Jean-Luc Petit[1]

Intention in Phenomenology and Neuroscience:

Intentionalizing Kinaesthesia as an Operator of Constitution[2]

           

Introduction

 

The advances in cognitive sciences over the last 30 years used to be so enthusiastically applauded by the practitioners of these same sciences that it did not occur to an outside observer to note  a lack of clarity in the assumed representation of the relationship between conscious conduct and its hypothesized neural bases. An ever growing number of researchers are even trying to apply the tools of information theory to the encoding, transducing and decoding (presumably performed by specialized brain areas) of signals impinging on the body. Nevertheless, the brain cell (so called ‘grand-mother cell’ or ‘cardinal cell’) responsible for coding a significant item of daily activities or an important concept of the mind has still not been found. And an ever growing wealth of substitutes for this cell are in the offing : ‘population coding’, ‘temporal coding’, ‘volume coding’, etc., an excess of competitors that makes it even more difficult to determine what patterns in brain tissue can be held responsible for what behavioural patterns, warned the neuroscientist Horace Barlow[3]. Other researchers, more reluctant to launch out into neuro-computational constructions (or the same researchers in popularizing works), limit themselves to borrowing ordinary, personal conduct predicates and boldly re-using these predicates in reference to brain functionings. Mental verbs, besides expressing what a person might be doing on some occasion of experience, are thus employed to label the brain. A simple renaming procedure that, for want of agreement on an interpretative model in neurosciences, a default that Alain Berthoz recently deplored[4], cannot but postpone a satisfactory explanation, given the dubious intelligibility of common speech mental vocabulary in this new context. In such a situation, the classic three stage transition of the genesis of scientific knowledge : ordinary language metaphor – hypothetical model – theoretical concept fails and leaves us stuck either in metaphors or in computational tricks with no bearing on mental life.

            From the phenomenological viewpoint[5], this epistemological blockage might be interpreted as a failure to understand the intentionality of the sense giving acts[6], or constitutive operations[7], to which any component of a person’s experience owes its sense of being[8]. At first sight, and at the very least, the main purpose of these acts is to orient the field of vision toward an object of interest and to grasp or maintain the object in question within arm’s reach. A rather trite accomplishment apparently ! But, by constantly repeating the process by which one directs one’s gaze in ever changing directions and learns to handle things in a variety of different ways, these acts contribute to the emergence and constant updating of a certain field of vivid actuality[9] against a background or under an horizon[10] of indifferent inactuality. A field to which things have to have access in order that they acquire fully fledged being for the perceiving-acting person. Only in such a context do things really acquire significance for the agent. And as for the agent itself, its biography is composed of little else but such acts. So that the being, the reality or objectivity of absolutely anything whatever (for the subject interacting with the thing in question) is contingent upon acts that have to be accomplished for this pretended value of being to be sustained[11].

To set the matter in a specifically philosophical light, Husserl’s later writing  investigates the possibility of making use in his theory of intentionality of consciousness of the psycho-physiological notion of  kinaesthesia[12] by blending James’ peripheral sensations of movement and Wundt’s central Innervationsgefühle[13]. To remain constantly aware of the way in which we will the movements of our body, this is the task of the ‘kinaesthesia of the I’. To remain constantly aware of the sensory contact of the skin of our hands or other limbs with any external thing or other part of the body, this is the task of ‘organ kinaesthesia’. This doubly oriented kinaesthesia was granted a major role in the constituting of that sense of being which gives us the things we perceive or act upon in daily life. However, in stressing this aspect of constitution, my proposal is not to stick to an interpretation of kinaesthesia from a strict phenomenological perspective, i.e. as pure interiorities of conscious experience. What I propose is to rethink kinaesthesia as a possible link between the subjectivity of experience and the objectivity of functional activation patterns in brain.

I base this proposal on the fact that kinaesthesia happens to be one of the more primitive ways in which an embodied consciousness can manifest itself in space and time. This, to the extant that it ‘expands or retracts’ through its material inscription, locally, in neural map[14] shapings and, at a distance, in synchronizations or de-synchronizations of cortical oscillatory patterns[15]. Such map changes and pattern shiftings initiate a process of ‘spatialization and temporalization of the mind’. Whatever its final destiny as a factor of structuring the lived world[16] at large, this process begins modestly. It begins in body – brain transactions that subtend  motivations, emotions, intentions or anticipations of inner, mental life emerging into bodily gestures without needing the mediation of verbal expression or reflective thinking. Kinaesthesia is thus our best candidate for endowing with experiential value the patterns of activation of brain regions elicited by any behavioural conduct on the part of the subject. Sure enough, not each and every activation pattern of brain can be convincingly correlated in this manner with kinaesthesia. We have to concede that most brain events stand in no provable correlation to kinaesthetic experience. Nevertheless, it remains (1) that at least some of these patterns are already currently acknowledged as neural signatures of intentions[17] or similar acts, and these are indeed typical kinaesthesia; (2) that the same acts by exerting some measure of feedback, top – down[18], fronto-parietal[19] control over the whole functional dynamics of brain machinery recategorize it as kinaesthetic. In fact, a few but well authenticated neurobiological results (reviewed hereafter) indicative of the modifying influence of intention and attention on the topologic organization not only of the motor, but also the primary sensory areas, provide us with indispensable empirical proof of the well-foundedness of our suggestion.

In so funnelling the dynamics of brain activation patterns through the kinaesthetic channels of experience, we hope to find an embodiment of intentionality that goes farther than dodging the issue like current cognitive theory of mind by implementing mental representations (its fake substitutes) in the brain. In the staggering entanglement of horizontal[20], vertical[21] and diagonal[22] connecting loops that the present state of research has kept track of, kinaesthetic constitution theory would be a welcome Ariadne’s clue. And this, in so far as it would help us to organize data under the heading of kinaesthesia in three fundamental ontological domains: things, body and others. To put the matter in a nutshell (not without paying tribute to Merleau-Ponty), our way out is to admit gesturing, effectively accomplished in bodily movements or kept inchoate in purely internal acts, as a schema for furthering an impending reconciliation between the objective ’materialism’ of the neurosciences and the subjective ’idealism’ of a phenomenology of consciousness.

 

A sampling of constitutive analyses in phenomenology

 

 Now, let’s get back to examples of intentionaly constituted objects : a sound, a cube. A sound is not a simple ‘acoustic stimulus’ in the physical environment captured by a passive receptor in the internal ear (cochlea) to give us automatically an auditory representation. A sound is a temporal objectivity which appears as endowed with the following sense of being : an objective entity, temporally extended across the flux of my experience. This object owes its constitution to its being placed at the centre of positings[23], a system of subjective tensions and projections of the living subject[24]. As for the place that this object occupies in objective time, it results from a later abstraction of the axioms of physical time measurement from the experience to which this system owes its structure. An abstraction purchased at the cost of an obliviousness to the original structure of that constituting time which lies at the root of habitual time. Adopting the Husserlian metaphor of the comet, one might say that when a sound sounds it is possible to distinguish a core made up of original sensorial experience and a tail of retentions consisting of its ‘just having been’ and of the ‘just having been’ of its ‘just having been’, and so on. The latter is thereby prolonged in a continual series of overlaping temporal fields right up to that limit beyond which the sound trails away and needs a new act in order for it to be recalled in memory. The present of the actual sound is not a fixed point but a generative origin from which there arises a constantly renewed sensorial material, each of whose newly engendered phases is subject to a process of modification[25] which stretches out into an ever increasing distance from the present ‘now’. This point is not the limit of an approximation which once attained would provide a definitive term but an incessant source of novelty. This novelty is neither a simple diversity nor a pure successive dispersion. Rather, the series of present ‘nows’ of the sound is embraced and firmly upheld in its unity of sense as being ‘the same sound’ by an act of apprehension of identity[26] which is effected in the actual now. The circularity between an original self identity maintained through distance and a distance which increases up to the point of non-retention is a pre-empirical (transcendental[27]) structure. The actualisation of such structure in the acts of the subject perceiving a sound is the condition of the possiblity of  his experiencing ‘the sound’.

In the same way a cube (a gaming dice) is not simply ‘an optical stimulus’ whose passive impression on our retinae gives us automatically the corresponding spatial representation. A cube[28] is a spatio-temporal  objectivity which is never given in any actual sensorial content because it only presents its frontal aspect, while its lateral aspects run off into perspectives, if they are not completely closed off. As any and every object of spatial perception, it is the product of the constituting activities of the perceiving subject whose contribution is indispensable for the appearance of the thing in its full range of aspects[29]. At the outset nothing like ‘the thing’ is given, there are only adumbrations[30], shadowy or phantom bearers of objective pretentions in course of  being confirmed (or the reverse) through the further course of experience. These series of adumbrations enter our instantaneous visual fields, go through them and leave them up at the pace of the movements of our sensory and motor organs. They only get organised for the perceiving subject into a permanent configuration bearing the value of being ‘a thing’ because the subject enfolds them all in a positing of identity. By means of  this act they are retained and connected in such a way as to form ‘a multiplicity’. That is a series of a sensorially laden phases of experience which is no longer arbitrary and dispersed but ‘definite’ under expectations of the subject. On the objective side of this experience  its noematic correlate[31] is the identical and unique thing.

Once again this structure of multiplicity is a system emerging from the flux of sensations, principally visual, but also kinaesthetic. The realisation of such a system requires a  tight synchronization of the series of adumbrations with the running off[32] of kinaesthetic sensations under the control of the objectifying posit. By contrast with the sound example, what produces the diversity of spatial perception can no longer be identified with the impressional sensation (the hyletic material of the sensory content of acts[33]) nor with the positing of identity. Here, the ‘empty’ positing of a regular (normal) running off of the adumbrations of the hidden sides of the thing in conformity with what is anticipated in advance of the flux of experience is sensorially fulfilled (or not fulfilled) with the production of new aspects ‘of the same thing’. We are always waiting ‘to know more’ about the object, an expectative that is nevertheless confined to aspects of the same type as before. Our contention is that these new aspects  are constantly provided and motivated by the sole free functioning of the kinaesthetic system. So we have to distinguish the physical stimulus from the thing in space : the first illustrates our passive sensibility, the second our active (transcendental) constitution of the sense of being.

 

Reassessing the intentionality of kinaesthesia in constitution theory

 

Bearing in mind these findings concerning the constitution of the temporal object and the constitution of the spatial object, we would like to draw attention to the fact that this theory of constitution is propelled in two contrary directions by the desire to satisfy two mutually conflicting if not incompatible, requirements. A first requirement was for Husserl to found the meaning of being for any subject of experience upon the transcendental subject, the ultimate source of all meaning-giving. For he saw it as necessary to maintain the transcendental dimension of the back-reference to the I-pole of all those acts constitutive of the value of being for. . . And so as not to mechanically pile up one layer of constitution upon another, in oblivion of the organic tension by which all layers are referred to the I, a criticism that Husserl made to  empirical psychology. But rather to recover the ultimate, subjective constituting sources of sense. The second requirement was to deploy the system of subjective operations in such a way as to bring to light the manner in which each product is constituted from scratch with the meaning of being that belongs to it for the subject of experience. Incorporating the constituting subject in the total system of kinaesthetic activity was a matter of not allowing subjectivity to detach itself from the flux of constituting activity. And so precisely because a detached subjectivity would be incapable of expressing itself in such acts. These two requirements are incompatible at least in the following respect. The former requirement tends to refer all meaning giving activity to a unique transcendental subject by conferring an absolute value upon the latter through a species of abstraction. An abstraction which makes it difficult to understand the relation of this subject to the constituted formations of sense and so call in question its right to be regarded as constitutive of the latter. The second requirement tends to render the constitution of sense as operational as possible by grounding these constitutive processes in the immanence of an uncontroversial psychophysiological experience. A layer of experience which  lends itself to be conceived as so  primitive as to make its attribution to a subjectivity seem gratuitous. As a result, the fundamental dilemma for a theory of constitution which claims to have surmounted the subject-object opposition remains the following : that the process by which subjectivity gets objectified and that by which objectivity gets subjectified instead of concurring to bring about the same result seem  torn between opposite trends.

In the direction of subjectification, the trend is to denaturalize subjectivity. A subjectivity reduced accordingly to its function of conferring (or refusing) validity upon the pretention of any possible entity to possess a value of being for someone. Such reference to an ultimate arbiter is so fatally drawn upwards through reflection as to loose all effective support. In the direction of objectification, the trend is to incarnate the productive activity in the immanence of natural life in which it is rooted and which furnish its motivational preconditions. And again along this route there can be no halting point. For any and every motivational component, no matter what the level at which it contributes to the hierarchy of behavioural determinants : will, desire, effort, instinct, feeling, impulse, tendency, etc., remains a possible candidate for the status of contingent somatic precondition of the transcendental.

But what is truly remarkable is that Husserl refuses to make a choice as between these two requirements. Right to the end he struggles to do justice to them both, thereby engaging in a sort of heroic confrontation with the tension imposed upon him by his attempt to remain true to his foundational programme. In his kinaesthetic theory of constitution, developed especially in unpublished manuscript material from the 30s, he tried to retain the transcendental approach, even though he is in effect deepening his understanding of the rootedness of concrete experience in the structure of embodiment. He ceaselessly  worked against himself (and against the transcendental tradition) by bringing the subjectivity of the transcendental subject back down into felt movements and the practical intentions of an acting body. “Qua primitive, consciousness is formed on the basis of the activity itself[34]”: this solution comes down to saying that the objective world is primarily that with which we stand in relation, that towards which we are consciously oriented in perception and action, to the extent that it remains the constant correlate of all those postures, movements intentions and dispositions to action which give us access to the identity and the permanence of objects. And this solely by featuring as the horizon of perceptual presentations for an I and the field of its practical interventions, manipulations and transformations.

For all that, in the constitution of the temporal object, the apprehension of identity which traverses the instantaneous temporal fields of the just having been is directly referred to an act of the I. An act which itself does not run off in time but enjoys the privilege of a-temporality. We find a parallel presupposal in the constitution of the spatial thing concerning the grasping of the unity and identity of ‘the same thing’. An intentional apprehension which runs through the definite multiplicity of the adumbrations of its sides to the extent that they are exhibited in the instantaneous visual fields associated with the running off of the kinaesthesia relative to the different perceptual and motor organs. Such apprehension is also directly referred to an I which itself remains invariable. The progress made by Husserl in his ever deeper understanding of the incarnate character of the theory of constitution leads him to call in question such fixity of the I. And to plunge the latter back into the dynamic process of the constitution of sense in which it nevertheless remains the pole of identity. 

While appearing to remain faithful to the cartesian ego one notices several attempts at an immersion of the I in the constituting flux of the experience of an activity which is initially ‘without an I’. But an activity which remains such that it enables an I to arise, and so to bring to consciousness the existence of a unitary and self-identical I. Through the process of constitution, kinaesthetic sensations begin to acquire a status which they did not enjoy before, for instance in Ding und Raum, which explicitly refused to treat them as intentional[35]. All intentionality could claim then were images of the visual field, since it is only across these series of images and to the extent that they refer to each other in a progressively more adequate approximation to the point of an optimal presentation that something can be present as an appearance. With regard to this presentative function of visual images, the kinaesthetic movements of the eyes, of the head, and of the whole  body, are reduced to a function of motivation understood in a very narrow sense. Kinaesthetic movement and rest had to take account of external and accompanying circumstances. Circumstances[36] whose variation brought with them a diversification of those aspects of the field necessary for a satisfactory presentation of the thing. But this diversity was subordinated to the intentionality of the perceptual apprehension. An apprehension which both dictated its realization and imposed upon it its own attentional orientation by selecting those kinaesthetic routings capable of unfolding the series of adumbrations leading to the confirmation of its expectations.

Insofar as it is reduced to figuring as an optimum for a series of sub-optimal presentations which tend towards this optimum, an optimum associated with quite determinate kinaesthetic sensations, such an intentionality would remain purely visual[37]. A provisional limitation to be corrected by taking into consideration the role of touch and the sense of posture in conjunction with  the movements accomplished by the body in its constituting activity, which latter is precisely tactilo-kinaesthetic and not visual. Over and beyond the abstract apperceptive apprehension, over and beyond the regularity with which a series of adumbrations is connected in the visual field, it is in terms of the free possibilities of a running off of kinaesthetic sensations for the return to the same thing in perception, or the positing of the same goal in action, that intentionality has to be re-thought.

With regard to the period 1905-7, the period 1930-33 puts into effect a dramatic redirection of intentionality towards kinaesthesia. Ideen II that could be cited as a work of transition does not bridge the gap because it fails to compensate the deficit in intentionality of kinaesthesia. The significance of this evolution might be missed if one failed to take into account the specific use Husserl makes of the term Kinästhese. For he does not use the word in the sense of modern physiology, which gave James preference over Wundt. For physiologists kinaesthesia designates a proprioceptive sensibility, whether muscular or articulatory, which follows centripetal sensorial paths to keep the brain informed about the movements of the body once these movements have been carried out[38]. Husserl, on the contrary, does not even mean by kinaesthesia sensations of movement, i.e. physical movements relative to the displacements in space of the limbs and of the muscular masses of flesh that coat skeletal bones of which the limbs are composed. He means rather the feeling that the agent has in an immediate and continuous way of his intentions to move, and of their conception and realization in effective movements. His kinaesthesia are not the effects felt in the body with respect to movements actually completed but a drama, a Passion or even a phenomenology (of Spirit[39]) of the development of an intention in and through its motor realization. An archaic conception ? Certainly, but one which, we will convince us hereafter, has turned out to be premonitory.

In spite of the peripheralist sensualist ideology which has impregnated physiology and psychology for some time now, evidence for such a feeling of acting and of the acting self and of its contribution to the functioning of the perceiving self has not been wanting. Now, that kinaesthesia are attributable to an I and that the I is before all else the I of kinaesthetic sensations was Husserl’s main idea. What are kinaesthesia in themselves, he asked[40] ? And what relation do they bear to those acts of the I by which they are accompanied ? Of that I which englobes them in their running off. Inasmuch as it consists in a ‘I move’ rather than an ‘I feel’, surely this form of kinaesthesia already belongs to the I. But then what does the subjectivity in question here really mean[41] ? Is the I anything at all over and above its concrete acts ? And is a concrete act thinkable other than as a running off, or as something which unfolds actively and which could therefore also be unfolded inactively ? Or again, could it consist in a core which is self-unfolding in an immediately active way[42] ?

In the light of the above, one is in a better position to understand the intentionalization of kinaesthesia, the fact that the meaning of being self-identical can be conferred upon things and upon the self, not just by a law of association linking their images one with another, but by the fully concrete sense we have of moving towards them. The thing proves to be the same because I can always come back to it and find myself again alongside of it. No need to posit, in the abstract, an arrow of visual attention directed apperceptively toward ... An attentional arrow which would be the privilege of a cogito without it being possible to say how the latter succeeds in materializing across the sensorial material and so conferring a unitary orientation upon it. This kinaesthetic power grants being to beings : whatever simply is, is only meaningful as such by virtue of its being actively made to be itself. Kinaesthesia are the unique sphere of a power whose exercise is immediately constitutive[43]. Just as perception interpreted as the reception of a sensory stimulus subjects us to the external object, so its reinterpretation as constituting the meaning of the being of the thing in its kinaesthetic activities confirms our freedom. Obtaining what is identical depends upon my freedom of movement, upon the immediate evidence I have of being free in the course of exercising it.

A purely visual world remains a world of images devoid of materiality, due to the absence of forces and of resistances to these forces. It is still remote from being an inertial world composed of masses in movement defined in terms of their equilibrium or disequilibirum, their accelerations, torques, etc. And this for an agent who is itself embodied and feels in his bones, sinews and muscles the constantly changing strain of the surrounding field of forces as a reflex of his own intervention in this field. The transition from the former visual world to the latter real, fully material world depends, in effect, upon my active intervention through an effectuation of the entire system of kinaesthesia over and beyond oculo-motor kinaesthesia. While I don’t have to overcome an inertia to move my eyes, and might accordingly dream as being a pure spirit hovering over the world, suffice it that ‘I move my head, my body etc.’ for me to acquire a fully material sense of the object as that object which stubbornly remains the same through the free realization of the totality of kinaesthesia[44]. As the unity and identity of the entire series of adumbrations unfolded for me by the sensorial fields of my organs in proportion as they are displaced through my exploratory and manipulative manoeuvres, the real object becomes the point towards which all these paths lead. It turns out to be for me the index of my capacity to  enter these paths as and when I want. Hence the solution to the problem of perceptive synthesis (binding problem) : the aspects are only aspects of something to the extent that they are constantly available to me through my free kinaesthetic activity[45]. By going back to my former posture, something unique and identical is given to me[46]. So there can be no question of detaching such a thing from those subjective perceptive-motor activities which give me access to it, as it had to be the case with the physical object of classical physics[47]. In and through these modes of appearance of things, one finds the ‘I alongside’ of the functioning of my perceptual organs[48]. That there is a world for the subject of experience therefore presupposes the freedom to run through such kinaesthetic multiplicities[49].The thingliness of the world is the precipitate of human intentions. All that is issues from my (our, intersubjective) activity[50].

Light might be cast on such intentionalization of kinaesthesia if we fix the relationship of Husserl’s theory of kinaesthesia to the Dilthey – Scheler controversy on the origins of the reality of external world[51]. Dilthey aptly put forward the role of our experience of willing and of the will impulse being countered by the resistance of the thing. But he did not distinguish sufficiently clearly such experience from the sensory feeling of a feed-back pressure exerted on the moving limb by the object, noted Scheler. A Scheler who, for his part, stressed the importance of an impulsory experience of the acting I, whose non sensory intention went right through any accompanying sensory experience. An intention, he insisted, that was sole responsible for the giving of the thing itself to the perceiving subject. In this controversy Husserl’s position can be expressed quite straightforwardly : he agreed with both parts. And no paradox in that, because his ‘kinaesthesia of the I’ stems from the same source as the voluntary intention to act, while his ‘organ kinaesthesia’ derives either from peripheral sensations of limb postures and movements or from proprioceptive feelings. It is true that in the visual constitution of spatial things the arrow of attention is detached from the eye-head-body kinaesthetic system and attributed to a still desincarnate I. But in the tactilo-kinaesthetic constitution of the body, the motor, voluntary kinaesthesia of the I and the somato-sensory, tactile organ kinaesthesia are finally tightly intertwinned thanks to a full embodiment of the I in the pulsional intentionality[52] of motivation.

 

Correlating phenomenology with new findings in neuroscience.

 

The models of phenomenological description invoked above did not take into account the possibility of other fields than the complete visual field or the whole temporal field of the perceiving subject. Is this a limitation and are these analyses out of date in consequence ? The most important contribution of the neurosciences of vision[53] has certainly been to multiply and distribute these fields by relating the reception of the signal to the ‘receptive fields (RFs)’ of the cells responsible for the different neuronal relays in the hierarchic processing of visual information (from V1, occipital calcarine area, to IT, polar infero-temporal region). The functions said to be of a ‘high level’ (attention, individuation, objectivation, binding, recognition of identity) were supposed to intervene at later stages in the process and not in the primary sensorial regions. The functional architecture of the latter seemed to be devoted to maintaining the topography of the receptors : retinotopy of V1, primary visual area; tonotopy of A1, primary acoustic area in the temporal cortex; somatotopy of SI, primary somesthesic area along the posterior margin of central sulcus. But the widespread admission of a reentrant feed-back hypothesis[54] thanks to which  the information extracted in superior regions would modify (facilitating or inhibiting) the reception of the signal in primary sensorial regions has called in question the uniqueness of this hierarchy, thereby inviting us to think again about the integral unity of the processing of sensory data.

Everything happens on the level of the neural correlates of attentive perception as if the cells of the primary receptive regions ‘refused to be’ limited to simply encoding and decoding the relevant stimuli falling in their RF. And this because they ‘knew something’ about what was going on outside this RF, therefore within the total field, which now also has to be taken into account. By indulging in such metaphors we are not lapsing into the same bad habit of mentalistic renaming of the subpersonal substrate. On the contrary : the discharge rate of the cell which RF is localized on a segment of a curve on a screen in front of the monkey is modulated by the end point of this curve, despite the fact that it is situated outside the RF, if only this end point is the target of an ocular saccade that the monkey has learned to make at the fading of the fixation point[55].  Far from inflating mental language, such way of bringing intelligence back down from the plane of supramodal (not visual nor auditory nor tactile) associations to the sensorial plane makes it possible to get by with fewer mental representations. This because it becomes less tempting to introduce such representations if the receptive activities are already fully interpretative. But by the way any unitary theory (the theory of constitution included) which attempted to account for the continuing integration of perception in and through the dynamic of the global visuo-attentional or audio-attentional or tactilo-attentional field would also become more plausible.

Our vision of the (non-anatomical) functional architecture of the transitory activation patterns of  the cerebral circuits recruited by the processing of visual or auditory perception is no more limited to the the linear bottom - up retino-(or cochleo)-thalamo-cortical hierarchy. This functional architecture is conceived as intersecting such hierarchy with a double feed-back. A feed-back of the superior stages onto the primary sensorial regions, on the one hand, and, on the other, upon the horizontal (cortico-cortical, i.e. fronto-parietal) and oblique (cortico-subcortical) modifying factors. With regard to the biological significance of perception as the individuation of an external object, these processes stem from acts which intervene in advance of  ‘the reality of the object’ and of the cognitive or affective values which it bears. It is this precedence with regard to habitual reality which makes it possible to talk of a biological foundation for operations constitutive of perceptual experience. If these pre-empirical operations do not float in a vacuum it is not enough to attribute them to ‘the transcendental subject’. To provide them with a foundation, it suffices to attribute them to the patterns of transitory activation in the functional loops recruited by perceptual activity in the brain of a perceiving subject.

We will particularly stress the evidence for the modifying influence of attention on the primary visual and auditory cortex as well as the modifying influence of action and intention on the plasticity of maps of the somatosensory cortex.

 

Attention modulates audition

 

            Electro-encephalographic recordings show a negative deflection of the curve representing electric potentials in brain tissue reacting to an unpredictable interruption of regular patterns of alternation between two tones that differ in pitch. Until recently, such mismatch negativity (MMN) was considered to be automatic and so independent of attention[56]. The deviant stimulus was viewed as standing out against a background of representations of formerly regular series of stimuli retained in memory, thereby causing attention to be oriented toward this stimulus. A process of this kind tended to conceive of attention as purely passive in relation to external stimuli and to abstract attention from the interests, motivations and intentions of the subject. In fact, what the combination of a deviant stimulus and a voluntary orientation of attention revealed, is that when the subject has to attend to a sound in one ear while ignoring the sounds in the other, the MMN registered in the case of attention is no less than two times greater than in the case of inattention[57].

Such results prove the early influence of an internal activity of the listener upon his perception of auditory regularities. This perception can no longer be attributed to a mechanism of automatic detection of irregularities released by the physical properties of stimuli. A special recruitment of cognitive resources is required for the selection of the deviant stimulus, as the mere contrast it creates with the regular series of tones does not suffice for its perceptual recognition. Perceiving it implies that it is recognized as deviant, and this by a focusing of attention upon its occurrence. We can see here the importance of the notion of an identifying act in the theory of perception, an act without which a true realization of the identity of the object would be out of the question.

            Magneto-encephalographic recordings confirm these findings by registering the electromagnetic fields evoked by the sounds perceived in the attentive, in contradistinction to the un-attentive, ear[58]. It has been found that the activity evoked by attentive hearing of a tone is situated next to, not to say confounded with, the activity evoked by an inattentive audition. Both can be referred to the auditory primary cortex, i. e. planum temporale in Heschl gyrus near the Sylvius fissure. A localization of the source that fuels the hypothesis of a control exercised by attention on the cortical treatment of the auditory signal, a control that bears upon the very first stages of this treatment, including that of stimulus selection at the point of entry of the auditory cortical system. In fact, some measurable incidence was registered in this auditory primary cortex no later than 20 msec poststimulus.

 

Attention modulates vision

 

            The functional organization of the primary visual area (V1) in the occipital cortex retains the topography of the retinae (retinotopy), a structural homology that tends to disappear in the temporal and parietal cortical regions, deemed to be more concerned with interpretation than with the reception of visual information. Such a disposition was thought to be indicative of a purely receptive functioning of V1, where we find cells devoted to a passive detection of elementary signals impinging on their receptive field.

A recent piece of research in brain imagery by fMRI (functional magnetic nuclear resonance) succeeded in disassociating and comparing the activations of the visual cortex correlated with shifts in visual attention with those evoked by passive exposure to identical stimuli[59]. Successive shifts of attention towards progressively more peripheral sectors of a circular target induce a transitory amplification of activation that sweeps the cortex from its occipital pole (V1) to ventro-medial extrastriate regions. This progression conforms to the known retinotopic pattern of cortical representations of the visual field in the visual cortex, despite the fact that it reflects a movement of attention and not of the gaze, which remains fixed on the centre of the target. A remarkable locational concordance is observed between the enhancements of activations of whatever origin : passive exposure to stimuli or voluntary displacement of visual attention. Such ‘attentional retinotopy’ suggests an influence of attention on the first stages of the cortical treatment of visual stimuli, and possibly even before the beginning of this treatment (20 msec poststimulus again).

These data call for a reconsideration of the role of so called ‘primary’ or ‘inferior’ visual areas. Far from being limited to the pure reception of an external signal, they prove to be the locus of a decision to see what the perceiving subject wants to see. At the very least, the same primary regions (V1, V2) are controlled in a feedback loop by modulatory influences from higher regions (V3, V4), influences that could be traced back to internal sources in the prefrontal and parietal cortex, that are themselves relaying sub-cortical, limbic[60] sources. As regards the adaptive value of this functional architecture[61], it is thought to speed up the recognition of objects in visual scenes by projecting onto the sensory material some kind of organizing pre-perceptions, informed by survival motives.

 

Attention and intention shape the body schema

 

            Electro-encephalographic recording of the fields of local intracortical potentials in the representational area of the hand has brought to light mutually coherent oscillations of a frequency of  25 to 35 Hz correlated with the execution of precise movements of the fingers requiring an effort of attention[62]. They appear most clearly in connection with the monkeys’ attempts to recuperate grapes in the holes of a Klüver board[63]. But their frequency does not vary as a function of the nature of the task. Not being synchronised with the bursts of electro-myographic activity of the forearm muscles, these oscillations cannot be attributed to the motor order nor to the preparation of an action. The important fact is that such oscillations have been recorded in sites of implantation  of electrodes located along an anteroposterior axis overlapping the central fissure. This suggests that they signal a synchronization of activities between the precentral regions devoted to the  elaboration of motor orders and the postcentral regions of the somatosensory cortex where the sensorimotor signals are integrated. This fronto-parietal synchronization does not necessarily intervene with each movement but only when the task requires a concerted effort of attention. In such circumstances, the sensorimotor integration could be facilitated by a coordination of the oscillatory activities of the somatosensory and motor cortices. A global activity which coherent pattern organizes the contributions of the interactions of the large population of individual cells recruited for the task. An analogous hypothesis was initially advanced in vision by C. von der Malsburg[64].

Brain plasticity studies of hand maps in the somatosensory postcentral cortex have established a reorganization of these maps due to cortical deafferentation[65] by limb amputation or nerve injury. Recent experiments[66] evidenced an influence of attention on this map reshaping. An electric stimulation was applied to digits 1 and 5 of subjects while the other digits were anaesthetised by an injection, a condition that spontaneously focuses attention on the disagreeable sensation in the anaesthetized digits. Electro-encephalographic recording of electric potentials elicited in the brain by these stimulations revealed that the cortical maps of hands tend to expand when the subjects attend to their anaesthetised digits and to retract when their attention is redirected toward a stimulus applied on the back of hand.

            The experience of one’s arm being prolonged by the use of a tool was correlated with the plasticity of the functional architecture[67]. A monkey was trained to retrieve food pellets using a rake. Electrodes were placed in the intraparietal sulcus, a region of convergence of somatosensory and visual information, in which neurons react not only to tactile stimuli applied to one hand, but also to visual stimuli moving around the same hand. When the experimenter moves a food pellet over the monkey’s hand, the places in the surrounding space

at which a registered neuron fires are normally concentrated above the hand. But, surprisingly, the locus of these firings shifted along the axis of the rake when (and only when) the monkey actually used it, as if, suggest the authors, this visual field expansion were “associated with the monkey’s immediate intention to use it”.

            After a stroke in the right hemisphere, patients frequently suffer from hemineglect[68] of space on the left, a deficit in attention, not in vision, that affects the contralateral[69] part of the visual field[70]. The influence of action and intention on attention was taken advantage of for the functional recuperation of the cortical representations of peripersonal space supposed to be deafferented, but not suppressed, by the lesion[71]. Patients were trained to seize a stick presented horizontally with the right hand and then to lift it repetitively. Tests of inattention (line bi-section, letter cancellation, figure copying, drawing) evince a sensible amelioration in performance due to the training. The conflict between the intention to seize a stick at its centre and the sensorimotor feedback of the stick held in fact out of equilibrium prompts the subjects to correct his skewed phenomenal space. Here again the intention to act exerts a regulatory influence upon the body schema.

 

Conclusion

 

We concede willingly that we have not given above ‘an empirical proof’, but only made a gesture, even if a not merely symbolic one, in the direction of such a proof. The data that we gathered are, in effect, for the most part referring to the effects of attention and an extension of the conscious control of awareness on the precocious stage, low level neural treatment of sensory signal, while the influence of the genesis of intention or action on perception is largely only in the offing[72]. However, as we track back their ultimate determinants, the correlates of attention in perception tend to requalify under a more inclusive category to the extent that they pertain to the same long range circuit as the correlates of intention in action. Accordingly, to be honest, the present conclusions are more of the kind of a bet on future research, but for all we know at this time it is not wishful thinking, but a perfectly reasonable bet.

Thus, what we expect to see in fact is the emergence of a large scale reorientation in neuroscience and cognitive science generally. Up to now neuroscientific labs have been concentrating upon pre-attentional, rigid, automatic modular systems of perception and decision[73]. From now on, they will compete in finding pre-perceptive or pro-active, dynamic interacting systems of attention and intention[74]. The  former conception of a mind that is essentially unconscious in most, not to say all of its functions[75] will be replaced by a new theory of the full embodiment, the rootedness of consciousness and intentionality in the body[76]. Inasmuch as one tends to find in the end what one is looking for, the cognitive impact of consciousness is likely to appear ever more precocious, contrary to the previous assumption that consciousness could only be encountered much later on in the hierarchy of cognitive functioning.

            If our forecast is correct, this re-direction of empirical research will change the terms of the relationship between cognitive science and phenomenology. As we have seen, the anti-naturalism of the phenomenology of transcendental constitution was not, after all, incompatible with a physiology of anticipation and action. A physiology that would try to unearth the biological foundations of those constitutive operations without which an acting subject would be unable to attribute to objects of its experience the meaning of being distinct and independent of consciousness[77]. In fact, recent empirical research has already begun  to implement just such a neuro-physiology of constitutive consciousness, thereby heading in the same direction as Husserl when he called for a science of the constitution of any kinf of objectivity by an essentially active, conscious being.

 

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