My Peregrinations through Varela’s Neurophenomenological Horizon Toward the Mathematics of Subjective Experience

The author recounts how Francisco Varela's mentorship shaped their views on consciousness, emphasizing the role of phenomenology in scientific theories of subjective experience. They describe years of introspective practice, including meditation and sustained isolation, which led to the intuition that consciousness has a three-dimensional projective structure. The author continues exploring the geometry of consciousness, particularly during the transition between wakefulness and sleep, and notes that altered states of awareness allowed them to follow conversations while appearing asleep.

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Abstract

The chapter you are about to read is much about how other minds played a role in shaping my views and theories about consciousness.It only seemed natu ral to me from the outset that the phenomenology of subjective experience should play a pivotal role in a scientific theory of consciousness.But my intuitions found firmer methodological ground in my brief yet meaningful, and retrospectively foundational encounter with Francisco Varela as a mentor.Much of this chapter explores Varela's influences on my views about consciousness.As I'm invited to begin with a more personal and experiential testimony, I reckoned I would bring forth the real, yet retrospectively amusing strug gle for self-imposed introspective routines and experiential discipline I progressively built into my daily life as a means of better understanding consciousness.I spent years practicing introspection, including through practices pertaining to meditation, in a more or less formal manner.At some point in my life, I found myself forced to spend time in a form of sustained isolation, which I used as an opportunity, a bit like a retreat, to tackle the question of the essential invariants characterizing subjective experience.I put my mind to work in a quite disciplined manner, sometimes for days without interruption.It was in such a state that the clear and somewhat obvious intuition of the three-dimensional (3D) projective structure of consciousness came to me.Ever since, I have kept practicing such exploration of the geometry and, more generally, the structure of consciousness, often during the transition between wakefulness and sleep.My friends would often laugh, recounting how they believed I was asleep during conversations late in the night, when I was actually aware-though in an altered state of consciousness-of what they had been saying and could continue the conversation seamlessly.