning the agent. If this holds true, we
need to identify some extra sub-personal mechanism to determine the agent. And this is the
purpose of the invention of the who system. If there is a possibility to point to the activated
area of the brain in case of our agency and when we see someone being an agent such
possibility extends our knowledge about the functioning of the brain concerning the agency.
The problem appears when we try to map the important neurological distinctions on the firstorder experience arising out of it. Some researchers claim that the experiential level is not free
from the distinctions that appear on the neuronal level. They explain the neutrality of shared
representations as being naked intentions (E. Pacherie and Jeannerod 2004).

Intentions are thus usually tightly connected with agency at the phenomenological level. To
state that the perception of someone elses action also involve naked intentions and attribute
agency at the later stage, presupposes unjustifiably that the structures of neural and
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experiential levels are of similar form. In experience a question of the who almost never
appears, but is pervasive at the sub-personal level. The experience of intention being defined
in regard to agency is present even in situation when we are mistaken about who is the agent
of the action, because there is no experience of actions without agents.

As I have mentioned before, Graham and Stephens present a parallel, but a top down one,
explanation of the sense of agency regarding the function of reflective introspection or higherorder cognition. The non-conceptual and pre-reflective first-order experience of agency would
be fundamental in comparison to the second-order self-attribution of action (including
conceptual metareflection), if we defined actions from the beginning at the first-order level of
experience as belonging to specific agents. After all, usually after performing an action one is
not pondering whether the action is caused by herself or not. It stays in accordance to
Heideggerian statement that our being in the world is defined in terms of action. We are in the
world and we define the usefulness of things that surround us, while being action-situated.
The metacognitive level may or may not come in the second place (Gallagher & Zahavi,
2008: 153-169).

If we concern the link between sense of agency and acting for a reason, the experience of
agency is not solely the awareness of the purpose of action. We may see that in the already
discussed case of people with the anarchic hand syndrome; in an imaginary situation, the
anarchic hand decides to take something from another persons plate, but before doing it,
the owner of the hand decided himself to take food from it. During the action of taking it, she
would know the purpose of action (the will to eat something), but still the action would not be
intentional. To understand this, we must be aware that something is lacking in such
depictions. There was a reason for action, but the actual action was not due to it. We should
83

not ignore these causal limitations and conditions; however, a different explanation can be
developed here that will make the agent conscious of the reason, but this reason is not a
direct cause of an act. It is first of all important to observe that in this example the agent lacks
the sense of control over her own movements. (Gallagher and Schmicking 2010: 342)
mention here Harry Frankfurt as the first one who introduced the concept of a necessity of
minimal phenomenal sense of guidance or bodily control. Frankfurt said that intentionality is
not acquired solely by a goal-directed or purposive behavior (which otherwise would add
various biological processes into that category). Therefore, not only we need aim-directedness
of a behavior for an action to be intentional, but also the agents feeling of full control over
the action with a governing aim over it. According to Frankfurt, this aim-focus is absent in the
examples of causal deviancy (Frankfurt 1978).

As for the possible prospects of neurophenomenology in successfully explaining the

mechanism of sense of agency I believe that a deeper analysis of the who system and a
greater amount of studies on introspective accounts of the experience of agency is required.
However, neurophenomenological investigations are already of some scientific use, as I
attempted to show. And who if not neurophenomenologists should be motivated to fill the
experimental gap of the first-person accounts of sense of agency? Of course, there are still
some problems with the very methodology of this model, like the strong charge of a bias in
trained subjects and discovering actually the elements of experience that were parts of
theoretical framework of neurophenomenological experiments (D. C. Dennett 2005); there are
also voices negating the phenomenological element in neurophenomenology and claiming
that this system may do without its supposed mother-theory (Heiner and Whyte 2008).
Nevertheless, neurophenomenology is a very young theory, and thus it is still developing and

84

transforming, so we still may hope that it will bring some more promising experimental
outcomes in the future.

8. Acknowledgements
The project was financed by a grant from the Polish Ministry of Science under the program
Diamond Grant (ref. nr. DI2011008441).

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