Chapter 8: Psychology Between Qualitative and Quantitative Phenomena: On the Different Strata of Introspection

When I was a psychology student, I attended a lecture on early approaches of neuroscience. The presenter—the Austrian professor Giselher Guttmann¹—talked about his pioneering works together with Hubert Rohracher at the very beginnings of this research field. As he continued to (critically) shed light on how to conduct neuroscientific experiments on such controversial “topics” as “the free will,” or “consciousness,” he brought me to questioning how neuroscientists would even define consciousness—in German Bewusstsein²—in the first place. When asking him, he first paused, and then answered: “The dean of this faculty once asked me this too, and I will answer the same to you as I did to him: It is just about the second part of the word, it is simply ‘Sein’ (‘being’).”