Page 132 - Contribution To Phenomenology

CONNECTIONISMAND PHENOMENOLOGY 125

any individual involved in the actual practice of Phenomenology can ever
be certain that he or she has realized Phenomenology completely with
regard to any specific result. One can think that one has good phenome-
nological evidence for what is actually a rather shaky claim or not see an
essential connection between things, and one reason for this can be that
one has allowed oneself to be misled by models that have been imported
from another sphere. Moreover, the more complicated the phenomenon
at issue, the more susceptible we are to mistakes.
Husserl's favorite examples of rather basic mathematical truths can be
misleading in this regard, for the sphere of the mathematical is purposely
a very restricted one, made up of clearly definable entities pertaining only
to quantities as such. In the realm of the mental, I would maintain,
things are not as clear—in spite of what Husserl maintains in a number
of his earlier writings about the complete and direct givenness of mental
states (das Psychische) as such. Thus the kind of paradigmatic examples
we use in when reflecting upon mental life can have a great effect upon
what the results of our investigation will be, and these examples will most
often be strongly affected by what we think we know about the non-
mental sphere and intimately, perhaps even unavoidably related to
questions concerning the physical basis or instantiation of mental events
(for instance, the relationship between sensuous fields as we find them
in phenomenological reflection and what we believe about the nature of
various bodily organs).
In sum, then, even if empirical science is accorded no place in the
pure formulation of the phenomenological program, that does not mean
that what we learn (or at any point in time, think we have learned) from
non-phenomenological science cannot have a profound effect upon the
practice of Phenomenology.^^
Finally, I might add that the way we think about the workings of
neural networks is especially relevant in view of HusserFs recognition that

^^ One should not overlook the fact that phenomenology never has proceeded in
a vacuum free of the influence of other sciences. Our common ways of thinking of the
mind both outside of and within phenomenology display the traces of Christian theology
(the mind as a self-subsisting entity capable of willing and knowing all on its own), modern
mechanistic thinking (the mind as the operator of the body as a machine), and biology
(concepts like "sensory stimuli" or "input from the senses"), and computer science (the
very notion of "input" itself). It is thus not so much a matter of importing models into
phenomenology from outside, as being inspired by and adopting models that are more
adequate to the phenomena at issue.