Albertazzi Liliana
University of Trento, 38122 Trento, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2024 Jul 22;14(7):735. doi: 10.3390/brainsci14070735.
In recent decades, the debate on consciousness has been conditioned by the idea of bottom-up emergence, which has influenced scientific research and raised a few obstacles to any attempt to bridge the explanatory gap. The analysis and explanation of vision conducted according to the accredited methodologies of scientific research in terms of physical stimuli, objectivity, methods, and explanation has encountered the resistance of subjective experience. Moreover, original Gestalt research into vision has generally been merged with cognitive neuroscience. Experimental phenomenology, building on the legacy of Gestalt psychology, has obtained new results in the fields of amodal contours and color stratifications, light perception, figurality, space, so-called perceptual illusions, and subjective space and time. Notwithstanding the outcomes and the impulse given to neuroscientific analyses, the research carried out around these phenomena has never directly confronted the issue of what it means to be conscious or, in other words, the nature of consciousness as self-referentiality. Research has tended to focus on the percept. Therefore, explaining the non-detachability of parts in subjective experience risks becoming a sort of impossible achievement, similar to that of Baron Munchausen, who succeeds in escaping unharmed from this quicksand by pulling himself out by his hair. This paper addresses how to analyze seeing as an undivided whole by discussing several basic dimensions of phenomenal consciousness on an experimental basis and suggesting an alternative way of escaping this quicksand. This mind-set reversal also sheds light on the organization and dependence relationships between phenomenology, psychophysics, and neuroscience.
近几十年来，关于意识的争论一直受到自下而上涌现这一观点的制约，这一观点影响了科学研究，并给弥合解释鸿沟的任何尝试都带来了一些障碍。按照科学研究认可的方法，从物理刺激、客观性、方法和解释等方面对视觉进行分析和解释时，遭遇了主观体验的阻力。此外，格式塔对视觉的原始研究通常已与认知神经科学融合。基于格式塔心理学的遗产，实验现象学在无模态轮廓与颜色分层、光感知、形象性、空间、所谓的知觉错觉以及主观空间和时间等领域取得了新成果。尽管取得了这些成果并推动了神经科学分析，但围绕这些现象开展的研究从未直接面对意识意味着什么这一问题，或者换句话说，从未面对意识作为自我指涉性的本质问题。研究往往集中在感知上。因此，解释主观体验中各部分的不可分离性可能会成为一种类似不可能完成的任务，类似于闵希豪生男爵的故事，他抓住自己的头发把自己从流沙中拽出来从而毫发无损地逃脱。本文通过在实验基础上讨论现象意识的几个基本维度，并提出一种摆脱这一困境的替代方法，来探讨如何将视觉作为一个不可分割的整体进行分析。这种思维方式的转变也揭示了现象学、心理物理学和神经科学之间的组织和依赖关系。
