Our Mind as a Laboratory
FEST log
Entry #004
April 02, 2024
Developing a lab culture and lab guidelines
In entry #001, I listed four categories of experiments in the science of matter: field observations, laboratory experiments, thought experiments, and computer experiments. Of those four, lab experiments are the most reliable. Because of the use of controlled conditions, they are less likely to introduce errors.
A quick look at the other three types of experiments makes that clear. Starting with working in the field, there are so many other variables at work, besides the ones that we would like to test. Most of the background variables we cannot change or shut out, and we hope for the best, that they don't turn out to be important.
Thought experiments are a wonderful tool for thinking out of the box, to come up with new ideas. But unless such hints are being firmly tested in the lab, or in the field if need be (galaxies don't fit in a lab), whatever we think about how experiments could or should go, we can't very well exclude wishful thinking.
In the case of computer experiments too, there are ways in which we can go astray. We start with a mathematical approximation of the situation that we want to study, and every model introduces approximations, the consequences of which cannot always be estimated accurately. The computer programs used for the simulations can contain subtle errors in their algorithms. Or errors that are not subtle at all: whole spacecrafts have been lost by miscommunication, for example when different members of the team used metric units while others used inches, feet and pounds.
Therefore, to have any hope to develop a science of mind, there is a firm need for developing laboratory settings in which to study the mind using the mind. And with laboratory settings in this case I mean protocols for using our own mind in specific ways.
The crucial point
Physics in particular has always aimed at reaching intersubjective agreement (often misleadingly called "objective agreement") through descriptions of matter in which the presence of the human subjects using their human minds is left out. In a science of mind, similarly, we aim at descriptions of mind in which the presence of matter is left out.
Is it possible to come to conclusions about the dynamics of matter without acknowledging the fact that scientists use their minds to study that behavior? Until 1925 the assumption was that "of course!" that is possible. Since then, for a whole century, quantum mechanics has thrown doubt on that question, and matters of interpreting the role of human observers continue to be debated, not only by philosophers, but also by physicists themselves.
Is it possible to come to conclusions about the dynamics of mind without acknowledging that scientists have physical bodies, made of matter? That reverse question has been asked most sharply and experientially by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in his book "Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology" in 1913, a question that he spent the rest of his life on, and that continues to be debated by philosophers.
My aim is to bring that second question into the realm of a science of mind, by minimally extending the physics methodology, while also acknowledging crucial differences between the nature of matter and mind. Is it really possible to use the mind to study the mind? Let's find out! In the same entry #001, under the heading of "The use of working hypotheses", I mentioned that for the science of mind, too, the crucial point is: "we should develop a proper lab culture and very important: lab guidelines."
Setting up a laboratory for mind studying mind
We are now ready to construct a mind lab, in analogy to matter labs, as have been used in natural science since the 17th century. To start with the latter, if we want to carry out sensitive experiments with sound, we build laboratories with walls that are constructed to be maximally soundproof. In order to do sensitive experiments using magnetism or radioactivity, again we use building materials for the walls of such labs that are minimally magnetic or emit a minimal amount of background radiation. How does that translate into the use of our minds like a lab?
Ideally we would find ourselves living in a "room" or even a "world" in which everything around us is "made of" experience, the "stuff" of the mind. But how?
In the previous entry (#003), we ended by introducing our first experiment, as the very first step on the road toward developing an empirical science of mind: experiment 1): the nature of matter as experience. Following some simple lab instructions, we started to explore ways to shift from seeing a stone as a stone to seeing a stone as an experience, namely the experience of dealing with a stone in front of us.
So far so good: we can learn to shift between two ways of viewing a stone, but how does that help us?
Learning to become fully empirical
The answer is simple. Given that we are looking for an empirical science of mind, only one of the two ways is admissible! When viewing the stone as an experience we can study that very experience fully, because that experience is fully there, self contained as an experience, and fully accessible for us.
In contrast, viewing a stone as a material object is an extrapolation from the experience that we have on seeing it. That is what natural scientists do, and that is what all of us do in daily life. But we have to leave all that behind. Looking at a stone, we feel a natural certainty that the invisible back side is there as we think it is. Similarly we feel certain that the inside is all stone, and not something else. But those 'certainties' are extrapolations, beliefs, not empirical certainties.
In every moment of our life we face a reality that can be attended to in terms of material or mental features. Physics, the simplest and most basic discipline of the study of matter, has made tremendous progress by rigorously focusing on the matter side of each situation. Our task now is to start a science of mind in an equally basic way by rigorously focusing on the mind side of each situation.
Spoiler alert: before too long we will begin to make some conjectures about what might happen if we try to unify a science of matter with a science of mind. But we shouldn't hurry to that next step. Only when a science of mind has taken a reasonably well defined shape will it make sense to begin to speculate what a science of reality could possibly look like.
Edmund Husserl
In the history of Western philosophy there is one philosopher who came closest to what I sketched above, taking any situation and admitting only what was given in experience, nothing more and nothing less. This was Husserl, who published a basic technology for turning the world into a laboratory for the mind. As a tool to be used in his lab, he introduced the 'epoché', pronounced 'epokhē', from the Greek word 'suspension' (ἐποχή). It was a method of suspension of judgment with respect to the physical reality of our material world. Instead he suggested to switch our attention to the direct empirical evidence we have of our world.
As an analogy, let us take the way a blind person experiences the world. Navigating in a room with a stick, he may feel the presence of tables and chairs by means of the vibrations in his stick. But what he is directly aware of is "this is a table" and "that is a chair", without focusing on the vibrations in the stick. Husserl's epoché is akin to shifting attention from the furniture to the vibration in the stick.
This is not the place to give an introduction to the Husserlian idea of transcendental phenomenology, as he called it, let alone to the large diversity of opinions of his students as to what exactly that might mean. What I described in very simple terms so far is good enough to use as a simple Ansatz, a German word widely used in physics for a kind of starting point from which to construct a new theory.
There is one other aspect, though, that I would like to introduce here, that is the tangible sense of awe that Husserl expressed towards the end of his life. He went so far as to describe the epoché as a `complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion' [The Crisis of European Sciences, 1970, Northwestern Univ. Pr., p. 137].
Conversion or deconversion?
Why did Husserl use the term conversion? My guess is that he was actually talking about a deconversion experience, in which you lose a faith that you may have had for most of your life. That last one can be equally intense. In a conversion experience you feel the freedom and openness of having found a whole new world. And in a deconversion experience you may feel the freedom and openness of dropping the limitations of what your previous belief system implied.
In Husserl's case, his sense of liberation was the discovery that he could drop what he called the "natural attitude". This was the term he used for our normally unquestioned belief that everything in our experience has to fit into a large universe made out of matter, in which our mind plays a minor role which is restricted by and adapted to the rules of matter. In contrast, entering the epoché, as a working hypothesis, he found a way to decouple from those restrictions.
It is very important, in discussing Husserl's epoché, to realize that he is not denying the existence of matter, nor is he suggesting that we live "as if" there is no matter. We talked about a sound lab, where we want to make the walls soundproof, in order to exclude noise from the outside. Similarly, Husserl wants us to be aware of how our interactions with matter, which pervade our lives, are tacitly "contaminated" with many subtle prejudices about what matter is and does. Performing the epoché is his way to "purify" our interactions, in order to make explicit what we actually experience in those interactions. And in that process, we can free ourselves from what we add by our habitual dogmatic views of matter, well beyond what empirical evidence tells us.
Continuing experiment 1): matter as experience
Meanwhile, let us spend some more time playing in Husserl's garden, watching individual objects releasing their nature as experience, and perhaps even traveling through Husserl's universe, in which everything turns to a kind of gold, namely experience.
– Piet Hut