Jack Petranker Who Will Be the Scientists ?

In the emerging discipline of consciousness studies, the bright-line distinction is between third-person methodologies -honed to a fine edge by the physical sciences -and first-person methodologies -usually associated with such disciplines or approaches as phenomenology, introspection, and meditation. Proponents of each approach tend to marvel that their opponents can be so thick-headed, so downright perverse. Third-person methodologists maintain that since physical reality is (a) all there is and (b) causally closed, consciousness will yield its secrets to inquiry that follows the scientific straight and narrow. There is simply no need to traipse off into the tangled thickets of subjectivity, where lurk the wily monsters of bias and self-deception. First-person methodologists respond that their opponents, blinded by loyalty to an inapposite research program, reject the subjective and experiential qualities that are the very essence of consciousness.

British Journal of Psychology, 1999

The growth of research on consciousness creates an opportunity to enrich psychological practice. This paper suggests that a more even balance between thirdand ®rst-person perspectives may now be sought, and that this will make possible more informed interaction between psychological science and pre-scienti®c traditions for investigating the mind. This paper concludes by discussing how such developments might enhance the image of psychological science.

2019

Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness: Ciba Foundation Symposium 174. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1993

""Classical ways of viewing the relation of consciousness to the brain and physical world make it difficult to see how consciousness can be a subject of scientific study. In contrast to physical events, it seems to be private, subjective, and viewable only from a subject's first-person perspective. But much of psychology does investigate human experience, which suggests that classical ways of viewing these relations must be wrong. An alternative, Reflexive model is outlined along with it's consequences for methodology. Within this model the external phenomenal world is viewed as part-of consciousness, rather than apart-from it. Observed events are only "public" in the sense of "private experience shared." Scientific observations are only "objective" in the sense of "intersubjective." Observed phenomena are only "repeatable" in the sense that they are sufficiently similar to be taken for "tokens" of the same event "type." This closes the gap between physical and psychological phenomena. Indeed, events out-there in the world can often be regarded as either physical or psychological depending on the network of relationships under consideration. However, studying the experience of other human beings raises further complications. A subject (S) and an experimenter (E) may have symmetrical access to events out-there in the world, but their access to events within the subject's body or brain is asymmetrical (E's third-person perspective vs. S's first-person perspective). Insofar as E and S each have partial access to such events their perspectives are complementary. Access to S's experience is also asymmetrical, but in this case S has exclusive access whereas E can only infer its existence. This has not prevented the systematic investigation of experience, including quantification within psychophysics, psychometrics, and so on. Systematic investigation merely requires that experiences be potentially shared, intersubjective and repeatable. In this the conditions for a science of consciousness are no different to a science of physics." Note added for 2012 Academia.edu upload: This paper, presented at a Ciba Foundation Symposiumin 2002 was the first time the epistemological implications of reflexive monism for a science of consciousness were presented to a group of internationally recognised scholars on consciousness, including John Searle, Dan Dennett, Thomas Nagel, Sydney Shoemaker, Colin McGinn, Michael Lockwood, Margaret Boden, Bernie Baars, Peter Fenwick, Michael Gazzaniga, Jeffrey Gray, Stevan Harnad, Marcel Kinsbourne, Nick Humphrey, John Kihlstrom, Ben Libet, Tony Marcel, Jerome Singer, Robert Van Gulick, Howard Shevrin, and Pat Wall. The discussion that follows the paper is of particular historical interest, much of it focusing on the how to interpret the projected nature (or out-thereness) of much of the phenomenal world. Over the following decade, various participants accepted the importance of the out-thereness of the phenomenal world (e.g. Libet, Gray, and Humphrey) along with other theorists such as Lehar, Revonsuo, Hoche, and Tye. However, whether phenomena that seem to be out in the world are really in the brain continued to be a source of contention.

A fully-functioning consciousness science is vital for humankind's navigation of the 21st century. Unfortunately the field currently has a number of significant dysfunctions. Fortunately, they're all eminently fixable! However, there's very little attention currently either to the deep roots of problems, or to fixes. Notably, there's a crucial experiment that needs to be done, if we're to have any kind of scientific approach to conscious experience ... This Chapter ends with an explicit strategy for engaging with, and transforming, the current field. [Chapter 3 from 'The Science We Need - One Experiment to Change the World'.]

Investigating phenomenal consciousness: New …, 2000

This overview of Consciousness Studies examines the conditions that one has to satisfy to establish a scientific investigation of phenomenal consciousness. Written from the perspective experimental psychology, it follows a two-pronged approach in which traditional third-person methods for investigating the brain and physical world are complementary to first-person methods for investigating subjective experience allowing the possibility of finding “bridging laws” that relate such first- and third-person data to each other. Mindful of the relative sophistication of third-person methods the chapter focuses on the problems of developing similarly sophisticated first-person methods. The problems are of three kinds: (1) Epistemological problems: How can one obtain public, objective knowledge about private, subjective experiences? (2) Methodological problems: Given that one cannot attach measuring instruments directly up to experiences, what psychological “instruments” and procedures are appropriate to their study? (3) The relation of the observer to the observed: The more closely coupled an observer is with an observed, the greater the potential influence of the act of observation on the nature of the observed (“observer effects”). Given this, how can one develop introspective and phenomenological methods where the observer is the observed? The chapter argues that the epistemological problems are more apparent than real, although this requires one to construe what is private versus public, and what is subjective or intersubjective versus what is objective in a slightly different way—with some enabling consequences for a science of consciousness. Methodological problems are real, but not fundamentally different to the problems traditionally faced in experimental psychological investigations of mental phenomena. The close-coupling of observer with the observed in first-person investigations can also be a problem, producing “observer effects” that are more acute than in most third-person investigations. The chapter suggests that one can either try to minimise such effects or to harness them, depending on the purpose of the investigation.

The downfall of structuralist schools of psychology in the early-twenieth century is a well-known piece of cognitive science folklore. The ‘introspectionists’, as their detractors called them, intended to use scientific methods to map the world of sensory experience, but their research programme collapsed somewhat abruptly when it was discovered that the results of the various structuralist labs were incommensurable. If the stronger conclusions of Elizabeth Irvine’s first book, Consciousness as Scientific Concept, are correct, we might one day regard contemporary scientific research into consciousness as we presently regard introspectionism: a troubled chapter in the history of cognitive science. Irvine’s thesis is that the concept of consciousness should be eliminated from scientific practice....

When he formulated the program of Neurophenomenology, Francisco Varela suggested a balanced methodological dissolution of the “ hard problem ” of the philosophy of mind. I show that his dissolution is a paradigm which imposes itself onto seemingly opposite views, including materialist approaches. I also point out that V arela’ s revolutionary epistemological ideas are gaining wider acceptance as a side effect of a recent controversy between hermeneutists and eliminativists. Finally, I emphasize a structural parallel between the science of consciousness and the distinctive features of quantum mechanics. This parallel, together with the former convergences, point towards the common origin of the main puzzles of both quantum mechanics and the philosophy of mind: neglect of the constitutive blindspot of objective knowledge.

Everything around seems phenomenal and appears driven by a conscious experience. Everything is an experience and for the experiencer appears eternally phenomenal and subjective. The conscious 'How' can be easily explained by the many reductive based advances in science and other disciplines, but the conscious 'Why' persists as phenomenal. The 'How' however can be reduced only to a precise limit i.e. the limits of scientific exploration, beyond which it persists to be phenomenal. This paper is an inter-disciplinary understanding of how science and phenomenology can complement each other to help decipher and conform to the hypothetical approach, that everything around is phenomenal.