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Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic
Can conscious experience be described accurately? Can we give reliable accounts of our sensory experiences and pains, our inner speech and imagery, our felt emotions? The question is central not only to our humanistic understanding of who we are but also to the burgeoning scientific field of consciousness studies. The two authors of Describing Inner Experience disagree on the Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist, argues that improved methods of introspective reporting make accurate accounts of inner experience possible; Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, believes that any introspective reporting is inevitably prone to error. In this book the two discuss to what extent it is possible to describe our inner experience accurately. Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel recruited a subject, "Melanie," to report on her conscious experience using Hurlburt's Descriptive Experience Sampling method (in which the subject is cued by random beeps to describe her conscious experience). The heart of the book is Melanie's accounts, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel's interviews with her, and their subsequent discussions while studying the transcripts of the interviews. In this way the authors' dispute about the general reliability of introspective reporting is steadily tempered by specific debates about the extent to which Melanie's particular reports are believable. Transcripts and audio files of the interviews will be available on the MIT Press website. Describing Inner Experience? is not so much a debate as it is a collaboration, with each author seeking to refine his position and to replace partisanship with balanced critical judgment. The result is an illumination of major issues in the study of consciousness -- from two sides at once.
322 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2007
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March 30, 2012Take a second out of your busy day and try to describe your conscious experience right now. I'll wait.
***
Here's my own amateur attempt:
I can feel a bit of hair touching my forehead. I'm looking at a computer screen. I can hear the fridge buzzing behind me. I don't hear anything like inner speech going on inside my head, even though I'm typing. I can feel my socks on my feet. My neck is kind of sore.
Trying to isolate "what it's like" (in the sense philosophers of mind care about) is supposed to be easy, if you believe most philosophers. There's a whole philosophical tradition that takes our knowledge of the contents of our own consciousness to be clearer and more obvious than any knowledge we have of stuff outside our own consciousness (the chair I'm sitting on, the computer I'm typing on, etc.).
It's impossible to hang on to that idea after reading the interviews in this book, which are edited transcripts of interviews between Schwitzgebel (a philosopher) and Hurlburt (a psychologist) with "Melanie", a college graduate who has agreed to wear a beeper that beeps her at random times during the day, signaling her to record what she is experiencing during the moment just before the beep. In the interviews, Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt ask for clarification, press on certain details, and raise skeptical worries about what Melanie is reporting. It's absurdly fascinating.
My favorite example involves a discussion of Melanie's experience just before to a beep that sounded while she was reading a book about the German invasion of a Greek island in WWII. Here's Melanie:
Melanie: Okay, I was reading again. In this part of the book it was the arrival of the German invasion of the island. The line I was reading had to do with the arrival of a formation of Stukas--German planes. And so I had an image in my head, a really simple image, the kind that you get if you watch those World War II movies or footage from back then, of a line of military planes against a blue sky background with a couple of white clouds...
[Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt quiz her about this image: what angle does she see the planes from, etc. Then they ask her the following:]
Russ [Hurlburt]: And what does the plane in your image look like? Do you know what a Stuka is?
Melanie: I have no idea, so yeah, I kind of put in F-18s instead [laughs], because I make them up, so... (p. 108).
I found this exchange remarkable--what seemed like a totally normal description of a mental image turns, when pushed on slightly, into a bizarre composite of WWII and jet fighters, of some indeterminate level of detail (they don't press her on this, but what grounds does she have to think she's seeing F-18s, rather than F-14s, F-15s, F-16s, and so on?).
That's just one example of dozens of extremely interesting discussions about weird, idiosyncratic features of the subject's experience. It quickly becomes clear that there's constant confabulation, uncertainty, unconscious experimenter bias, lack of accurate terminology, and all kinds of other factors contributing to produce Melanie's descriptions.
There are theoretical glosses on what's going on by both Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt, but the interviews themselves are gripping and make the point that conscious experience is elusive more powerfully than any argument could. After reading this and Schwitzgebel's Perplexities of Consciousness, I think that he's doing the most gripping work in philosophy of mind right now.
***
Here's my own amateur attempt:
I can feel a bit of hair touching my forehead. I'm looking at a computer screen. I can hear the fridge buzzing behind me. I don't hear anything like inner speech going on inside my head, even though I'm typing. I can feel my socks on my feet. My neck is kind of sore.
Trying to isolate "what it's like" (in the sense philosophers of mind care about) is supposed to be easy, if you believe most philosophers. There's a whole philosophical tradition that takes our knowledge of the contents of our own consciousness to be clearer and more obvious than any knowledge we have of stuff outside our own consciousness (the chair I'm sitting on, the computer I'm typing on, etc.).
It's impossible to hang on to that idea after reading the interviews in this book, which are edited transcripts of interviews between Schwitzgebel (a philosopher) and Hurlburt (a psychologist) with "Melanie", a college graduate who has agreed to wear a beeper that beeps her at random times during the day, signaling her to record what she is experiencing during the moment just before the beep. In the interviews, Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt ask for clarification, press on certain details, and raise skeptical worries about what Melanie is reporting. It's absurdly fascinating.
My favorite example involves a discussion of Melanie's experience just before to a beep that sounded while she was reading a book about the German invasion of a Greek island in WWII. Here's Melanie:
Melanie: Okay, I was reading again. In this part of the book it was the arrival of the German invasion of the island. The line I was reading had to do with the arrival of a formation of Stukas--German planes. And so I had an image in my head, a really simple image, the kind that you get if you watch those World War II movies or footage from back then, of a line of military planes against a blue sky background with a couple of white clouds...
[Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt quiz her about this image: what angle does she see the planes from, etc. Then they ask her the following:]
Russ [Hurlburt]: And what does the plane in your image look like? Do you know what a Stuka is?
Melanie: I have no idea, so yeah, I kind of put in F-18s instead [laughs], because I make them up, so... (p. 108).
I found this exchange remarkable--what seemed like a totally normal description of a mental image turns, when pushed on slightly, into a bizarre composite of WWII and jet fighters, of some indeterminate level of detail (they don't press her on this, but what grounds does she have to think she's seeing F-18s, rather than F-14s, F-15s, F-16s, and so on?).
That's just one example of dozens of extremely interesting discussions about weird, idiosyncratic features of the subject's experience. It quickly becomes clear that there's constant confabulation, uncertainty, unconscious experimenter bias, lack of accurate terminology, and all kinds of other factors contributing to produce Melanie's descriptions.
There are theoretical glosses on what's going on by both Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt, but the interviews themselves are gripping and make the point that conscious experience is elusive more powerfully than any argument could. After reading this and Schwitzgebel's Perplexities of Consciousness, I think that he's doing the most gripping work in philosophy of mind right now.
February 12, 2020
There was recently a tweet floating around the internet about how not all people have internal narratives. This observation was mind-boggling to me and started me on a rabbit hole of research that led me to this book (the online version). I can't speak to how scientifically useful or sound the findings presented in this collaborative project are since I don't normally read a lot of scholarly works. However, I can say that I was absolutely fascinated by the dialogue presented by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel.
While reading this book, I found myself constantly stopping and trying to pinpoint my own inner experience. It is definitely challenging! I appreciated reading the detailed DES interviews with Melanie (I also listened to some of the transcripts online) and would be interested to see the responses of other subjects. I personally would find those interviews to be very frustrating and exhausting; I can't imagine having to face someone's skepticism and questioning of my own inner experiences which are already difficult to define and express. Luckily, Melanie's interviews (and my own armchair observations!) may have helped me gain a slightly better understanding of what goes on in people's consciousness now than I did before.
Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel collaborate, refine, and present their differing viewpoints on whether or not it is possible to achieve accurate reports of inner experience. I definitely understand Schwitzgebel's skepticism and see how people can be inaccurate in reporting their own experiences. His argument about the different ways people use language to express themselves was especially compelling; it is very possible that people interpret and express the same experiences in vastly different ways, especially since we don't really have the vocabulary to express what goes on in our inner worlds. However, I am also inclined to take Hurlburt's standpoint and believe that people have different experiences that they are able to describe pretty accurately. Overall, I kind of like that there are some things that just aren't accessible to science and are beyond explanation and logic and reason. At the same time, it's so fascinating to study and I think science should keep on trying. Happy introspecting.
While reading this book, I found myself constantly stopping and trying to pinpoint my own inner experience. It is definitely challenging! I appreciated reading the detailed DES interviews with Melanie (I also listened to some of the transcripts online) and would be interested to see the responses of other subjects. I personally would find those interviews to be very frustrating and exhausting; I can't imagine having to face someone's skepticism and questioning of my own inner experiences which are already difficult to define and express. Luckily, Melanie's interviews (and my own armchair observations!) may have helped me gain a slightly better understanding of what goes on in people's consciousness now than I did before.
Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel collaborate, refine, and present their differing viewpoints on whether or not it is possible to achieve accurate reports of inner experience. I definitely understand Schwitzgebel's skepticism and see how people can be inaccurate in reporting their own experiences. His argument about the different ways people use language to express themselves was especially compelling; it is very possible that people interpret and express the same experiences in vastly different ways, especially since we don't really have the vocabulary to express what goes on in our inner worlds. However, I am also inclined to take Hurlburt's standpoint and believe that people have different experiences that they are able to describe pretty accurately. Overall, I kind of like that there are some things that just aren't accessible to science and are beyond explanation and logic and reason. At the same time, it's so fascinating to study and I think science should keep on trying. Happy introspecting.
February 15, 2011
This book is a sort of debate between a skeptical philosopher and a more credulous psychologist, on how much one's description of one's own "inner experience" (thoughts, emotions, mental imagery, etc) can be taken as "reliable." There are immediate questions around what it means to say an account of an internal state is accurate, reliable, etc. but the skeptic and proponent agree on terms enough for the discussion to be viable.
The psychologist has this method "descriptive experience sampling" that he uses in this book on a particular subject, Melanie. The way it works is, you carry around a beeper for periods of several hours each day, and it goes off at random intervals ranging from few seconds in between to an hour in between. When you hear the beep, you immediately note down what was 'going through your head' in as much detail as possible. Later, a psychologist (or in this case psychologist and skeptical philosopher) grill you for details, trying to elicit as accurate a recollection as possible and tease out inconsistencies and inaccuracies along the way.
The bulk of the book consists of psychologist and philosopher debating various aspects of Melanie's DES reports, with her in the room as well. The discussions are often presented in boxed form, with one or more notes saying 'next in thread x: section y' which means go to section y to continue thread x. Sample boxes:
What is "thinking" ?
Doubts about Melanie's "inner thought" voice
Little is known about the phenomenology of reading
People say things that are not true
Is Melanie inferring rather than recalling?
Are people mostly alike?
Self-awareness of emotion
Mozart's claim to hear a symphony instantaneously
Do people know when they are being metaphorical?
In the end the philosopher comes away unconvinced that you can put much significance in the details of DES reports. There are just too many problems with trying to describe what happens in your own head. The psychologist's interview technique and approach aren't without merit but they don't really seem to produce a ton of insight beyond what, say, William James had back in the olden days.
I would give this book 3 stars, but I have to admit that even though I enjoyed it and it made me think a lot about my own thought processes/inner experience, I did at several points wonder "What's the point of all this navel gazing?" The purported subject area of this book & the experiments is "consciousness studies," which they irritatingly refer to as a science on several occasions. Is it really a science? Doesn't seem like there's much scientific method being employed here.
I guess I'm just not clear on what the end goal of consciousness studies is. What would it even mean to understand consciousness? I'm sure there are detailed philisophical/psychological responses to this question, but as a layman you're not going to read this book and come away feeling like you understand consciousness any better. As far as the unreliability of self-reported inner experience, this doesn't seem like an earth shattering revelation either.
That said, it was pretty interesting to flip through, so if you have a penchant for introspection or have spent time wondering what it's like to be in someone's head and whether or not someone else's experience works like yours, this is worth checking out. (If you care deeply about such questions, probably better off reading Dostoevsky or David Foster Wallace.)
The psychologist has this method "descriptive experience sampling" that he uses in this book on a particular subject, Melanie. The way it works is, you carry around a beeper for periods of several hours each day, and it goes off at random intervals ranging from few seconds in between to an hour in between. When you hear the beep, you immediately note down what was 'going through your head' in as much detail as possible. Later, a psychologist (or in this case psychologist and skeptical philosopher) grill you for details, trying to elicit as accurate a recollection as possible and tease out inconsistencies and inaccuracies along the way.
The bulk of the book consists of psychologist and philosopher debating various aspects of Melanie's DES reports, with her in the room as well. The discussions are often presented in boxed form, with one or more notes saying 'next in thread x: section y' which means go to section y to continue thread x. Sample boxes:
What is "thinking" ?
Doubts about Melanie's "inner thought" voice
Little is known about the phenomenology of reading
People say things that are not true
Is Melanie inferring rather than recalling?
Are people mostly alike?
Self-awareness of emotion
Mozart's claim to hear a symphony instantaneously
Do people know when they are being metaphorical?
In the end the philosopher comes away unconvinced that you can put much significance in the details of DES reports. There are just too many problems with trying to describe what happens in your own head. The psychologist's interview technique and approach aren't without merit but they don't really seem to produce a ton of insight beyond what, say, William James had back in the olden days.
I would give this book 3 stars, but I have to admit that even though I enjoyed it and it made me think a lot about my own thought processes/inner experience, I did at several points wonder "What's the point of all this navel gazing?" The purported subject area of this book & the experiments is "consciousness studies," which they irritatingly refer to as a science on several occasions. Is it really a science? Doesn't seem like there's much scientific method being employed here.
I guess I'm just not clear on what the end goal of consciousness studies is. What would it even mean to understand consciousness? I'm sure there are detailed philisophical/psychological responses to this question, but as a layman you're not going to read this book and come away feeling like you understand consciousness any better. As far as the unreliability of self-reported inner experience, this doesn't seem like an earth shattering revelation either.
That said, it was pretty interesting to flip through, so if you have a penchant for introspection or have spent time wondering what it's like to be in someone's head and whether or not someone else's experience works like yours, this is worth checking out. (If you care deeply about such questions, probably better off reading Dostoevsky or David Foster Wallace.)
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