Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
described their experience one way or another, what assumptions were
made in encoding the data, how many experimenters encoded the
data, how much the encoders agreed in their clustering of the data, and
whether the encoders were blind to the hypothesis being tested.
(Piccinini, 2010, p. 104)Given that the protocols for reporting the imaging side of the study are so much
better established, these gaps are perhaps understandable. But they do compro-
mise the aim of developing ‘interpersonal standards of data-gathering’ to apply
to the exploration of subjectivity (Dennett, 2011, p. 32). More recent experiments
have given detailed accounts of the instructions participants received and how
the verbal data from their reports were analysed. One example is a study of ‘effort-
less awareness’ that related expert meditators’ descriptions of their experiences
to activation in the default mode network, specifically in the posterior cingulate
cortex, which is active during self-related thinking (Garrison et al., 2013). Another
example is a visual masking study (Albrecht and Mattler, 2012) which found cor-
relations between three distinct categories of participants’ performance and their
reports of their perceptual experiences, though the analysis of participants’ free
reports was limited to very basic presence-or-absence ratings (do participants
mention a motion percept, an afterimage percept, both, or neither).
It’s still early days, but philosophers Evan Thompson and Dan Zahavi (2007) have
argued for the value of collaborative research between phenomenology and
neuroscience for such topics as self-consciousness, non-reflective self-awareness,
temporality, intersubjectivity, and the importance of embodiment in experienc-
ing the world.
Take temporality. The sense of time is potentially a rich area for study, because
experienced time does not equate to neural time, and all sorts of anomalies arise
when we try to pin down the ‘time at which consciousness happens’ (Chapter 6).
Perhaps disciplined first-person study of experienced time might help.
According to Varela, this means exploring ‘the structure of nowness as such’ or
what James called the ‘specious present’. As James and others have described it,
there is a three-fold structure in which the ‘now’ is bounded by the immediate past
and immediate future. Husserl explored what he called internal time-conscious-
ness. To hear a melody, see something moving, or see it as retaining identity over
time, consciousness must be unified in some way through time. He introduced
the twin ideas of retention, which intends the just-past, and protention, which
intends the immediate future. So when we hear and understand a sentence, for
example, we not only retain what has just gone but have some ‘protention’ of
where the meaning of the sentence is going.
One of the ways in which Varela tried to bring phenomenology and neuroscience
together was by relating the structure of time as discovered phenomenologically
to the underlying self-organising neural assemblies. He explains that ‘the fact that
an assembly of coupled oscillators attains a transient synchrony and that it takes
a certain time for doing so is the explicit correlate of the origin of nowness’ (1999,
p. 124). Varela describes this insight as a major gain of his approach. Yet some
meditators have described a complete loss of any sense of ‘now’ resulting from
deep exploration of koans such as ‘when is this?’ or ‘are you here now?’ Disciplined
‘Consciousness is then,
as it were, the hyphen
which joins what has
been to what will be, the
bridge which spans the
past and the future’(Bergson, 1920, trans. Carr, p. 9)