Max Velmans is a British psychologist and emeritus professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, principally known for the theory of consciousness called "reflexive monism".
Reflexive monism bridges the materialist/dualist divide by noting that, in terms of their phenomenology, experiences of the external world are none other than the physical world-as-experienced, thereby placing aspects of human consciousness in the external phenomenal world, rather than exclusively within the head or brain. A similar point of departure is adopted in much of European phenomenology. The theory then explores the consequences of this point of departure for a different understanding of various conventional ways of distinguishing mental from physical phenomena, such as internal versus external phenomena, private versus public phenomena, subjective versus objective phenomena, and the world-as-experienced versus the world as described by physics. The theory also combines facets of realism (for the existence of reality per se), with idealism (for the existence of the phenomenal world), which falls short of avowing the necessity of perception to the existence of reality per se (the principle of "esse est percipi").Blackmore, S. (2003) Consciousness: An introduction. Hodder & Stoughton. Blackmore, S. (2005) Conversations on Consciousness: Interviews with twenty minds. Oxford University Press. Revonsuo, A. (2006) Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Velmans has around 100 publications in the area of consciousness studies in which he develops this basic point of departure into a general theory that addresses the many problems of consciousness, including Understanding Consciousness (2000, 2009), and Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness (2017). In his map of prominent theories of consciousness Francisco Varela categorises Velmans' work as non-reductionist, stressing the importance of first-person accounts of the phenomenology of consciousness,Varela, F. J. (1999) Present time consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(2–3), 111–140. as well as third-person accounts of brain states and functions, which in Velmans' work are thought of as complementary.biem Graben, P. & Atmanspacher, H. (2009) Extending the philosophical significance of the idea of complementarity. In H. Atmanspacher and H. Primas (eds.) Recasting reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science. Springer, pp. 99–113.
Biography Born in Amsterdam, Velmans grew up in Sydney, Australia. After attending Sydney Boy's High School, he studied Electrical Engineering at St. Andrews College at the University of Sydney, where he received his B.Eng in 1963. In the evening he attended psychology classes at the University of Sydney for another two years, before moving to Europe. After several years of research and development he received his PhD in psychology from Bedford College in 1974.Extracts from the Introduction to Velmans, M. (2017) Toward a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness: Selected works of Max Velmans. World Library of Psychologists Series, London: Routledge/Psychology Press, pp. 1–15 (of 22) After his graduation in 1963 Velmans had started his career designing electrical circuits at the electronics laboratory of the Australian engineering company EMAIL Ltd.
Academic career Velmans began his academic teaching career at The City University, London, in 1967, and joined Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1969. Over the next three decades, he held teaching and research roles focusing on cognitive psychology, language, memory, attention, philosophy of science, and consciousness studies. His undergraduate course “The Psychology of Consciousness,” taught over 25 years, was one of the earliest mainstream UK university courses dedicated to consciousness. Velmans co-founded the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society in 1994, and served as its chair from 2003 to 2006.
In 1997 he was awarded a Fellowship of the British Psychological Society and in 2011 was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy of Social Sciences. He was appointed emeritus professor of psychology at Goldsmiths in 2006. Between 2007 and 2014, he held the position of visiting professor of consciousness studies at the University of Plymouth. In 2011–2012, he was appointed National Visiting Professor by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, under the Ministry of Human Resources, Government of India. Velmans has also been a visiting professor at the University of Westminster and was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984. In 1997, he was a faculty member of the University of Arizona's online "Dialogues on Consciousness" course.
Work Early Work: Deafness Research During the early phase of his academic career, Velmans made a contribution to auditory science through the invention and development of an innovative hearing aid designed to assist individuals with sensorineural hearing loss.
While a postgraduate student at Bedford College, University of London, in 1970, Velmans devised a frequency-transposing hearing aid, later named FRED (Frequency Recognition and Enhancement Device). This device was specifically designed to aid individuals with little or no residual hearing above 4 kHz by shifting high-frequency sounds into lower, more audible frequency ranges. The goal was to expand the detectable auditory spectrum and thereby improve the perception of speech and environmental sounds for the hearing impaired.
The technical novelty and potential clinical utility of FRED led to patents being awarded in the United Kingdom, United States, and Japan in 1973. The invention was subsequently adopted by the British Technology Group, and in 1977 Velmans received substantial external funding from the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), the Medical Research Council (MRC), and the British Technology Group to support an extensive research and development programme. Between 1977 and 1987, this multidisciplinary research initiative received over £100,000 in grants (approximately £300,000 in today's currency) and engaged specialists in psychoacoustics, electrical engineering, deafness rehabilitation, and the psychology of language.
Over the course of a decade, Max Velmans directed a programme of experimental and clinical research evaluating the FRED (Frequency Recognition and Enhancement Device) system. This work focused on assessing the device's effectiveness in improving speech and environmental sound perception in adults with acquired hearing loss, as well as its impact on speech perception and production in congenitally deaf children. Under Velmans' leadership, the programme produced various iterations of the aid including body-worn, desktop, and radio transmission models and developed clinical protocols for diagnosis, training, and rehabilitation. The research was conducted in collaboration with NHS hearing aid clinics, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), and a network of academic and industrial partners.
The results of the programme were documented in three major reports, totalling approximately 500 pages, and submitted to the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), with copies distributed to research centres both in the UK and internationally. The findings were further disseminated through fifteen peer-reviewed journal articles, including in The British Journal of Audiology and Language and Speech, and were presented by Velmans at more than twenty scientific conferences and six technical exhibitions. The project received significant public and professional attention, featuring in media coverage, BBC World Service broadcasts, and television programmes such as BBC2's Medical Express.
The Royal Society selected the work for exhibition at its "Conversaziones" on two occasions, and the British Society of Audiology entered a working version of the device into the National Hearing Aid Museum.
Understanding Consciousness Velmans' Understanding Consciousness (2000, 2009) is a comprehensive summary of his theoretical work, and introduces the idea of "reflexive monism."Harris, K. (2009) Review of Max Velmans Understanding Consciousness. Metapsychology, 13 (52) http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=5300&cn=396Faw, B. (2009) Book review of Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness (2nd ed.) Journal of Consciousness Studies. Vol. 16, No.9, pp. 103–108 http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/16-9_br.pdf Batthyany, A (2002) Consciousness in the natural world (a review of M.Velmans, 2000, Understanding Consciousness). Theory & Psychology 12(3), pp. 415–417. http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/thpsyc/Reviews12(3).pdf
Reflexive monism presents itself as an alternative to both dualism and reductionism. It states that it does not make sense to speak of phenomenological experiences of reality as occurring solely within the brain, given that some of them quite clearly occur within the experienced world itself (for example, asked to point to an external light as-experienced, almost all rational subjects would point to the light that is experienced rather than to the brain, which is where, according to dualists and reductionists, the experience actually takes place). Thus, Velmans argues, the relationship between subjects and experienced reality is reflexive: some experiences apprehended by the subject are quite clearly placed "in the world" by the perceiving mind. The contents of consciousness are, thus, not exclusively in the brain, but often in the perceived physical world itself; in fact, in terms of phenomenology, there is no clear and distinct difference between what we normally think of as the "physical world", the "phenomenal world" and the "world as perceived".Velmans, M. (2009) Understanding Consciousness, Edition 2. Routledge/Psychology Press, p. 298 He writes:
This sketch of how consciousness fits into the wider universe supports a form of non-reductive, Reflexive Monism. Human minds, bodies and brains are embedded in a far greater universe. Individual conscious representations are perspectival. That is, the precise manner in which entities, events and processes are translated into experiences depends on the location in space and time of a given observer, and the exact mix of perceptual, cognitive, affective, social, cultural and historical influences which enter into the 'construction' of a given experience. In this sense, each conscious construction is private, subjective, and unique. Taken together, the contents of consciousness provide a view of the wider universe, giving it the appearance of a 3D phenomenal world. ... However, such conscious representations are not the thing-itself. In this vision, there is one universe (the thing-itself), with relatively differentiated parts in the form of conscious beings like ourselves, each with a unique, conscious view of the larger universe of which it is a part. In so far as we are parts of the universe that, in turn, experience the larger universe, we participate in a reflexive process whereby the universe experiences itself."
Changing Places The changing places thought experiment is one of many conceived by Velmans, discussed in Understanding Consciousness. The experiment was designed to demonstrate the difficulties in distinguishing phenomenologically between a "subjective" first-person experience of a given event or object and a third-person "objective" observation of the same event or object. It also throws doubt on the supposed contrast between the "subjectivity" of a subject's experience and the supposed "objectivity" of an external observer's observations of the neural correlates of that experience in the subject's brain.