Brain World or Life World? Critique of Neuroconstructivism

Abstract

From a neuro-constructivistic point of view, the brain creates an internal simulation of the external world which appears as the phenomenal world in consciousness. This view presupposes in particular that the subjective body and the organic or objective body belong to two fundamentally different worlds, the mental and the physical. The spatiality of the subject-body must then be declared an illusion, for example by referring to dissociations of the subject- and object-body as in the rubber hand illusion or the phantom limb. However, this alleged virtuality of body experience can be refuted by the intersubjectivity of perception, which confirms the co-extensivity of subject-body and object-body. Subjectivity thus proves to be as embodied as it is spatially extended, that means, as bodily being-in-the-world.