Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
Eric Schwitzgebel (2008): that variety is just more evidence for the profound unre-
liability of introspection.
Taking a defamiliarising stance on your own experience is something we have
tried to encourage with the Practices throughout this book. Not taking your own
‘what-it’s-like’ at face value is an important habit to get into if you want to take
your exploration of consciousness further.
Another good habit is to drop your defensiveness towards other disciplines.
Whether your home field feels like psychology or neuroscience or philosophy,
particle physics or literary studies, it is clear that the mystery of consciousness
is not going to be solved any time soon by any single existing disciplinary para-
digm. It’s very easy to be protectionist, perhaps especially if we have grown up in
the humanities and sometimes feel a little resentful that science gets all the status
and all the money. But protectionism usually leads to misreading, caricature, and
many missed opportunities for exciting research. And there’s nothing that really
needs protecting – certainly not ‘the citadel of the first-person’ (Dennett, 2007, p.
264).
Heterophenomenology may be a good way of proceeding – a good default for
the moment, while we work out where and how to safely use phenomenologi-
cal reports (van de Laar, 2008). Indeed, the essence of heterophenomenology is
simply not committing ourselves in advance. Part of this is waiting until we know
more: ‘It sure seems as if there is a Cartesian Theater. But there isn’t. Heterophe-
nomenology is designed to honor these two facts in as neutral a way as possible
until we can explain them in detail’ (Dennett, 2007, p. 269). For Dennett, the most
promising ‘for now’ attitude is to rephrase the mystery of consciousness in the
way Newton rephrased the mystery of gravity: to stop asking what it is (a fluid,
a substance, a force?) and start asking how it behaves. For Dennett, phenome-
nologists are in practice committed to this ‘bland form of behaviourism’ without
realising it, because like everyone else, they have nothing else to say about con-
sciousness beyond what it does.
But in a flash, as of lightning, all our explanations, all our
classifications and derivations, our aetiologies, suddenly appeared
to me like a thin net. That great passive monster, reality, was no
longer dead, easy to handle. It was full of a mysterious vigour, new
forms, new possibilities. The net was nothing, reality burst through
it. [. . .] That simple phrase, I do not know, was my own pillar of fire.
For me, too, it brought a new humility akin to fierceness. For me too
a profound mystery. [. . .] There had always been a conflict in me
between mystery and meaning. I had pursued the latter, worshipped
the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw
that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and
vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the
atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter
who died, because he was inside the vacuum.
(John Fowles, The Magus, 1965/2010, p. 309)‘Are we not familiar
enough with our own
experiences?’(Gray, 2004, p. 123)‘the widespread
conviction that you
have to defend the
citadel of the first-
person is simply a
mistake’(Dennett, 2007, p. 264)