John Pickering

Ratna Ling Meeting.March 29-April 2, 2007.
John Pickering
Warwick University.
Without accepting experience itself as data, research in psychology is Hamlet without the prince, Until first-person data become the necessary complement to experimental findings, the science of mental life will remain incomplete and unbalanced, a mirror which does not reflect our image.
In my work I try to bring cognitive science together with both Western and Eastern phenomenological traditions. In the Anglophone context however, the former are usually dismissed as postmodern jargoneering and the latter as New Age rambling.
Einstein believed that science had no reason to deal in experience. Shortly before his death he wrote to the children of his lifelong friend Michele Besso, who had just died:
And now he has preceded me briefly in bidding farewell to this strange world. This signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.Perhaps our Albert felt it was his duty, as a Spinozist, to dispel such illusions.

But most of us do not see ourselves sub species aeternis and to dispose of the primordial temporality of experience a ‘stubborn illusion’ flies in the face of common sense. Like Bergson, we take temporality to be real; we feel that irreversibility is in nature. Prigogine, on whom Bergson was a major influence, showed that even though even though nature may be nothing more than atoms and the void, under the right conditions, temporality spontaneously appears.
This leads Hunt to ask:
…has there perhaps been an intriguing sea-change in much of contemporary science, such that, after several hundred years of specific concentration on the linear and the inanimate, we are now beginning to seek out those physical properties of nature that actually mirror the form of our own existence? (Hunt, 1995)
James admired Bergson’s notion of durée since it replace temporality in nature, allowing him to propose a world of pure experience. To repaired. James warned against what he called Hume’s “pulverisation of experience”, claiming that if science merely seeks rules of succession in natural phenomena and denies any reality to succession itself, then … it only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. (James, 1890).
Whitehead, too, warned that Hume’s influence had led to ontological blindness in science:
Science can find no aim in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. … such Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. (Whitehead, 1938).
I hope the meeting will be an opportunity to discuss how psychology might become able to deal with all of human experience. Paradigm shifts begin in metaphysics and I think there are significant signs that the necessary shift is occuring. Apart from a resurgence of interest in Bergson, the last few decades have seen a return of interest in process thought (e.g. Rescher, 2001) and in the embodied flow of experience (e.g. Pred, 2005).
In my view, re-introducing the study of experience itself into the science of mental life will help to bring empirical and phenomenological traditions closer together. This would, in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty, possibly the most significant of Bergson’s heirs, make it possible to inquire into:
… the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity. (Abram, 1996).
Practicalities.
I will present something based around the ideas above in whatever time the schedule permits.
I would like to discuss how to incorporate first-person data into research and teaching.
I’m open to the topics on Susan’s list, which is below in descending order of my interests:
epistemic vs. ontological issues/approaches
moral implications
the body
ipseity and alterity
intersubjectivity
interspecies issues
the self and the community
I’d be ok with a film on Sunday evening, but as a McLuhan devotee, I’d prefer a hot medium to a cold one. Instead of watching, how about we all bring some short audio clips, listen to them without introduction and then compare notes on what we experienced?
References.
Abram, D. (1996) The Spell Of The Sensuous : Perception And Language In A More-Than-Human World. New York : Vintage Books.
Hunt, H. (1995) On the Nature of Consciousness. London: Yale University Press.
James, W. (1890) Principles of Psychology. London: MacMillan & Co.
Pred, R. (2005) Onflow: dynamics of consciousness and experience. London: MIT Press.
Rescher, N. (2001) Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues. Pittsburgh:University of Pittsburgh Press.