Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
Yet reflexive monism faces serious problems. Velmans claims that it is ‘nondual-
ist’ and calls it ‘dual-aspect monism’, and he concludes with the stirring idea that
each of us is a small part observing the greater universe and so ‘we participate
in a reflexive process whereby the universe experiences itself ’ (2009, p. 298). Yet
the theory rests entirely on the supposition that conscious experiences are ‘pri-
vate, subjective, and unique’ and are constructions that represent the external
‘things-themselves’. Thus, although reflexive monism is not a form of substance
dualism, it seems to entail precisely the split that gives rise to the hard problem.
Velmans’s ideas have nonetheless influenced other researchers interested in how
to close the gap. Donald Price and James Barrell (2012) lament the fact that we do
not yet have a true ‘experiential neuroscience’ (p. 19) and that human experience
remains such a blind spot in the sciences – perhaps not accidentally. ‘The mainte-
nance of the blind spot of human phenomenal experience has not been a passive
endeavor’ (p. 26); rather, strenuous efforts have long been made by philosophers,
psychologists, and neuroscientists to eliminate, reduce, and ignore experience.
They informally recreated Libet’s famous (1985) wrist-flexing task, and found
their colleagues reported a wide range of experiences while taking part, ranging
from ‘inner seeing’ (an image of the hand moving), ‘inner speech’ (‘I am going to
move right NOW!’), emotional feeling (want to get this done!), and ‘unsymbol-
ised thinking’ (the wordless equivalent of ‘move real soon’) – or else just ‘I had
no idea what was going on’ or ‘I was completely surprised by my hand moving’.
Given such striking variety, they argue that Libet’s methods and his interpretation
of his results are far too simplistic, and do not represent ‘the extended temporal
phenomenology of choosing’ (p. 286).
They suggest an alternative to Libet’s experiment: get people to choose not
when to flex their wrist, but how to cook a pizza, with either just a microwave or
microwave plus conventional oven. Ask them not to respond randomly (which we
never do in real life) but to deliberately choose one option and to notice what the
choice feels like. How do you think this would change the experience of being a
participant, and what we could learn as an experimenter? Like many others, they
criticise Libet for using such a simplistic task, but their proposal departs far from
the purpose of Libet’s experiment, which was to measure the time difference
between RP and W.
Price and Barrell offer another suggestion: imagine we have a complete mapping
of neural activity correlated with a particular experience of pain, including the
functional connections between activated and deactivated areas, and the inter-
actions between the autonomic, somatomotor, and endocrine systems and the
rest of the body. We also have a control condition without pain. The two are dis-
played on large screens and viewed ‘objectively’ ‘by scientists who are disposed
to leaving human experience out of the experiment altogether’ (p. 26). What
would these highly advanced scientists know? They would know that this is one
pain and this is not-pain. But for deeper understanding, they would need fine-
grained experiential maps of each, and the best way to get that would be for the
scientists to be the participants. An account of how pain relates to neural activity
requires observations of both: neither account can be observer-free, so why not,
as Velmans suggested, have the same observer provide both? They could run the
experiment on themselves and then use other people’s accounts afterwards to
confirm or disconfirm their direct observations.
‘The maintenance of
the blind spot of human
phenomenal experience
has not been a passive
endeavor’(Price and Barrell, 2012, pp.
25–26)