Wendell Wallach
Ratna Ling 2007
Since 1967 I’ve been probing whether introspective work, meditation, or contemplation can be approached with some degree of scientific rigor. This kind of inquiry, as most of you will know, is an apparently never-ending confrontation with partially hidden expectations and intentions that color one’s perception. That confrontation is also cathartic, a peeling away of assumptions, and a reorganization of one’s mind in light of their absence. But whether this negative neti neti (not this, not that) approach leads to a more “scientific” understanding is subject for considerable debate. In many respect, this inquiry, what it reveals and how it transforms (for good or bad) the human psyche, has defined my adult life.
My interest in this group lies in either creating a community of inquiry around first-person methodology or discovering that this is a relatively hopeless adventure. Like most of life’s journeys, it appears that we’ll have to make the trip to truly find out (experience) where it leads.
What follows is a topic I’ve considered for a presentation.
How embodied is cognition?
Abstract: Mystical experiences, inner silence, altered states of consciousness, peak experiences, and being in “flow” are often accompanied by the sense that cognition is not only embodied but the environment itself is conscious — the individual is in consciousness rather than consciousness being in the agent. Experiences of the unity of consciousness, or oneness, naturally lead to pantheistic, idealistic, dualistic, or panpsychic worldviews. These philosophies arise ex post facto and probably represent distorted interpretations of the experiences. But the hypothesizes of third-person scientists that mystical experiences are illusions, the product of mental structures such as a “natural-born dualism”, are also unsatisfactory for those who have had such experiences. This presentation will explore whether there is a first-person approach to probing the question of how embodied cognition is, and what kind of discipline would be necessary to make such an inquiry? Many spiritual practitioners claim that heightened experiences of embodied cognition are actually pre-conceptual or post-conceptual states. Thus a second question for our first-person inquiry is whether a valid distinction can be made between thought and perception.