Journal of Humanistic Psychology

50(4) 410­–429
William James and © The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0022167810376305
Implications of the http://jhp.sagepub.com

Neuroscience
Revolution: An
Outrageous
Hypothesis

Eugene Taylor1,2,3

Abstract
William James anticipated that his views on a science of consciousness
would have an impact even decades after he had passed away in 1910.
His evolving model of consciousness is reviewed as it developed between
the 1860s and the early 1900s. As a result of these investigations, James
developed a metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism to
answer the question of how waking rational consciousness can understand
states of consciousness beyond itself and to address the larger problem as
to whether or not a science of consciousness is even possible. His answer
led him to an investigation of the primary presuppositions underlying how
consciousness is actually conducted and an alternative epistemology to
reductionistic positivism. His view influenced subsequent developments
in personality–social psychology in the 1930s and 1940s, and the birth
of existential-humanistic psychology in the 1950s. Though emphasis on

1
Saybrook University, San Francisco, CA, USA
2
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
3
The Cambridge Institute of Psychology and Religion, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Eugene Taylor, Graduate College of Psychology & Humanistic Studies, Saybrook University,
747 Front Street 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94111-1920, USA
Email: etaylor@igc.org

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Taylor 411

the person as the central focus of psychology has virtually disappeared in

the era of the cognitive neurosciences, new developments in the area of
neurophenomenology that draw on James’s ideas suggest the new focus of
a person-centered science will be on the phenomenology of the science-
making process itself, and the experimenter as the new confounding variable
in the conduct of experiments. Humanistic psychologists are encouraged
to turn their attention to the humanistic implications of the neuroscience
revolution in order to answer aspects of the relationship between the brain
and the mind that the reductionistic neuroscientists still cannot fathom.

Keywords
William James, neuroscience, neurophenomenology, epistemology, radical
empiricism, consciousness

The year 2010 marks the anniversary of the demise of the American
philosopher-psychologist, physician, and Harvard professor, William
James, MD. He is most often confused with his younger brother Henry, the
novelist, because so many have had to read Henry’s novels in college, while
those who do know William can at least remember that he was author of
the Principles of Psychology (1890), a pioneering text that launched psychol-
ogy in America as an experimental science, and that he wrote The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902), as well as philosophical texts such as The
Will to Believe (1897) and his more well-known Pragmatism (1907). His
thinking was so broad that he has been variously claimed by behaviorists,
psychoanalysts, gestalt psychologists, psychologists of perception, those
engaged in the scientific study of emotions, the analytic philosophers, as well
as the phenomenologists and existentialists, and now, though long dead, he is
even raising eyebrows in the neurosciences (Baars, 2010; Crick, 1994;
Damasio, 1999; Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008; Thompson &
Varela, 2001; Varela, 1996).
So although James remains largely obscure to the public, arising like a
phoenix out of the ashes, modern philosophers and neuroscientists are begin-
ning to take note of work he accomplished at the end of his life that points to
the science of consciousness today. Humanistic psychologists remain unin-
formed by this occurrence, however, though it has a bearing on the long
awaited revolution in science that since the 1960s they have long sought and
involves a new agenda for humanistic psychologists in the area of what
I have called the humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution. On
the centenary of James’s passing it seems appropriate then to outline James’s
role in what can only be tentatively fielded today as an outrageous hypothesis,

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412 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

forecasting a transformation of experimental psychology as well as science

generally as we know them.

The Argument
Most Americans would be shocked to learn that, among other strains of
influence, a uniquely American contemporary psychology that sets American
psychology apart from the type of laboratory science that developed in
Leipzig with Wundt’s laboratory in 1879, began with the literary psychol-
ogy of the New England Transcendentalists, dating from the 1820s. William
James was the inheritor of this Swedenborgian and Transcendentalist liter-
ary legacy, defined as an intuitive and spiritually oriented psychology of
character formation. His task was that he had to transmute it into the more
rigorous scientific dictates of the age in which his own thought matured
(Taylor, 2002). The result in his hands was a 50-year odyssey to launch an
evolutionary theory of consciousness, culminating in a philosophical episte-
mology grounded in a tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and
radical empiricism (Taylor, in press-a, in press-b).

James’s Model of Consciousness

James developed a model of consciousness that covered a spectrum of states
ranging from the psychopathic to the transcendent, which then forced him to
take step back and ask, “Is a science of consciousness really possible” (Taylor,
1981). His answer was yes, but it called for a transformed science. In the
beginning of this journey, in the early 1860s, as a young medical student and,
through the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, James became a junior confidant at
the periphery of Darwin’s inner circle. While everyone else was looking at the
plant and animal kingdom generally, James took up the scientific study of
individual consciousness in the biological context of natural selection. After
taking his MD in 1869, as a physiological psychologist and budding philoso-
pher, he then fought the social Darwinists over the importance of the individual
in the larger scheme of evolution, championing not only the power of indi-
vidual choices but also the mind of solitary men and women of genius who led
the way into new possibilities of experience and the rest of us followed.
Because he understood the power of free will within the individual, he
was not exactly committed to the doctrine of reductionistic positivism in
science. Nevertheless he adopted that stance and produced his Principles of
Psychology in 1890, in which he succeeded in helping establish psychology
as a legitimate science independent of philosophy internationally. His focus
in The Principles was successive cognitions that appear at the center of the

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Taylor 413

field of attention. But he also linked the stream of thought to the stream of
feeling. Feelings, he said, are what warm our thoughts, making them our
own, but they were so much harder to pin down because they came from the
periphery of the field of waking rational consciousness and were so often
buried beyond the margin (Taylor, 1996a). So The Principles ended up hav-
ing two centers of gravity, one anchored in a positivist epistemology focused
on the waking state, and the other hinting that within us there were states of
consciousness beyond waking material reality (Taylor, 1996b).
Throughout the 1890s, James developed a new epistemology for the study
of these altered states of consciousness, which he was soon to call radical
empiricism, the core of his tripartite metaphysics. This expanded the purview
of scientific psychology to include the entire spectrum of human experience,
not just the rational ordering of sense data alone, as the traditional definitions
of rationalism and empiricism had maintained. In this he made major
advances in psychical research experimental psychopathology, educational
psychology, philosophical psychology, and the psychology of religion. Chief
among these developments were his unpublished 1896 Lowell Lectures on
“Exceptional Mental States” (Taylor, 1982).
In these lectures he articulated what was then known as a dynamic psy-
chology of subliminal states of consciousness, accessible through dissocia-
tive techniques such as hypnosis, crystal gazing, and automatic writing
within the individual. He also demonstrated the workings of this dynamic
psychology of the subconscious in the social sphere in dramatic cases of
hysteria and multiple personality, crowd contagion, apparent cases of demon
possession and witchcraft, the social phenomena of heredity mental degen-
eration, as well as the public perception of genius. The primary means of
entry into these interior states of consciousness was the translation of abstract
thought into mental images in the hypnogogic state, an insight that James
articulated, but one that carried him only part way into the method of symbol-
ism which he largely rejected, though it was to characterize the era of depth
psychology to come, of which he was an early pioneer.
James did not publish the 1896 Lowell Lectures for several reasons, not
the least of which was his role in launching the philosophical movement
called Pragmatism at the Berkeley Union in 1898 (James, 1898). These were
ideas he had discussed with Charles Sanders Peirce, Chauncey Wright,
Nicholas St. John Green, and others back in the 1870s, which James put for-
ward as the singular contribution of Charles Peirce. Peirce, however, claimed
no relation to James’s interpretation of his ideas and changed the name of his
philosophy to pragmaticism in friendly protest.
Pragmatism, however, caught the attention of the philosophers and the
general public and through figures such as John Dewey and Josiah Royce in

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414 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

the United States, and F. C. S. Schiller, Henri Bergson, and Giovanni Pappini
abroad, went viral, first nationally and then internationally, becoming the
first uniquely American philosophy to have worldwide consequences, reaching
the philosophical literature as far away as China and Japan.
The other reason James did not publish the 1896 Lowell Lectures was
that, because he did not have the time, he inserted their content into major
chapters of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), his Gifford Lectures
on Natural Religion, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the spring of
1901 and 1902. There, James maintained that he spoke as a psychologist of
religion. Religion, however, he would take to mean solely the spiritual expe-
riences that occur within the individual. Such spiritual experiences, he said,
can be transformative for the person who has them. The route toward under-
standing this transformation seems to be an exploration of subconscious
states within in the person. They lead to the highest states of consciousness it
is possible for human beings to achieve. The effects of these highest states,
meanwhile, must be gauged in terms of their effect on enhancing the moral
and aesthetic quality of everyday life.
This is the model of consciousness that James evolved between 1865 and
1902. It began with the scientific investigation of the center of the field of
attention; the theory progressed to the margin or periphery; it crossed over
into the hypnogogic state of mental imagery; it relied on the spectrum or
stage idea of internal states of consciousness presented by F. W. H. Myers,
ranging from the psychopathic to the transcendent; it acknowledged a tran-
scendent dimension to human experience within that spectrum, and it posited
the experience of the highest states of consciousness surrounding normal
everyday waking rational consciousness, leading to its radical reorganization.
James even addressed the experience of death, which, of course, psychical
research was all about. He then entered a period of intense philosophical
reflection on the attitude, methods, angle of view, and primary assumptions
of how science is conducted to ascertain whether or not a science of con-
sciousness was even possible. The key question became, how can the waking
rational state of science, defined as the rational ordering of sense data alone,
comprehend states beyond itself? His answer was radical empiricism, a
restructuring of the primary presuppositions on which experimental psychol-
ogy was based, and continues to be based today.

His Tripartite Metaphysics

Pragmatism (James, 1907) essentially said that within every individual, beliefs
are tested by their consequences (Taylor, in press-c). We believe in ideas and
systems of thinking because they provide some kind of payoff, materially,

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Taylor 415

emotionally, or spiritually, for the one who holds them. Pragmatism was also
a method of testing truth claims about the ultimate nature of reality. If two
explanations, one from science and the other from religion, for instance,
appeared contradictory regarding the ultimate nature of reality, but were then
examined in terms of their utility for each one of the adherents, and each were
found workable for that claim, then for all intents and purposes they were to
be considered equal. Though diametrically opposed to others’ views, each
explanation was satisfactory for the individual who held that theory. This
method of analysis did not say they were the same, however. It did preserve
whatever the unique source was of each explanation, at the same time that it
encouraged tolerance for a pluralistic world of differing viewpoints. Science,
after all, is not the only kind of epistemology in possession of the real.
Pluralism (James, 1909) was the idea that every individual center of expe-
rience was different and could not always be presumed to participate in the
same larger reality. We were not all connected together at the same time in
one huge single, monolithic state of consciousness, but rather, according to
James, we are all connected but through a concatenated union. Each of us
was connected to 30 other people at any given moment, and those relation-
ships keep changing. It was not a single organic unity but an organic whole
the parts of which operated in a state of constant evolution—a concatenated
union, as it were. This suggested to James that for the collective good, the
main task of the individual was to work on improving themselves, so that our
individual condition of incompleteness would not infect the goals of self-
improvement that others were also trying to attain.
But pluralism was also noetic (James, 1907). By this James meant each
individual was a source of visionary knowledge, capable of experiencing the
highest states of consciousness that were possible for humans to achieve. The
problem for the monists of the world, however, was that this highest state of
consciousness within the person might not be the same highest state from
person to person. Each person’s worldview was unique and had to be
accounted for. This would become James’s doctrine of pluralism. So, as the
ardent Jamesean psychologist Gordon Allport (1962) would later put it,
nomothetic statistics was fine for describing the effect of a single variable in
extremely large numbers of subjects, but the ideographic approach was
equally as powerful by focusing on the single individual as an in-depth case
study, where the person’s internal world of meanings could be explored.
But radical empiricism was the true core of James’s tripartite metaphysics
(James, 1912; Taylor & Wozniak, 1996). It referred to pure experience in the
immediate moment before the differentiation of subject and object. One
might be that moment just before the differentiation of an object in the field

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416 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

of consciousness when it first comes to us out of the “blooming buzzing

confusion” that James defines as our immediate and undifferentiated percep-
tual field. Radical empiricism might be like Husserl’s method of bracketing,
where we contemplate the object for just what it is in itself, in its unfathom-
able uniqueness, meanwhile holding all of the labels and categories and
memories of that or similar objects back until we see into the object before us
with regard to its essence. Similarly, we might think of pure experience in the
immediate moment as a profound mystical experience in which we enter into
a state of what the Mahayana Buddhists describe as emptiness (sunyata). The
Samkhya would call it Purusha, pure experience as discriminated from life-
less inert matter (Taylor, 2009). It is the immediate experience of the light of
pure consciousness independent of the continuing flow of insights into all
objects achieved in the highest state of samadhi (Taylor, 2008).
Radical empiricism poses a number of different assumptions quite distinct
from reductionistic science in psychology. It maintains, for instance, that
both subject and object have equal validity within the larger theater of experi-
ence. It attempts to overthrow hyperobjectivism, where the subjective is sup-
pressed and the objectivist account is all that appears to remain. Radical
empiricism also calls for the overthrow of the doctrine of representation in
psychological science. This refers to the prevailing misinterpretation that
there are two worlds, the one of objects out there and the one I am modeling
in my mind. Rather, there is only one object, and that exists at the intersection
between the history of that object and my autobiography. The solution to this
dichotomy James believed can be found in the fact that nothing ever comes
to us except in the immediate moment. In the immediate moment, our relation
to the object is always one of an intersubjective connection. This was also
James’s answer to the question he posed to psychologists and philosophers in
1904 in his article “Does Consciousness Exist?” (James, 1904; Taylor &
Wozniak, 1996). His answer was no, consciousness does not exist as an
object, independent of other objects. However, it does exist, but always as a
function of someone’s consciousness somewhere. It is always a process, not
a thing.

James’s Influence on Humanistic Psychology

James was an important figure in the development of several lines of thought
in the first half of the 20th century leading to the humanistic movement in
psychology, which flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s and continues
but in a much reduced form to this day (Taylor, 1991, 2009). Savants of
the humanistic and transpersonal tradition in American psychology might

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Taylor 417

remember an article published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology

(JHP) in 1991 titled “William James and the Humanistic Tradition” (Taylor,
1991). There, it was suggested that James’s impact on humanistic psychol-
ogy in areas such as Asian psychology, phenomenology, personality–social
psychology, parapsychology, philosophical psychology, and the psychology
of religion was substantial. Elsewhere, his impact on transpersonal psychol-
ogy has also been considered (Taylor, 1996b).
According to the 1991 article, in the field of parapsychology, then known
as psychical research, James brought the scientific investigation of spiritual-
ists and the mental healers to bear on a variety of claims that led major devel-
opments in modern psychotherapeutics. His legacy, however, we can say
here remains somewhat divided today as the field now referred to as parapsy-
chology has split between over identification with the methods and rhetoric
of the physical sciences, while continuing to aspire to an intuitive psychology
of character formation within the psychotherapeutic counterculture. Mean-
while, existential-phenomenology, James developed as a uniquely American
tradition beginning with the New England transcendentalists, which he
absorbed a generation later into his tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism,
pluralism, and radical empiricism. James’s metaphysics, in turn, came to
influence Henri Bergson and the French existentialists, as well as phenome-
nologists such as Edmund Husserl and later theologians such as Paul Tillich
and the existential psychotherapist, Rollo May. Today, promulgators of the
existential and phenomenological traditions in psychology remember this
influence but maintain their continued overreliance on the Continental phi-
losophies to the exclusion of this more uniquely American and Jamesean
phenomenological tradition of which they are actually a part.
With regard to classical Eastern psychology, most of those associated with
the early days of the humanistic movement were involved in the introduction
of Asian ideas into Western psychology; figures such as Aldous Huxley, Alan
Watts, D. T. Suzuki, Houston Smith, and others, were all profoundly affected
by James’s writings, which included discussions on highest states of con-
sciousness in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and the Christian traditions, as
well as numerous secular experiences of transcendence taken from people’s
autobiographies. The widespread introduction of Asian concepts and tech-
niques into the psychotherapeutic counterculture in the era when humanistic
and transpersonal psychology flourished, however, has shown a continued
overreliance on clinical psychologists and psychiatrists who are devotees,
instead of promoting a dialogue between experimental science and scholars in
comparative religions. Anticipating this problem, in his Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902), James called for the development of an objective, cross-
cultural and comparative science of religions (Taylor, 2000).

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418 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

The 1991 article in JHP also situated the historical roots of the humanistic
movement in classical personality–social psychology. Rogers came out of
counseling psychology, Maslow from comparative animal psychology, and
May from the tradition of existential depth-psychology but their ideas in the
humanistic movement resonated most closely with the personality–social
psychologists. After 50 years, parts of the movement seem to have edged
more toward trying to gain acceptance within mainstream American psychol-
ogy by blending with and incorporating parts of it. Others, meanwhile, repre-
sent an aging population of therapists and professors who have adapted into
a niche but are not able to leave a legacy there for their students to inherit
(Martin, 2001).
As we have said elsewhere, humanistic psychology developed an early
split between the secular humanists and those members who were more
inclined to inward contemplation and spiritual states of consciousness. Not a
few transpersonalists, however, continue to focus on a completely disembod-
ied conception of the enlightened person, still trying to inoculate psycho-
therapy with meditation, and now shamanism, and to promote a nondual
philosophy reminiscent of the Judeo-Christian monotheism from which they
were so certain they had escaped. At present, most transpersonal conceptions
of consciousness have become disembodied from a person and the traditional
understanding of the relation of transpersonal experiences has drifted away
from its original historical roots in personality theory, making it unlikely that
it would have a direct impact on mainstream psychology and psychology.
In fact, it is possible to say that these connections define a uniquely
American Jamesean tradition in psychology running from the era of James’s
functional psychology in the early decades of the 20th century, which had its
greatest impact through the personality–social theorists of the 1930s and
1940s. These lineage holders argued for a science of the whole person, and
became the grandfathers and grandmothers of the humanistic movement in
psychology that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The emphasis of this new
movement was on psychology as a person-centered science. Humanistic psy-
chology has since become a much larger and diffused movement defined
broadly as existential-humanistic, phenomenological, and transpersonal points
of view in psychology (Taylor, 2009). Its parents were, as we have said, the
personality–social psychologies, the so-called soft sciences in the academy,
not only the tradition of depth psychology, including Freud but also in more
ways the psychologies of Adler and Jung. The focus of the existential-
humanistic tradition in the hands of Maslow, Rogers, May, Buhler, and oth-
ers, became the psychotherapeutic hour rather than the laboratory, while the
phenomenologists maintained a strong philosophical discourse in addition to
fusing with the existential therapists. The movement extending finally to

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Taylor 419

personal experience not only as a lived reality out in the world in human
relationships, the bodily arts and sciences, but also inwardly, in the explora-
tion of interior states of consciousness.

The Evolution of Psychology as a Person-Centered Science

1900-1910 James’s functional psychology, “the only psychology

worthy of the name”
1930-1964 The personality–social psychologists of the 1930s
and 1940s call for a psychology of the whole person.
1941-1981 The existential-humanistic and transpersonal theo-
rists call for a person-centered science.
1954 to the present In the era of cognitive science, we have witnessed the
disappearance of the person from the radar screen, a
new focus on artificial intelligence and parallel distrib-
utive processing models of the brain, and a return to the
identity of self and ego. Only those who subscribe to
the rational ordering of sense data alone are considered
in possession of the real.
2001 The humanistic implications of the neuroscience rev-
olution require a new focus on the phenomenology of
the science-making process itself, where the person-
ality of the scientists and their belief systems now
enter into the equation.

In the era of cognitive science, we have seen the disappearance of the

person from the radar screen, a new focus on artificial intelligence and paral-
lel distributive processing models of the brain, and a return to the identity of
self and ego. As in the past, only that which can be measured can be studied,
and one’s research question is always determined by traditional methodol-
ogy, where it is presumed that only those who subscribe to the rational order-
ing of sense data alone are in possession of the real.
As a result of these developments, humanistic psychology today finds
itself at a crossroads (Taylor & Martin, 2000). From the late 1960s onward,
the movement was captured by the burgeoning psychotherapeutic counter-
culture and ceased being a significant influence on psychology in the acad-
emy, as it virtually dominated applications in the clinic until it was
overshadowed by the incursion of cognitive–behaviorism, which had become

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420 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

a strong enough movement to take over the university laboratories in psy-

chology and from there to invade the clinics. Down one path, humanistic
psychology had become a niche movement still flourishing in pockets out in
the counterculture, and with the incursions it had previously made into the
academy, it still retains its own Division in the American Psychological
Association, inspires a number of college and university programs and pro-
fessional journals, and has had a few books published by the American Psy-
chological Association, from which vantage point it still maintains some
recognition in mainstream psychology.
Down the other path, at the time it was absorbed into the psychotherapeutic
counterculture, giving the impression that it was not much more than a popu-
lar fad, certain existential-humanistic, transpersonal, and phenomenological
psychologists were nevertheless trying individually to advance, beyond the
general opposition to behaviorism and psychoanalysis, a sophisticated cri-
tique of the very foundations of experimental psychology itself (Giorgi, 1970;
Maslow, 1966). This was thoroughly in the tradition of William James, who
had attempted the same critique a half a century earlier with his metaphysics
of radical empiricism. The individual discussions more or less ceased, how-
ever, and never reached the level of a discipline-wide discussion from the
humanistic perspective, as humanistic psychology lost its previously growing
foothold in the academy.

The Rise of Neuroscience and Its

Implications for the Humanistic Agenda
The neuroscience revolution began in the 1950s with a series of interdisciplinary
dialogues between physics and biology initiated by the Neuroscience Research
Program begun at MIT and Harvard in cooperation with the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences (Schmitt, 1990). The revolution was actually the beginning
of cross disciplinary dialogues about the brain that soon came to include chemis-
try, molecular biology and other scientific disciplines leading to major
developments today at the interface between molecular genetics, neurology,
endocrinology, immunology, biological psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience.
The general goal of the movement has been to understand the relation between
the brain and the mind in terms of the biology of consciousness.
Within a very short period of time the general focus of neuroscientific
inquiry has jumped from dealing exclusively with problems defined by the
traditional boundaries of the old disciplinary categories of reductionistic
biology, physics, chemistry, and so on, to interdisciplinary studies in the sci-
ences and the training of a new generation of investigators to conduct science
in this new context. The most important development to note in this regard is

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Taylor 421

that at the present pace of expansion the outcome of the neuroscience revo-
lution is quite out of the control the original reductionistic mentality that
started it and out of which it grew.
One sign of this is the return of philosophical discourse in search of a
solution to the so-called “hard problem”—the relation of the brain to the
mind. The literature from the so-called specialization of the philosophy of
mind, generated by such figures as Daniel Dennett, The Churchlands, Owen
Flanagan, Robert Searls, and others, shows decisively that the current phi-
losophers trying to address the new philosophical questions, with a few
notable exceptions, are still from the generation trained in the old Kantian,
Cartesian, and Newtonian epistemology. They appear functionally incapa-
ble of addressing what I have called the humanistic implications of the neu-
roscience revolution.

Enter on the Scene, Neurophenomenology

One such hopeful possibility that has recently emerged is neurophenome-
nology. A term first coined by the anthropologist Charles Laughlin for the
Institute of Noetic Sciences’s project on science and causality (Laughlin,
d’Aquili, & McManus, 1990), neurophenomenology was taken up by the late
Chilean biologist Francesco Varela, cognitive neuroscientist, Buddhist medi-
tator, and philosopher schooled in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
Varela began by examining some of the standard problems in cognitive neu-
roscience, such as the nature of the self and our experience of time, but added
some new elements, believing that something more than merely the stimulus
and the response occurs in the study of human cognitions, namely, the state
of the body, which he called enaction or embodiment, as well as the condi-
tion of the environment in which the cognitions are taking place (Varela et al,
1991). He forecasted a marriage between typical third person measures of
cognitive science, with scientific measures of the condition of the brain and
the body, such as in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner
at the time the experiment is being conducted, combined with an understand-
ing of the subjects’ first person accounts of the experience, as analyzed by
Husserl’s systematic method of phenomenological analysis, so as to qualify
as “first-person science.” His call was for 20 years of systematic research
into this kind of experimentation to establish a body of literature called
neurophenomenology sufficient to have an impact on the continuing devel-
opment of the neurosciences.
Varela died prematurely in 2001, but his work has been carried on by a
number of other researchers, among them, Shaun Gallagher (2005), Dan

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422 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

Zahavi (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008), and Evan Thompson (2008; see also
Thompson & Varela, 2001). Their work demonstrates a strange and wonderful
coincidence between their perception of neurophenomenology and its impact
on neuroscientific inquiry and their reading of William James, who already
set the stage for addressing some of these modern problems a hundred years
ago. Not coincidently, the confluence with Jamesean phenomenology and
modern neurophenomenology assists us in defining some of the more impor-
tant humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution.

Ten Humanistic Implications

A selection of some of these humanistic implications at this point is strictly
arbitrary, but for purposes of illustration some might be as follows.

1. The Search to Reconcile the Relation

Between the Mind and the Brain
As we have indicated, this is a particularly important goal of neuroscientists,
though of more importance to some investigators than others. There are two
ways of interpreting the “hard problem,” one is the attempt to understand
how experience is generated out of neural and chemical substrates, as if
physiology was everything and experience a mere epiphenomenon, and the
other is an articulation of how our actual experience in the immediate moment
can be reconciled with scientific models about our experience in the immedi-
ate moment. In any case, the task is the same. Traditionally, when research
psychologists and psychiatrists get together to talk about consciousness, they
talk about the brain. When they discuss the problem of consciousness with
their clinical colleagues, the clash in epistemologies emerges between the
brain and the mind. The brain at least is right there in front of you as a physi-
cal entity, whereas the mind seems nebulous and cannot be exactly located.
The brain is a physiological term, whereas the mind is a metaphor for experi-
ence. The two camps have traditionally kept their discussions separate but
the difference has now became a key problem to be solved.

2. The Parasynaptic Information Network

One of the major breakthroughs of the 1980s was the discovery of the endor-
phins by a graduate student Candace Pert in the laboratory of Soloman
Snyder (Pert, 1997). This opened the floodgates to the identification of hun-
dreds of chemical substances, many thought to only function as gatekeepers

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Taylor 423

at the synapse of nerve cells, which were found to also serve as transmitters
of information between the brain and receptor sites throughout the body,
including free floating cells in the immune system. In 1895, the molecular
biologist Francis O. Schmitt at MIT identified these newly discovered lines
of communication between the brain and the body collectively as a parasyn-
aptic information network operating in parallel with the brain and its
hardwiring throughout the central and peripheral nervous system. Pert went
on to lead a team of investigators at the National Institutes of Health in the
mapping of neuropeptide receptor sites throughout the body that receive and
send back messages to the brain by way of the extra ambient cellular fluid,
conjecturing as she went that these receptor sites would probably play a key
role in unlocking the biochemistry of the emotions. The point of her discov-
eries has been the call for a major change in the way we understand the relation
of mind and body. Traditional epistemology governing how reductionistic
science is to be conducted, however, has thwarted this discussion.

3. The Presence of the Experimenter in

the Midst of What He or She Is Studying
Robert Rosenthal (1966) originally demonstrated the experimenter bias
effect in the conduct of experiments in psychology but maintained that in the
overall experimental enterprise the presence of the effect was actually quite
small. More recently, the cognitive scientist Max Velmans (1993) has pro-
posed that the experimenter himself or herself needed to be figured more
centrally into the equation of how experiments in cognitive neuroscience are
conducted. Where the experimenter stands with regard to the problem of
defining consciousness, the extent of the reductionistic impulse he or she
demonstrates, the general existential state of mind of the experimenter toward
science would all be important factors to identify as a way to estimate the
influence of the experimenter’s attitudes in the formation of hypotheses, the
selection of subjects, the methods chosen, the environment in which the meth-
ods are applied, and the interpretation of the results.

4. The Demand Characteristics of the Experimental Situation

Martin Orne (2002) generated experimental studies of hypnotic suggestibil-
ity within the experimental situation that occurred between the experimenter
and the subject. He came to understand the experimental situation as more
accurately a study in the social psychology of the event, in addition to what
is purportedly the point of running the experiment in the first place. Beyond

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424 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

the motivation of the experimenter and as a means of adhering to the dictates

of objectivity, the motivation to please the experimenter, even if it is the
experimenter’s laboratory assistant, of a subject who has once volunteered or
who is being paid exists as a factor to be considered.

5. The Phenomenological Relationship Between

Client and Therapist and Experimenter and Subject
This is an issue raised by the experimental phenomenologist Amedeo Giorgi
(1970) regarding the unity of psychology as a discipline. Traditionally,
experimentalists have maintained through a variety of mantras that only that
which has been vetted in the laboratory can be applied in a clinical situation.
This is essentially a metaphor establishing the supremacy of pure science
over all other forms of psychology. Clinical delivery of services is not a pri-
mary science but what they call applied science. Giorgi has challenged this
view, maintaining that if psychology was more phenomenologically oriented
the unity within the discipline can be found in the similarities found in the
relationship between the subject and the experimenter and the clinician and
the client.

6. The Phenomenology of the Science-Making Process Itself

Even before Giorgi, Abraham Maslow’s work, The Psychology of Science
(1966) pointed out that no matter what the claim to objectivity, science
always involved people and their motivations, aspirations, and foibles. The
model of science in operation now has been inherited from the impersonal
sciences of things, objects, animals and part-processes, based on definitions
passed down to us from that have defined the goals, methods, axiomatic
values, concepts, languages, folkways, prejudices, selective blindnesses, and
hidden assumptions from scientists in the past. The fatal weakness of this
science has been its inability to deal with the personal, the unique, the prob-
lems of meaning and value, and the holistic. The removal of an organ in
surgery, for instance, is not just a mechanical procedure, but should be
accompanied by some ritual significant enough to acknowledge the loss to
the person.

7. Various Prevailing Definitions of the Self

It is easily observed that concepts such as the self, the ego, and personality all
have their separate bodies of literature in the scientific corpus. Concepts of

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Taylor 425

the self have not been reconciled between the clinical and experimental
traditions, such that depth psychology has been admitted to the picture,
which have sophisticated models separating the self from the ego. Mean-
while, introspective reports and concepts of the unconscious have entered the
cognitive literature. Within the literature of the neurosciences, however, the
attempt is continually being made to understand the origin of self-conscious-
ness. These endeavors ignore the existing literature and instead proceed to
define the self in much the same way that psychoanalysis has classically
defined the ego, as a mediating function between the person and the environ-
ment, but with no apparent reference to the literature of depth psychology, or
to the possibly reality of altered states of consciousness experienced within
the person (Taylor, 2009).

8. The Critique of Hyperobjectivism

The issue here is whether or not the claim to objectivity within the reduc-
tive sciences is a true and meaningful one. In other words, when it comes
to consciousness trying to understand itself, is the classical definition of
objectivity even really possible? The double blind, randomized, placebo
controlled experiment is the gold standard, but what do we really know
about what the placebo actually is? The alternative in human science, quali-
tative methods, and phenomenological research has been to presume that
the human element is always there regardless of the experimenter’s claim
and so to account for it from the very beginning. This has led to the under-
standing that the relation between subject and object is not actually separate
but interconnected.

9. The Overthrow of the Doctrine of Representation

This issue surfaces when the Cartesian rule is invoked, usually in an
implied form, which starts with the assumption that mind and body were
considered by Descartes as separate from the beginning. He called for the
examination of the body, that is, material reality, as the best means forward
for understanding in science, presuming that the mind was a parallel phe-
nomenon less easily captured. This has led to the idea that there is the real
world out there and then there are our models of the world in our minds,
which must be reconciled. The mind is thought to represent reality to
itself in the form of models or images. The current challenge to this view
is that if subject and object are interrelated, then our understanding of
consciousness cannot be based so rigidly on this traditional definition of
perception.

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426 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50(4)

10. The Shift From Exact Measurements to Measurements in

Terms of Probabilities With Regard to Quantum Philosophy
This issue begins with the idea in quantum philosophy that the atom is both
a particle of matter and at the same time a wave of light. The crisis in physics
beginning in the 1920s was that both explanations were correct, though con-
tradictory. Cartesian, Kantian, and Newtonian epistemologies are correct at
the atomic level, whereas they have no relevance at the subatomic level,
which requires an entirely different epistemology for things like neutrinos to
be discussed. At the subatomic level, one could not give an exact measure-
ment of the place of a particle because it was always in motion. One could
only estimate its place using the statistics of probability. At the same time,
there is abundant evidence that the act of observation alters the phenomenon
under study at the subatomic level, but no such evidence has been forthcom-
ing at the atomic level. This suggests that science based on Newtonian
principles is not wrong, but rather usually quite correct for that level of obser-
vation. However, the problem comes when the Newtonian-based cognitivist
tries to overgeneralize his or her findings beyond the data of the immediate
experimental situation. Their conclusions must always be only half the pic-
ture, not the complete picture that they claim.

The Outrageous Hypothesis

While the era of the person seems to have gone by the wayside and been
replaced by pixels and antiquated definitions of the self, proving once again
that consciousness in the hands of the neuroscientists remains confined to
waking rational consciousness and the new but disputed and oversimplified
introduction of the so-called cognitive unconsciousness. Neurophenomenol-
ogy points the spotlight back on the investigator him or herself as an integral
part of how the new science is to be conducted, if we take James’s suggestion
that beyond human science psychology becomes epistemology. The phenom-
enology of the science making process becomes the key to answering the
“hard problem.” Self-knowledge becomes not only a legitimate method in
psychological science but also a prerequisite to the training of scientists.
A new definition of psychology emerges as an intuitively oriented phenome-
nological psychology in the immediate moment, which redefines psychology
as both an art and a science, not just a science alone. Basic science becomes
transformed as we know it, widening the purview of what it is able to study, as
this more phenomenologically oriented psychology replaces physics as foun-
dational to all the sciences. This is because, as James maintained, there is no
such thing as science anywhere without human consciousness somewhere.

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Taylor 427

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or pub-
lication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.

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Bio
Eugene Taylor holds a PhD in the history and phi-
losophy of psychology. His primary academic
affiliation is as a professor of psychology at Saybrook
University. He is also a lecturer on psychiatry at Har-
vard Medical School, and Senior Psychologist on the
Psychiatry Service at the Massachusetts General Hos-
pital. He is the author of, among other titles, William
James on Exceptional Mental States (1982), William
James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin (1996;
coedited with R. Wozniak), Pure Experience: The
Response to William James (1996), and William
James and the Spiritual Roots of American Pragma-
tism (forthcoming).

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