Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness

Consciousness is a beautiful but slippery fish. Try to catch it and it retreats into the shadows among the reeds. How can we analyse something so fundamental to our experience? This question has been ducked by most psychologists for the past hundred years, largely because investigating consciousness requires more than the conventional third-person methods deemed necessary to make Psychology an acceptable scientific discipline. But if the study of consciousness is excluded, how can Psychology claim to be the science of the human mind? The 15 articles in this important and stimulating book show the many ways that rigorous exploration of subjective experience may provide the route out of this impasse. As someone not involved in consciousness research (I am a neuroscientist and healing practitioner), I found the book rewarding, although hard going, for the contributions provide an excellent survey of contemporary research into consciousness, ranging through brain mechanisms, clinical and therapeutic studies, complex systems, theoretical analysis, altered states of consciousness and spiritual disciplines, linguistic philosophy and interdisciplinary studies that include forays into the humanities and social science. There is much here to challenge both consciousness researchers and lay people. I cannot do justice here to the richness and complexity of ideas presented and have to limit myself to themes that I found most compelling. Experiences are essentially private and subjective, so consciousness research must include the use of first-person reports. Max Velmans considers that castigation of the subjective approach as lacking objectivity has arisen because the meaning of objectivity in the scientific method is wrongly understood. Given a clear appreciation of the ways in which the observer and observed can interact, particularly when they are the same person, subjective methods can also be empirical. Repeatability can be tested by the injunction "If you follow these procedures you will observe or experience these results". His chapter should be required reading for all scientists, what ever their discipline. The problem of how to validate such reports remains, however, because we do not have direct access to each other's experience. Velmans argues that we all have similar sensory and neural apparatus, so commonality of experience can be assumed. Thus we can share and reach agreement about private experiences, which then become public. Given certain common criteria, such as language and cultural background, are fulfilled, experiences shared in this way, or inter-subjectivity, can provide material for a communal science. Sharing as a tool for validating subjective experience has been well-established for centuries in the meditative and contemplative traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, among others (David Fontana). Charles Tart and Ken Wilber and Roger Walsh emphasise that training in a contemplative discipline is a prerequisite for researchers wanting to investigate transpersonal states of consciousness. Wilber and Wright even propose that meditation may offer the best opportunity for a multi-disciplinary study of consciousness (of which more below). However, I think Tart's claim that the investigator would necessarily need to be in the same altered state as the subject is too extreme: as Wilber and Walsh say, researchers will need to have experienced or at least glimpsed the states they want to study. Obviously a book of this sort has omissions and one is shamanism, another cultural tradition familiar with altered states of consciousness. There could be much to learn from, for instance, the work of Arnold Mindell. Transformational disciplines also develop the part of the mind known as the 'Witness'. As various authors mention but do not specifically discuss, so-called ordinary or normal consciousness is not a single, constant state (even if, as Tart reports, some readers of Science magazine consider that rationality is possible only in this state!). Rather state of consciousness varies continually in response to conditions both external to and within the body: my experience of the world is very different when I am doing the weekly shop in a busy supermarket to when I am walking in the mountains or listening to music. Training the witness would not only provide an internal observer for subjective studies but also enable researchers to keep track of changes in their subjects' state of consciousness. Inter-subjectivity is proposed as the bridge between introspective, first-person (I) studies and the experimenter–subject, third-person 'it' relationship of conventional psychology, in which the subject is essentially passive. Inter-subjectivity is designated as the second-person relationship but I find the use of 'we' to describe it (Wilber and Walsh; Velmans) misleading. 'We' implies a common experience, whereas the inter-subjective relationship requires that 'I enter into your experience' — a subtle but important distinction. Jane Henry and Janet Richardson both demonstrate that this is the basis of successful therapeutic interactions. Richardson's excellent chapter outlines how developing this empathy requires openness and an awareness of the practitioner's vulnerability and limitations, which few conventional scientists would consider including in their experimental design! Another lesson from Eastern traditions is inclusivity. Rather than the oppositional, either–or, thinking prevalent in the West, it is possible to embrace subjective, inter-subjective and third-person, quantitative approaches — radial pluralism as John Pickering calls it. To work with plurality or inclusivity requires a way of tracking the relationships between different approaches. Wilbur and Walsh's ambitious map demonstrates how the mental life of an individual is both physically embodied and embedded in social and cultural contexts. Each of these four domains consists of many levels, ranging from simple to highly complex. By mapping the domains as four quadrants, similar levels can be identified across them. All domains use the same process for testing knowledge — exemplar, evidence, falsifiability — but each has its own way of testing validity. The corollary of their map is that consciousness is not located in any one domain but distributed across and anchored in all of them. To understand consciousness, all four domains have to be considered simultaneously. Although any research effort encompassing all levels in all four domains is difficult to envisage, this map should help investigators to assess whether their methods and conclusions are appropriate to the domain they are working in; and to appreciate the influences between the level they are studying and both neighbouring levels in their own domain and comparable levels in other domains. This requires clarity about the different validity claims of the domains. In a field as complex and fundamental as this, such awareness is essential to prevent both fragmentation and procedural mistakes. Even though consciousness embraces much more than the individual, it still manifests as individual experience, which in turn is based in brain mechanisms. Peter Fenwick demonstrates how the third-person view of the brain that dominates Western neuroscience excludes the study of subjective experience and consciousness. The mind probably is an emergent property of the nervous system embedded in the physical being with its social and cultural contexts, as Alwyn Scott contends. However, an understanding of consciousness is very unlikely to emerge solely from a knowledge of brain mechanisms. Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists would do well to study Wilber and Walsh's map to gain a more realistic perspective of how their work may contribute to the overall project. Training in self-awareness and empathy, working with and in higher states of consciousness, inclusivity and pluralism, cultural and social embedding — consciousness studies could well become the force that brings more humanity into Science!