Consciousness as Reflexive Shadow: An Operational Psychophenomenological Model

Abstract

Starting from the position of Searle's critique of theories of consciousness cast in an objective ontological frame and using James's notion of Radical Empiricism, an ontologically neutral, operational notion of conscious experience (awareness) is developed. This empirically based model incorporates a systems approach to conscious states, but eschews duality and unnecessary ontological ascriptions as found in many other theoretical proposals. The model is, in effect, non-epistemic and avoids the usual category error implicit in neurophysiological or quantum physical reductions. It does this by casting all human knowledge as experiential creations arising from operationally generated reflexive attention. From this point of view both objective and subjective ontologies are understood to be explicate constructs of an experiential implicate order.