This article outlines the main conceptual ideas needed to understand recent research on the neurobiology of interpersonal experience. It analyzes, at anthropological, phenomenological, and epistemological levels, how recognizing otherness and intercorporeity among humans changes the image of nature, suggesting a new relationship between living bodies, neurophysiological systems, and empathy. The hypothesis is that neurophenomenology—an evolutionary, multidimensional, autopoietic approach—can probe the preconditions for a phenomenology of intersubjectivity shaped by the neuroscientific discovery of mirror neurons. Neuroscientific data are interpreted through an interdisciplinary lens to offer a unified theoretical framework.
Consciousness is argued to be both epistemologically and ontologically emergent, meaning it cannot be fully understood or reduced to simpler physical processes. By combining emergence theory with algorithmic information theory in a thought experiment involving a basic nonlinear process, the analysis shows that emergent properties can develop in a physical system. Applied to the brain's neural network, this suggests that a reductionist understanding of consciousness is impossible. Further combinatorial analysis based on quantum mechanical limits indicates that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to low-level phenomena, implying the mind-body problem lacks a reductionist solution.