Science & Phenomenology

Science & Phenomenology

Kalina Moskaluk tells us how an idea outside of her theoretical background destroyed her research project and her faith in ‘simple’ phenomenology.

Neurophenomenology is the first of them. It was introduced by Francisco Varela in 1996 and promoted by him and by Evan Thompson as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness – the problem of how humans (and other conscious organisms) have experiences, thoughts, and feelings as a result of brain activity. Neurophenomenology is said by its practitioners to be able to address this problem by combining the subject’s own phenomenological investigation with simultaneous neuro-imaging data. The goal of neurophenomenological experiments is to provide a two-fold description of what is going on in one’s mind – from the subject’s own point of view and from the perspective of ‘objective’ neuro-images of their brain activity obtained using fMRI scans or EEG monitoring. The most important point here is that experience cannot be reduced to what is happening on the biological level in the brain, which means that adding the first-person description of experience to the brain scan data allows us to formulate a more reliable answer to the question ‘What’s going on in thinking?’

Heterophenomenology, on the other hand, is an approach advocated by Daniel Dennett, and reflects his naturalistic and reductionist views. Even though it also utilizes first-person data, it has a radically different method and goals from neurophenomenology. Dennett allows participants to express freely what it is like to be them or to be experiencing; but he treats their reports as fictions insofar as what they say is not what experimenters see through the ‘objective’ measurement of participants’ brain states with scientific instruments. (See Dennett’s paper ‘Shall we tango? No, but thanks for asking’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 18(5-6), 2011). Neurophenomenology-oriented experimenters treat the participants’ first-person reports as pieces of the puzzle of consciousness, while for heterophenomenology-oriented experimenters, first-person reports are no different from any other kinds of raw data: that is, prone to errors and useless as long as not interpreted.

Personally, the problem I found the most striking (and I was shocked that it went so long unnoticed) was that practicing phenomenology – the systematic study of human experience – changes the experience it’s supposed to reliably explore!

This is almost explicitly said by Evan Thompson when he criticizes Dennett’s heterophenomenology for having nothing to do with the original idea of phenomenology. Thompson writes that heterophenomenology “has had nothing to say about the proposal to use first-person methods of training attention and awareness in order to sensitize individuals to their experience in ways enabling them to describe it more precisely” (‘Reply to Commentaries’, JCS, 18(5-6), 2011). A similarity struck me between this proposed ‘awareness training’ to the training in mindfulness that has gained a lot of attention in different areas of our culture over the past few years. However, while for phenomenology this training is supposed to allow the production of a standardized and reliable description of the experience as it is experienced, mindfulness training is supposed to be a tool for change! On reflection, it seemed reasonable to think that being aware of or paying close attention to phenomena in our experience makes us experience them in a different way than we would without that attentiveness. Does this mean, in a paradoxical, Catch-22 manner, that a systematic first-person exploration of experience destroys the picture it’s supposed to grasp? Yes, probably. This is a fundamental difficulty for phenomenology.

To indicate how this problem might affect experimental results, I would like to share an example from the research project my team and I designed (but never actually conducted, for reasons that will become clear)...