The naturalistic attitude is a single attention on natural being and natural causality (IX, 7, 14–15, 17), something that is still in evidence today among those who deny the relevance of the products of consciousness as worthy of scientific interest. The naturalistic problem is that focusing on natural causation moves science away from meaningful justification and common sense experience. There are many important topics that together comprise consciousness in the world. In the consciousness- view, there is no doing without being, no thought without feeling, no action without reaction, no values without ethics and no self without others. Being conscious in a context is a multi-faceted whole that exists within yet more contexts of greater size. However, if common sense were sufficient then there would be no need for philosophy or science. The starting point of philosophy and the ground of psychology, and any other discipline for that matter, require understanding the experientially rich conscious life that people lead. For phenomenology, the natural attitude of the ordinary citizen of being in the world is a relevant starting point for the intentional analysis of meaningfulness, to clarify how consciousness works ideally in order to provide a co-ordinating set of universals about how consciousness is aware. But there are those scientists who take the naturalistic attitude , a focus on various levels of natural being such as the biological, biochemical, cellular and genetic. Obviously, the physical körper , the body as seen by natural science as a physical thing is an enabling condition of possibility for consciousness and intersubjectivity (IV, 25, 29, 34, 56–75). But the consciousness-biology relationship varies in sleep, coma, anaesthesia, hypnosis, mood syndromes and other ways.

Despite the variation between a number of materially-oriented psychological sciences, their commonality is discernible as an excessive reliance on natural being with an absent or unclear relation to consciousness, the world of intentionality in which meaningfulness inhabits. Philosophically and theoretically, there are problems of unclear references between concepts and their referent-experiences among the naturalistic disciplines. The philosophical problem of confused references leads to problems of accuracy of understanding and the proliferation of schools of thought and practice. For instance, there are multiple assumptions about the being of consciousness that structure the methods used to generate evidence that is interpreted to conclude on consciousness. Because natural science can only investigate specific non-meaningful biological and physiological processes, then its results are disconnected from the need to make consciousness understood. The naturalistic attitude of natural science is the dominant paradigm (IV, 25, 174, 183, 191, 208, V, 21, 63). So, denying consciousness as qualitatively and scientifically relevant does not realise the consequence of rejecting rationality, personal responsibility in morality and the law, and shared meaning in culture and science. The whole of meaningfulness is lost along with the order that has occurred in the progress of civilization itself. The denial of consciousness is a profound alienation of rational discourses from meaning and qualia that are part of the lifeworld and the history and functioning of science, mathematics and philosophy. One product of civilization is natural science. But for Scientism to deny consciousness, free will and its forms of rationality is to deny meaningfulness, the history of science and its rationality too, because all are based on meaning for consciousness.

Because natural science and natural psychological science cannot focus on consciousness properly, and while some approaches attempt their best in this respect, others believe there is no point in making any connection to consciousness because it is entirely caused by natural processes and is epiphenomenal (Crick 1994; Crick and Koch 2003). The majority of contemporary psychology rejects radical behaviourism as absurd, yet there are some scientists who prefer to theorise in terms of observable neurological processes and observable behaviours following the old programme (Skinner 1953; Watson 1913). In fact what natural psychological science methods enable are focusing on biology, neurophysiology and chemistry, and only through statistical methods do they generally ‘return to meaningful experience’ as what is happening in a person’s brain. Problems arise when natural psychological sciences employ assumed theories, images and metaphors that shape their empirical actions and ways of concluding but do not follow the inherent contours of consciousness in its intersubjective milieu. This is one reason as to why there are so many competing schools of empirical research. There are associated hypotheses like brain and biological processes as entirely unconscious influences on the conscious.

The many types of natural psychological science express their commonality which is the focus on natural being and natural cause in a variety of unclear relations to consciousness. These varieties of metaphysical realism claim that facts and truth stand completely outside of anyone’s perspective. In this view, allegedly true knowledge of facts is not intersubjective: They exist without reference to the views of people and its justification. So knowledge should be disconnected from multiple perspectives. Metaphysical realism is where “the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external sets of things. I shall call this perspective the externalist perspective… The perspective I shall defend… [is] the internalist perspective… that there is more than one ‘true’ theory or description of the world. ‘Truth’, in an internalist view, is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability—some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief system—and not mind-independent or discourse-independent ‘states of affairs’. There is no God’s Eye point of view”, (Putnam 1981, 49–50). The relevance of consciousness is the fact that all multiple senses of facts about neurons or electroencephalogram (EEG) readings are meanings that are interpreted by scientists in relation to specific objects of understanding . So all that is transcendent appears inside consciousness and findings from scientific tools of any sort, be it computerised tomography (CT) scanning or the large hadron collider, extend human perception and rationality in their own ways. Except the natural processes measured are no longer given in the phenomenological sense. The idea of there being multiple views of the world agrees with Husserl’s attendance to manifolds of sense about cultural objects .

The role of empiricism is that the test of any theoretical claim is that they must apply to everyday life and so connect with meaning as a genuine phenomenon, rather than some non-scientific side-issue, a trivial epiphenomenon (VI, 240). For instance, despite large scale international projects that aim to map the workings of the brain, these projects face considerable technical difficulties. Because of the promise of techniques like fMRI and others, there comes into view for neuroscience the possibility of modelling the brains of individuals and later of the brain in general. But natural being is not the only aspect of being worthy of attention. When the naturalistic attitude is applied to consciousness , a hermeneutic mistake is made because of its inability to understand the functioning of consciousness (VI, 229–232). The success of the human genome project in biology is where genetics has been transformed into genomics through the use of computing to read DNA sequences (ENCODE Project Consortium 2012). This has become a model for how computing might deliver general finding about the brain.

At a physical level the brain contains 10¹¹ neurons in the cortex, each of which has between 1 000 to 10 000 synapses, connections to other neurons, producing approximately 10¹⁴ connections in total. The naturalistic attitude of natural psychological science is typified in physics that brings many victories and improvements but it does not apply to all being . For instance, in some areas of neuroscience, experimentalism and the images produced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners that represent images of blood flow over time, and similar technologies, that provide the ‘naturalistic evidence’ that counts. (Some of which are positron emission tomography (PET) where a radioactive isotope is added to oxygen or glucose that can be detected within the brain. EEG readings derived from 64 or 132 electrodes that records electrical activity on the scalp. Average evoked potentials (AEP) record electrical activity with respect to a meaningful object although it has to be noted that dissimilar objects can produce the same effect). What these methods show are where there is currently oxygen-rich haemoglobin in the brain. But individual studies of current neurophysiological blood flows are insufficient to link the biological, psychological and social aspects to meaning as it exists in everyday lived experience. For instance, the fMRI scanner is the tool of choice in cognitive neuroscience. The results of fMRI scanning show living brain activity and the functional anatomy at a split second of its dynamic action about the everyday experience of living persons whilst they are in the scanner. The findings of fMRI scanning show how biological and physiological processes of parts of the brain work, for neurological activity can be investigated within the confines of a scanner. It can show the effects of the biochemistry of the neurotransmitters, the connectivity between neurons and so indicate the functioning and structure of the brains of individual persons. So far, the discipline of neurosemantics has been able to predict the connections between words and brain processes by calibrating for the physical responses of individuals (Bode et al. 2011; Breidbach 1999; Heinzle et al. 2009; Soon et al. 2008). But the general finding is that experiments prove a one to one relationship between meaningful objects with brain processes only in small areas of decision-making for specific persons (Chun et al. 2008). One finding is that brain activity occurs up to four seconds before the exercise of freewill but that does not mean that such activity is causal even if it does correlate with behaviour. The brain has many active areas before an active choice to move or think something.