Christian de Quincey
Science & Consciousness: An Odd Couple?
I will look at the questions “Can we have a first-person science of consciousness?” and “How will science have to change to include consciousness?” and then outlines the kinds of changes needed.
Don Hanlon-Johnson
Somatic Awareness as an Essential Element in First-Person Methodology
A glaring problem in any first-person methodology is how to control for individuality of perspective, biases, blind spots, and outright deception. First person science depends on reports of direct experience. Yet, although first-person experience is radically limited in scope, conclusions are often finessed beyond that scope. In addition, we have to face the poignant reality that we sometimes unwittingly deceive ourselves. And, if first-person science were ever to emerge as a mainstream activity, we would have to deal with the well-known attempts at deception for the sake of profit.
Third-person science has enjoyed its enormous transcultural success in large part due to the simplicity of its methods of controlling for these factors: measurement and mathematical reduction. Edmund Husserl, in creating the agenda for Phenomenology—zu den sachen selbst—made a central question whether or not it was possible to gain the kind of reliable knowledge in the realm of direct human experience that we find in reductionist science. A crucial strategy which he created is bracketing in combination with careful description, the inhibition of judgments of truth or value while the experiencer keeps returning to the description of the experience in question.
But how does one do this? It is an extremely difficult task, if even possible.
Phenomenology as a field has become, like most fields, an intramural discussion of texts and interpretations. For that reason, a confluence of experiential practices—some old, some new—hold out the promise of creating communities of co-researchers who have the training to implement bracketing so that the things themselves might shine forth in their uncluttered truth.
I will blend some theoretical analysis of this question with experiential exercises to embody them.
Erika Rosenberg
Knowing consciousness inside and out: A look at the collaborative venture of Buddhism and Science
I will discuss collaborative research efforts in contemplative science aimed at better understanding the nature of consciousness. First, I will briefly survey the state of the field of meditation research in terms of what it does or does not tell us about consciousness. Then, I will explore the more general question of whether one can know about consciousness from a third person perspective. If meditation training changes the quality of conscious experience, certain capacities of consciousness such as stability of attention – should show measurable changes as a function of such training.
Finally, I will briefly discuss the research of The Shamatha Project, a multi-disciplinary collaborative study of the cognitive, emotional, and neurophysiological effects of intensive meditation training, which includes first and third person measures of consciousness.
Jack Petranker
First-Person Experiments
As I see it, the most internally consistent and promising approach to first-person inquiry into consciousness is “being conscious differently.†By this I mean that you have to explore present experience from within present experience. This means proceeding intransitively, in non-intentional mode.
To investigate consciousness non-intentionally and within the present act of being conscious requires introducing an additional element—another layer—into ordinary conscious experience (roughly, Husserl’s “natural attitudeâ€). We can therefore speak of “consciousness-plus,†or “C+†for short. Because evoking C+ need not require extensive training, it lends itself to exploration within the framework of this conference.
Toward that end, I will present three 30-minute experiential sessions, each meant to evoke (and clarify) C+. In each, I will spend 5-10 minutes laying out the theoretical framework that grounds this way of proceeding, introduce an exercise that will last about 10 minutes, and use the rest of the time for discussion. I am doing this over three days in the hopes that participants will continue “running†the experiments at other times during the day as the conference unfolds, discussing the results informally. The idea is to give everyone a taste of how this particular mode of inquiry into consciousness operates and what benefits it may offer.
Max Velmans
Free will, values, and the operations of the preconscious mind
This talk explores the source of values and the connections between values, evaluation of action and the operation of free will. Using a combination of phenomenological analysis, psychological evidence and neuropsychological evidence I argue that the source of feelings of value and feelings about the consequences of our actions, along with wishes, decisions and other contents of consciousness have their origins in the operations of the preconscious mind. This leads us to ask interesting questions about the relation of the conscious to the preconscious and unconscious aspects of mind, the nature of self, and the embedding of mind and self in the surrounding world.
Background Reference: Velmans (2009) Understanding Consciousness Edition 2. Routledge/Psychology Press
Ron Chrisley
Empathy and Robots: Some Ethical Implications of a Science of Objectivity
I have been working on robotic/ computational theories of affect (including pain), and according to many ethical theories, affect and especially pain are directly relevant to doing what is right, and virtue. This raises ethical concerns. But also, and more importantly, the synthetic phenomenology approach, unlike some means of experience specification, is “passionate” (in the sense of not being dispassionate), since the success of the specification requires an empathic connection between all three corners of the specification triad:Â subject, specifier, and specification recipient. Such interdependencies pose ethical questions, since to understand another, even scientifically, may thus require us to become a kind of person that our ethics may tell us is non-virtuous.
Susan Stuart
The Immanence of Interkinaesthesia
‘Interkinaesthesia’, like ‘intersubjectivity’ and ‘intercorporeality’, relates to notions of affect, but in this case it is with the affect we can have on the neuro-muscular dynamical flow and muscle tension of an other including other animals, both through touch and through touch which does not make contact, for example, your perception of others perceiving you, and the way language, as a biodynamical engine, can alter the body.
I will argue that interkinaesthesic dialogical-relations are the preconceptual experientially circular temporal dynamics which form the deep extended melodies of relationships-in-time, and that any understanding of how those relationships work, when they falter, when they resonate sweetly, and so on, will depend on a grasp, not of our intersubjectivity or our intercorporeality but, of our interkinaesthesia.
I will elaborate the interkinaesthetic the notion of an ontogenetically primary sensory-kinaesthetic, with kinaesthetic memory, melody, imagination and anticipatory dynamics building in to it.  One of the most striking things here is to get rid of the false idea of turn-taking as the basis for the organization of communicative dialogical relations, and this will be done with reference to the affective balance achieved through the Husserlian notion of Paarung, like I said, the folding, unfolding and refolding of the intersubjective, intercorporeal, interkinaesthetic dynamic.
Steve Torrance
1. The virtue of first-person science (with John Pickering)
The University of Chicago, under the ‘Arete Initiative’, has invited grant bids from groups interested in contributing to the development of a ‘Science of Virtues’. In spring 2009 John Pickering and Steve Torrance submitted an initial ‘Letter of Intent’, with the assistance of several other members of the Ratna Ling group. We will outline the rationale and content of the first stage funding application, whose outcome will be known in a few weeks. The proposed project has three strands: (a) building links between mindfulness and environmental approaches to mind and ethics; (b) an empirical strand using 1st and 2nd person approaches to examine ethical experience in adept meditators; (c) explorations of how 1st person methods of study can help mind science impact on the study of virtue. We will invite comments and suggestions from members of the workshop on how the proposal could best be taken forward, if we are successful at getting to the next stage, and if not, on how we might mount further applications to other funding sources.
2. The ‘inner’ character of experience. (with Russ and Jack)
This session was originally going to be conducted by Claire Petitmengin, but unfortunately she is unable to attend in person this year.
What do we mean by ‘Inner Experience’? In what sense, if any, is consciousness essentially ‘inner’? How you answer these questions may have important implications for methodologies of first-person exploration.   One possible response is that first-person investigation IS the investigation of ‘inner’ processes. Perhaps no-one seriously holds this view but sometimes there is talk as if all experience is to be seen as ‘inner’. Steve will question this view, and will suggest that there is no clear sense in which conscious experiences are essentially inner, or at least that any such sense still remains to be explicated. Some experiences are undoubtedly ‘inner’, but not in a way that excludes others from being ‘outer’. (See his paper ‘Contesting Concepts of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, May 2009). Russ will respond, clarifying the ways in which his DES methodology does and doesn’t focus on ‘inner experience’. We will also incorporate inputs from Claire and Jack. We will then pass it over to others for discussion.
Tom Froese
Artificial Embodiment: An integrative methodology for a science of consciousness
Even today, 40 years after Bach-y-Rita’s seminal Nature paper on a tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS) system, no consensus can be reached on how best to interpret users’ verbal reports. Is the experience of using such sensory augmentation interfaces visual, tactile, cognitive, or something altogether new? The growing fascination with technological wizardry, i.e. the building of different and more advanced interfaces, is in itself unlikely to resolve such a foundational issue.
The lack of a principled methodology to make progress on this impasse can naturally be linked to another growing debate in the cognitive sciences, namely about the role of first- or second-person approaches for the scientific study of consciousness. The development and establishment of these approaches is encountering some difficulty in the face of a widespread skepticism inherited from the behaviorist tradition. In order for them to demonstrate their methodological validity it is especially important that they go beyond mere data collection, i.e. descriptions of experiential phenomena, and move into a more productive relationship with the rest of cognitive science.
Accordingly, we propose to address the distinct difficulties faced by phenomenological methodology and sensory augmentation research by relating these two growing areas of research in a mutually beneficial manner. The crucial step of moving beyond mere technological wizardry or data collection into a principled scientific research program is to link them together in terms of hypothesis generation and verification. We refer to this novel research program as Artificial Embodiment (AE). The basic methodology consists of four essential steps:
(i) Synthesis of interfaces: The experiential phenomena of interest are not naturally occurring and need to be artificially induced by technological means. Here it is possible to draw on the work that has already been going on in research into enactive interfaces and sensory augmentation.
(ii) Emergence of experience: The experiential phenomena of interest emerge out of the ongoing interactions of a human subject with the world, as mediated by the interface designed in step (i).
(iii) Analysis of first-person perspective: The experiential phenomena that emerge in step (ii) are essentially opaque, especially if the subject is not an expert in becoming aware of experiences and describing them. In other words, experiences are typically in need of being explicitated by means of second-person interview techniques, and then require further analysis.
(iv) Generation of hypotheses: The insights gained in step (iii) form the empirical basis for verifying the original motivating hypothesis for the study. They also inform the process of generating novel hypotheses, which then become the basis for the design of novel interfaces in step (i).
It is step (iv) which crucially turns these disparate elements into a coherent scientific research program. Indeed, any serious study should ideally traverse this methodological circle at least twice: Once to generate a novel hypothesis, and then once more to verify the validity of this hypothesis.
So far there exists no scientific study which has systematically followed the AE research program as outlined above. One topic that is generating growing interest in the cognitive sciences is the role of value for the embodied mind. Accordingly, we propose to use AE as a framework for investigating the phenomenon of situated normativity, i.e. the values associated with instinctive or unreflective embodied action. Such values are a good starting point because they are an essential aspect of phenomenal feel, as well as of affective behavior, and thus provide us with the basis for correlating subjective and objective data. A study with haptic interfaces (distance-to-touch) has indicated that subjects show aversive behavior with minimal priming (“avoid objectsâ€) and no knowledge of the interface. Can we explain this normative reaction in terms of the phenomenology of the subjects?