Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
the way of thinking, character, mood, and virtuosity of the players,
look and proceed completely differently.
(Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel],
1943, our translation)SECOND-PERSON NEUROSCIENCE
Paradigms like the body-swap illusion make clear that there is always a ‘second’
person in between the ‘first’ and the ‘third’. Second-person neuroscience is con-
cerned with consciousness insofar as it asks how our conscious experiences relate
to our attributions of consciousness to other people. Proponents suggest that
some mainstream neuroscience has generated the results it has because its meth-
ods make them inevitable. For example, the science of ‘Theory of Mind’ is based
on the idea that we engage in complicated inferencing and theorising about each
other in order to bridge the gap between me and other people. By relying on
people watching video recordings of other people and making judgements on
what they see, for example, without ever testing their judgements in action or
interaction, these studies found out only what they put in (Schilbach et al., 2013,
pp. 394–395).
By contrast, advocates of the second-person paradigm tend to take what in Chap-
ter 10 we called an ‘Interaction Theory’ approach to social cognition, which grew
out of Gestalt theory and phenomenology. As one classic account puts it:
The quality of their actions imbues persons with living reality. When we
say that a person is in pain, we see his body as feeling. We do not need
to ‘impute’ consciousness to others if we directly perceive the qualities of
consciousness in the qualities of action. Once we see an act that is skillful,
clumsy, alert, or reckless, it is superfluous to go ‘behind’ it to its conscious
substrate, for consciousness has revealed itself in the act.
(Asch, 1952, p. 158)We immediately experience the other as a subject. The sense we have of a great
gulf between myself and other people need not be thought of as an epistemolog-
ical given, an inescapable limitation on the kind of science we do. Neuroscience,
say Leonhard Schilbach and colleagues (2013), ‘should not content itself with
a spectatorial view of social cognition’ (p. 443). Observing others and interact-
ing with them are not the same thing, and when we ask questions about how
humans typically interact, third-person observation doesn’t deserve to be sci-
entifically privileged in the way it long has been. Neuroscience therefore needs
new methods to encourage meaningful interaction between participants and
between ‘participants’ and ‘experimenters’, including elements such as emotion
and reward, nonverbal as well as verbal responses, the dynamics of real-time
feedback, and more complex reconstructions of social encounters.
Better second-person methods of this kind might help ‘clos[e] the gap between the
experiential and the neurobiological levels of description in the study of human
consciousness’ (Olivares et al., 2015, p. 1). In second-person relationships, people
Neuroscience ‘should
not content itself with
a spectatorial view of
social cognition’(Schilbach et al., 2013, p. 443)