We happy to have our long-term collaborator Piotr Konderak again in Lund, where as you can see below he will present a new topic pushing the borders of phenomenological experience and accessability! All are welcome to the room itself, preferably, or if not possible to the zoom link - with cameras on, please! We start at 3am for the usual round of introductions and catching up, while the talk will start at 15:15 and last about one hour, followed by discussion.

As I have argued elsewhere, understanding of gestural meaning-making crucially requires addressing the issue of pre-reflective self-consciousness (Sartre 1943, Zahavi 2005). Accepting the claim that understanding of experiencing, acting (gesturing) subjects must be considered “on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in world performs” (Varela et al. 1991: 9), we may need to reach the earliest stages of human life to find the primal and pre-reflective basis of conscious experiences. Consequently, instead of focusing on adult, vision-based consciousness, I would like to adopt a bottom-up, developmental perspective on subjective experiences, and address their roots and emergence. In this talk, I draw on results of studies on the emergence of experiences in early human life, i.e. in utero. I discuss three experiencing-related claims. First, experiences are rooted in sensory-motor integrative activity of the human foetus (Quintero & De Jaegher 2020). Second, experiences are not just rooted in embodiment, but in the co-embodiment of mother and foetus (Ciaunica et al. 2021). In other words, it is important that experiences first develop within another human body. Finally, foetal perceptual experiences emerge out of activity of proximal tactile, olfactory and proprioceptive systems (Piontelli 2015). These ideas assume an enactive view on meaning-making and may contribute understanding the distinction between the first and second layers of the Semiotic Hierarchy (e.g. Zlatev & Konderak 2023). 

Ciaunica, A., Constant, A., Preissl, H. & Fotopoulou, A. (2021). The first prior: From co-embodiment to co-homeostasis in early life. Consciousness and Cognition 91(5):103117. 

Quintero, A. M., & De Jaegher, H. (2020). Pregnant Agencies: Movement and Participation in Maternal–Fetal Interactions. Frontiers in Psychology. Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Vol. 11, 01977. 

Piontelli, A. (2015). Development of Normal Fetal Movements: The Last 15 Weeks of Gestation. Berlin: Springer. 

Varela, F., Thompson, E., Rosch, E. (1991), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Zahavi, D., (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 

Zlatev, J., & Konderak, P. (2023). Consciousness and Semiosis. In J. Pelkey (Ed.) Bloomsbury Semiotics Volume 1: History and Semiosis, 169-191. Bloomsbury Academic.