From Towards a Science of Consciousness 4 CogNet Proceedings Module
In any attempt to develop a science of consciousness, first-person experience must play a necessary role. Unless introspective data is taken seriously, it is unclear what theories of consciousness or empirical investigations would be seeking to explain. However, there has been much disagreement over the question of how best to obtain first-person data. The formal introspection methods of the early structuralist psychologists (e.g., Tichner) failed, in part because of mistaken assumptions about how perceptual experience is built, and in part because of an inability to replicate across the introspective reports of similarly trained observers. The approaches of European phenomenologists (e.g., Husserl) have not enjoyed wide-spread acceptance within North American philosophy. Meditative and contemplative disciplines employ rigorous training and prolonged practice in introspective methodologies, but are often embedded in religious contexts that do not transport easily across cultures. Within consciousness studies currently, there is an active reexamination of various traditions and systems that have sought to develop reliable methods for obtaining knowledge about first-person experience and its communication across individuals. There is also a growing interest in how these apparently different approaches may overlap or complement each other. The eight chapters within this section examine the variety of methods and assumptions characterizing contemporary approaches to first-person experience and intersubjectivity.
The first chapter of this section is authored by Piet Hut, who provides a comparison of three apparently divergent approaches to answering the question, "What is actual?" These approaches are modern science, Husserlian phenomenology, and Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen. As Hut makes clear, however, each of these approaches or world views share an emphasis upon experiment as the ultimate artiber of truth, and all are characterized by theoretical foundations that are in dynamic change. Another commonality Hut finds is that each approach attempts to find "a form of deep truth" that is independent of the culture in which the approach originated. Hut also finds the three world views to be remarkably similar in their respective processes of investigation, despite the markedly different results that are produced. Hut concludes by outlining his agenda for a further comparative study of world views, which he summarizes by the slogan "roots, not fruits." His emphasis, therefore, is on comparing the structure of inquiry rather than resultant cosmologies.
Christian de Quincey, in the second chapter of this section, shifts the focus to intersubjectivity in his discussion of explorations of consciousness from the second-person perspective. In beginning this discussion, de Quincey clarifies differences between psychological and philosophical uses of the term consciousness, between two different meanings of subjectivity ("experienced interiority" versus "private, independent, isolated experience"), and between different meanings of intersubjectivity (the standard meaning of consensual validation between independent subjects via exchange of signals, versus the experiential meaning in which mutual engagement of interdependent subjects conditions or creates their respective experience). The main thesis of de Quincey's chapter is that of a need to move beyond the limitations of first- versus third-person arguments to include the second-person perspective. Consciousness, he asserts, involves not only third-person "its" (brains or computer models) and first-person "I"s (personal experience), but also interpersonal relations and "I-you" experiences during which something changes in consciousness.
In the third chapter, Arthur Zajonc explores the implications of Goethe's work for the phenomenological investigation of consciousness. Zajonc makes the case for experience being an irreducible and essential component of any future science of consciousness. Goethe, although best know for his literary works, considered his greatest contribution to be in the sciences, particularly in his criticism of naive scientific realism and his emphasis upon the role of phenomena in the study of color. Goethe's method of inquiry, Zajonc asserts, offers an approach that holds considerable promise. Summarizing his more extensive reflections (Seamon and Zajonc 1998), Zajonc argues that Goethe's method opens up new ways of resolving the two forms of the hard problem of consciousness, by it's commitment to first-person experience rather than to the establishment of hypotheses as truths about the world. Subject-object dualism, he asserts, disappears in the recognition that science is actually only concerned with the subjective world, and the first-person, third-person version will ultimately find resolution through a basic change in the structure of consciousness itself.
Within the fourth chapter, Frances Vaughan follows along the themes developed in the previous three chapters in her discussion of objective, subjective, and intersubjective dimensions of consciousness. Vaughan's main argument is for the importance of epistemological pluralism, with equal attention given to these three different dimensions. Vaughan finds that our culture, dominated by a scientific materialism, the subjective and intersubjective modes of knowing have been generally overlooked. Vaughan calls for an integrative approach to consciousness studies in which there is open and mutually respectful dialogue across the different modes of knowing. In making this plea, Vaughan draws on the work of Ken Wilber (1997, 1998) who points out that objective, subjective, and intersubjective modes all similarly employ the methods of injunction (if you wish to know X you must do Y), apprehension (direct experience using the methods directed by the injunction), and confirmation (validation of the direct experience by other who have also followed the injunction).
B. Allan Wallace, author of the fifth chapter, examines the methods of attention training and exploring consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism. Wallace makes it clear that without the subjective evidence provided by introspection, there would be no discipline of consciousness studies. William James (1890/1950) recognized that introspective study requires clarity and sustainability of voluntary attention, but was not convinced that the faculty of attention was trainable. Hindu and Buddhist contemplatives have, however, developed methods for enhancing attentional vividness and stability, and it is these methods, particularly as developed within Tibetan Buddhism that Wallace describes. He argues that these attention-enhancing methods present a challenge to modern researchers in consciousness studies "to broaden the scope of legitimate methods of scientific inquiry so that the introspective exploration of consciousness may begin to rise to the levels of sophistication of objective means of studying brain correlates of conscious states."
The sixth chapter, authored by Harry Hunt, makes the case for a necessary and reciprocal dialogue between transpersonal and cognitive psychologies of consciousness. As with the other authors of chapters within this section, Hunt sees phenomenology as primary since ". . . all we ultimately have is our experience, . . . all we know about brains and microtubules comes to us refracted through the very medium they are being used to explain." In agreement with Wallace, Hunt sees meditative, transpersonal, and other "altered" states as demonstrating that consciousness can undergo specific transformations and development, and as potentially providing "a kind of microscope" for viewing inner cognitive processes. In this way, cognitive psychology needs the transpersonal. Conversely, Hunt views transpersonal psychology as at risk of remaining mere "magic and only a modern re-recording of lost traditions," without nonreductive neurocognitive accounts of what it is about our minds that allows transpersonal experiences to occur.
The sixth chapter of this section, by Charles Laughlin, summarizes his biogenetic structural theory of consciousness. Resting upon the assumptions that all of science is grounded in experience and that consciousness is a function of higher nervous systems, Laughlin's biogenetic structural theory attempts to integrate research from phenomenology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and physics. Laughlin details the common limitations of other theories within consciousness science, which biogenetic structural theory counters. This theory, including phenomenological, neurobiological, and sociocultural perspectives, attempts to incorporate all of the approaches to scientifically studying consciousness, and places a particular emphasis upon ethnographic and neurophenomenological (drawn from contemplative disciplines linked to current discoveries about brain function) approaches. Biogenetic structuralism holds that all humans share some common experiences of themselves and their world because of "the origins of their cognized environments in species-typical neurognosis." Those Similarities between only some human beings are seen as dependent upon "the social conditioning in the development of their individual cognized environments," and unique aspects of persons are viewed as "due to the complexity and uniqueness of each individual's innate temperament and developmental path."
The seventh and final chapter, by Jonathan Shear, focuses upon an experiential clarification of the problem of self. Shear begins by reviewing the attempts at understanding the self made by Descartes, Hume, and Kant, with the resulting paradoxical conclusion being that the "self as single, simple and continuing is at once both absolutely necessary and absolutely unexperiencable and unknowable." The chapter goes on to unpack the logic of the arguments of these three famed philosophers and further demonstrate problems in the notion of self. However, Shear then shifts from discussions of self in Western philosophy to those within Asian civilizations, in which the experience of "pure consciousness" (identified by it's characteristic of being devoid of all phenomenal content) plays a key role. Shear examines the different procedures used in different cultures (e.g., within Zen, Vedantan Transcendental Meditation, and Medieval Catholicism) to produce the common experience of pure consciousness. The chapter provides support for the possibilities that our ordinary sense of self may reflect a subliminal awareness of pure consciousness as a ubiquitous component of experience, and "that after we become clearly aware of it as it is in and by itself in meditation, we can then come also to recognize it as ubiquitous as self is supposed to be. Shear therefore sees the experience of pure consciousness as capable of resolving some of the major Western concerns about self, and as clarifying commonsense intuition.
James, W. 1890/1950. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications.
Seamon, D., and A. Zajonc. 1998. Goethe's Way of Science. Albany: SUNY Press.
Wilber, K. 1997. An integral theory of consciousness. In Journal of Consciousness Studies 4: 71Ð92.
Wilber, K. 1998. The Marriage of Sense and Soul: The Integration of Science and Religion. New York: Random House.