It’s all First Person: Where does the Third Person come from?

As Velmans has reminded us, all our science, like the rest of our mental worlds, is based on first person experience. The enormous conceptual success of science tends to obscure this fundamental fact: that for every one of us, all knowledge, including “objective” scientific knowledge, is as private as our qualia. The subjective world is the only world each one of us can ever know.

So where does the third person description of things come from? It comes from what we can agree about: inter-subjective corroboration. We can agree about the “objective” features of the “external world” because 1) we have similar perceptual apparatuses, which confer objectivity to our percepts for free, and 2) we can arrange things so that any difference in our perceptions can be reduced to near zero. Two physicists agree on the reading on say, a spectrometer, because they both have almost identical perceptual apparatuses in their brains. If divergences in eyesight result in disagreement, the experiment can always be redone in such a way that these perceptual differences can be overcome. This can be done even though we do not know if we have the same qualia, as in Locke’s inverted spectrum thought experiment.

We also have similar conceptual apparatuses. The inverted spectrum thought experiment does have a conceptual analogue: these ideas that you are reading may seem completely different to you subjectively from the way they do to me, and I can never know that difference. But if we are steeped in the same culture or literature, there is likely to be a high degree of concordance in our understanding because the relationships between a vast number of ideas are roughly similar in your mind and mine. And by asking each other to clarify those portions that we cannot quite slot into our private conceptual world, we can reduce our differences and understand each other, though usually not to the same extent as measuring a meter reading.

We have similar sensations and emotional apparatuses. Widespread general agreement is possible on many issues involving sensory and emotional qualia using empathy and extrapolation. This is the implicit premise of social interaction in everyday life. But usually when we try to reduce disagreements to zero, we find that there are many practical difficulties. Our emotional histories are different, our bodies are different, we don’t have perfect memory for qualia that we aren’t experiencing currently, we don’t have perfect empathy.

If we can overcome these barriers, there is no reason why a first person science is not possible. Thus, we can imagine creatures whose internal bodily qualia are absolutely similar and who can agree perfectly about them and even quantify them, but whose inter-subject variation in perceptual apparatus is so vast that they could not agree about any “objective” scientific measurement. Their subjective science might say something like “If you have a sensation of 5x,7y,15z milliqualia at coordinates 4x,3y,2z subjmms, applying an effort of 8.3 subjdynes at the specified coordinates will get rid of it,” and be perfectly consistent, repeatable and effective.

As a beginning towards imagining such creatures, consider the difference between a normal westerner and 1) a Japanese person who cannot hear the difference between “l” and “r”; 2) a color blind person; 3) a congenitally blind person and 4) an animal. We can easily corroborate the pain of a blind man, or a dog—or a bat—but we cannot corroborate parts of their perceptual worlds.

So in principle, as Gray (1995) put it: “Scientists have no more difficulty in principle in agreeing on observations about conscious experiences than they do in agreeing about meter readings; witness the whole of psychophysics.”

In practice, the difficulties listed above to reduce disagreement need to overcome. The investigator therefore, needs to become an expert in empathically identifying with, and identifying the subject’s qualia. Just as it takes years of training for someone to contribute to nuclear physics, a community of investigators having similar training in empathic techniques seems to be a must for first person science. There must be a standard, reliable test to establish the competence of an investigator, just as there is “board certification” for medical practitioners. Can this be accomplished?

What about states of consciousness that I cannot experience but someone else can? What first person methodology can I use to decide if such states are authentic? How do I understand them and “get a feel” for them?

Actually, a similar situation obtains in science. Imagine that a scientist publishes a true scientific theory that is so difficult that only a handful of scientists in the world can understand it (General Relativity had this reputation in popular legend). In order to authenticate the theory, there needs to be a hierarchy of experts who each “vouches” for the next level all the way to the handful who can understand it. If one of the lower levels of this hierarchy is accessible to me, and I trust that the experts are truthful, I can accept the theory as authentic. Some degree of objective information to confirm the “status” of these experts (their publications, reputations, etc) adds credibility.

Ideal meditation communities in eastern religion follow this exact model. A lower level expert can recognize and “vouch for” the meditative accomplishments of a higher expert. The higher experts have reputations that are proportional to their accomplishments and that places them in their proper places in the hierarchy.

Can this be a model for first person science?

It may be, but an enormous amount of spadework needs to be done if we are to make it so.

Pradeep