In seminars and colloquia doubts and critical questions… are always concerned with the same issues.  Can one trust what the subject says? Is what he says true? Can it be proven? How can we be sure that what he says is true? — Pierre Vermersch (p. 52)

 When the mind is not pushed by fascination in any direction, neither to external objects, nor to internal objects, like thoughts and emotions (treated as external objects), there will be no object, no aim. Notions like ‘within’ and ‘without’ will lose their meaning. — Charles Genoud (p. 119)

I come away from Ten Years of… with a mixture of feelings. On the one hand, it makes me want to read the original View from Within (which I have not yet done), and it goes some considerable way toward relieving me of my skepticism toward the whole project of neurophenomenology, at least when understood to be “predicated on the belief that a marriage between an individual’s intorspectively arrived at data, and findings using instruments such as fMRI scanners, may generate new ways of understanding aspects of consciousness” (p. 190). How else could one determine what experiential state corresponds to a certain fMRI pattern, except by asking the subject what she is feeling? As Pierre Vermersch writes (p. 21), “…there is no point carrying out research into consciousness, or into any other subject of study based on consciousness, without trying to gather information about what the subject is conscious of, in his own view.” Unless one is opposed to first-person methodologies altogether or wishes to take a reductive approach as e.g. Dan Dennett does with his heterophenomenology project, then first-person methods seem difficult to argue against. Likewise it seems reasonable that consistencies in experiential reports across subjects trained in introspective methods may provide, if not direct evidence for or against one or another theory of consciousness, then valuable circumstantial evidence. There is nothing wrong with such evidence if presented and understood for what it is. Meanwhile the possibility that most of us can, with relatively straightforward training, be encouraged to remember details of past situations we would swear we had no consciousness awareness of at the time — the colour of someone’s shoes, the distracting buzz of a fly — is something I, certainly, find quite exciting.

On the other hand, I cannot help but wonder if some if not many of the authors in this volume are missing what I would take to be the greatest contribution of sciences of the mind to the broader scientific project. It seems to me that sciences of the mind — including the study of consciousness — remind us of what we should have remembered all along: that the observer is always present, that the subjective is inseparably bound up with the objective, that science yields not timeless understandings freed from cultural and historical contexts but working hypotheses.  On pain of regress, the mind cannot know itself fully — a point made by F.A. Hayek in The Sensory Order more than half a century ago; but it is not only the mind that we cannot know fully (and consistently!), it is the world. Sciences of the mind are not, as Claire Petitmengen and Michel Bitbol might be taken to suggest in their contribution, just another tool like any other in the empirical scientist’s handbag; they are different precisely because of the way they force us to confront our role as observers and the way that the observation alters the observed. Vermersch asks why learning to introspect “should… be  any different than for any profession, any activity in games, sport, music, etc” (p. 28). It is different — or so I think! — precisely because of the unavoidably self-referential nature of the exercise: the mind trying to know itself, with the potential regress that invites. (I realize that some of the volume’s contributors are at pains to deny that any such regress is lurking.)

In brief, I am concerned that the contributors to this volume are too much focused on taking first-person methodologies to third-person empirical science — with the aim of legitimizing them, which is understandable — and not as much as they might be on taking things the other way around (beyond basic lip service).  That aside, one might well ask how well they succeed at their chosen task; and this raises a number of further concerns.

First is the reliance on, and close affiliation of a number of the contributors with, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). I have to say at the start that I know very little about NLP, beyond what is described here and the anecdotal evidence of friends; but I know that it is a red-flag phrase for a lot of people — and that, alone, should require some further explanation of its involvement. Many ideas that are denounced as “crazy” turn out to be anything but; at the same time they do, legitimately, require careful justification and argument. There is a passing mention of how the founders of NLP “seem… to have deliberately taken NLP out of what they perceived as the confines of academia, making it into a commercial venture accessible to all who could pay the training fees” (p. 193). Proceeding to say in the next paragraph that “whilst there are various criticisms that can be levelled at this field… this should not distract attention from the pragmatic tools that NLP offers” does little to assuage my unease.

Second is the highly abstract and self-focused nature of some of the accounts — I have in mind in particular the highly first-personal contribution by Natalie Depraz. As fine of a researcher as she doubtless is — she is certainly well-published, and she has published with Shaun Gallagher, whom I respect — I was lost.  Not only did I find too few recognizable landmarks, I seemed to confront too many looming circularities, too many attempts to use language to get beyond the limitations of language: both real problems one seems to face, again and again, in this field. I do not intend to single out Depraz; I found the Andreas’ idea that our sensory modalities may, for each of us, be split between first-, second-, and third-person intriguing — so that ” as I experience an event, I could be seeing out of my own eyes (Self position); I could be feeling the feelings of the other person (Other position); and I could be hearing an internal voice making comments from the outside (Observer position)” (p. 221) — but by the end I was still confused what their idea actually means, practically.

Finally, in all the talk of “authentic introspection” and “pristine experience”, there is the repeated assumption that people trained in introspection are able to get closer to the real truth of their experiences. Certainly, in some ways this appears to be true: as when people are able to remember obscure details of past situations, ones that can be verified or that, for lack of a better phrase, “ring true”. What is not immediately obvious, however, is just what it means to “know yourself better”, or how much the training in introspection changes the nature of the experiencer and the experiences.

I find much here of interest, but I come away not only with mixed feelings but the very strong impression of a mixed bag of ideas going off in various directions: into neurological investigations, into consciousness studies, into early child development, into psychoanalysis. I found Hurlburt et al.‘s notion of sensory awareness and Philippot and Segal’s discussion of mindfulness-based interventions (a type of psychoanalytic method) particularly insightful. What I lacked, and lack, is a sense of where and how the ideas come together. But perhaps that is to be expected of what many of the authors describe as being “such a young field”.

© 2011 Joel Parthemore

Joel Parthemore successfully defended his thesis, on theories of concepts (within philosophy of mind), in March.  His particular focus of attention was Peter Gärdenfors’ conceptual spaces theory.  He is currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher by the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics at the University of Lund in Sweden, exploring the relationship between concepts, representations, and language.  In his spare time, he plays with Linux systems and goes cycling.