Principles to Guide Our Early Observations

How to Make the Most of Fieldwork as We Get Started

Original photo by Boris Baldinger on Unsplash, cropped and modified.

At this early stage in our investigation into the nature of conscious experience, we have established a way forward, but there remains much that is shrouded in mystery. For our science to progress in a way that might reveal patterns that reflect our inner reality and offer themselves as valuable components of our maps of that inner reality, we need to proceed with caution.

What We Have

Our primary asset at this point is our method of fieldwork. We have discovered that if we turn our attention toward the inner experience of feeling and ask very specific questions comparing our experience to that of materiality, we get very precise answers. (See A New Method for Observing Inner Experience.) These answers about spatial location, substance, temperature, color and other properties result in a detailed, tangible and unique snapshot of each feeling experience.

Our second asset moving forward is that we experience this snapshot as having some form of validity, especially in its capacity to serve as an interface by which we are able to interact with the feeling experience directly. By deliberately altering the virtual material properties of our snapshot, our feeling experience simultaneously shifts.

These two assets open a very large door to investigation. Perhaps it is a little too large, in some ways. Moving forward, I am going to lead us in choosing to focus on our primary asset, the mapping experience, to find out what we can learn if we restrict our activity to its capacity for observation alone. We will apply the second capacity to interact with the feeling experience using the virtual material interface only as a way of validating our observations. If we move a property and experience a shift in feeling, we have established that we have captured something essential about the feeling experience itself.

My intention in doing this is to help us avoid going too fast, getting out of balance and falling over into ungrounded theorizing and speculation. For now, we will minimize our use of the capacity for interaction. One small step at a time will be our best way forward.

What We Don’t Have

At this stage of our science, we do not have a map of the territory we wish to investigate. We have been given the means by which to conduct disciplined observations of the experience of feeling using a method which provides orders of magnitude more precision than previous observational methods. This capacity is unique, and therefore we have no basis upon which to frame our expectations about what we might find in our observations.

To make this more explicit, the best that current science has done in approaching the experience of feeling is to support people (subjects) in using a more fine-grained vocabulary for naming what they feel. This semantic approach suffers from the subjectivity barrier limitation, given that for any person, we can never know that what they actually feel when naming their feeling “sadness” is the same as what someone else feels when they have given their feeling the same name. We simply cannot know.

To compare the experience of sadness as similar between two different people requires triangulation using extensive chains of correlation. For example, tears correlate to people labeling their feeling as sadness. It can be tempting to assume that two people crying feel something similar.

In our bodies, crying involves a chain something like this:

• Sadness activates the limbic system, particularly the hypothalamus and amygdala.

• The hypothalamus communicates with the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system.

• The autonomic nervous system signals the lacrimal glands to produce tears.

• Neurotransmitters like acetylcholine play a role in stimulating tear production.

In addition, we could easily run many different chains of connection between tears and sadness through many social and cultural patterns and stories, along with the accumulated memories of our own personal experiences.

These correlation chains are long and intertwined. Many other emotions can produce tears. Many people feel sadness and do not cry. Other dynamics, both physiological and psycho-socio-cultural, influenced by countless other factors, may or may not link sadness and tears in any given instance.

And even if our correlations were reliable and consistent, they get us no closer to the actual, inner lived experience of what it is like to be that person experience that sadness in that moment, no closer to being able to say that experience is the same or similar to that of another person.

Optimizing Our Advantages

So we have established that we carry forward a primary asset: our capacity to collect observations of the virtual material properties of our feeling experience. Let’s take a look at the strengths of this new asset, to consider how best to move into our investigations.

The Advantage of Virtual Materiality

Earlier, I discussed the limitations of our vocabulary for emotions like sadness to carry definitive comparisons from one person to the next. To be clear, it is also true that we cannot know, for example when someone perceives the substance of their sadness as solid, that the experience is the same as that of someone else who also assigns the substance of solid to their sadness. Nevertheless, we are able to shorten the correlation chain significantly by staying within the realm of subjective experience as it interfaces with the more consistent domain of more objective properties of the material world.

To take “solid” a little further as an illustration, we can say the following, building on the fact that the materiality of our bodies is similar enough, person to person, to make some generalizations:

• None of us can walk through walls. When we press against a solid, we experience our body being effectively resisted by that solid.

• None of us is immune to the effects of gravity. When we lift a heavy solid, we experience a greater force of its weight bearing down toward the center of the earth than when we lift a relatively lighter solid.

• Our bodies have their own solidity. When we grip a ball of clay, we experience our fingers pressing into this softer, yielding solid.

• All of us have a measure of tactile sensitivity. When we run our fingers over a lump of pumice stone, we experience something very different from holding a billiard ball.

• We also experience the capacity to perceive temperature through our skin. Picking up a warm cup of coffee generates a somewhat universally different experience from holding a snowball.

Drawing from these generalizations, we can say with some assurance that when one person describes their feeling state as being a hard, rough, heavy, cold solid, that their experience as a relatively high correlation with the experience of someone else describing their experience with the same properties. Of course, when our inner perception of virtual material properties strays into less physically common territory like “energy” and “light” substances, we may lose some of that strong correlation between our reports and our more universally shared physical experiences. Nevertheless, we have gained a significant shortening of the correlative chains by linking our feeling experience to that of the material world.

The Advantage of High Resolution Perception

In addition, the increased resolution of our observational data provides an opportunity for far greater possibilities to identify patterns shared among people. As mentioned earlier, we gain orders of magnitude finer grain in our ability to perceive our feeling experiences and to share those experiences with one another.

To clarify what I mean by this greater resolution, here is a list of words that label variations of flavor or context for the experience of sadness, providing a more fine-grained vocabulary advocated by researchers like Lisa Feldman-Barrett.

• Melancholy – A gentle, lingering sadness often tinged with nostalgia.

• Sorrow – Deep sadness, often tied to loss or grief.

• Heartache – A poignant sadness or emotional pain, particularly from love or loss.

• Despair – Intense hopelessness, an absence of faith in improvement.

• Grief – Profound sadness, usually in response to a specific loss.

• Dismay – A mix of sadness and disappointment or alarm.

• Longing – A bittersweet sadness tied to yearning for something or someone.

• Aloneness – Sadness arising from solitude, without the comfort of connection.

• Homesickness – A specific sadness from longing for a familiar place or people.

• Forsakenness – A profound sadness from feeling abandoned or utterly alone.

• Mourning – A sadness tied to the process of honoring and remembering a loss.

• Fragility – A subtle, tender sadness marked by emotional vulnerability.

• Ache – A deep but dull emotional pain, lingering without resolution.

• Resignation – A sadness tinged with acceptance or surrender to circumstances.

• Yearning – A sadness mingled with hope or desire.

• Nostalgia – A wistful sadness mixed with fond memories of the past.

• Regret – Sadness linked to past decisions or missed opportunities.

• Bittersweetness – A poignant sadness blended with gratitude or beauty.

• Disenchantment – A sadness from realizing something is less ideal than imagined.

• Disappointment – Sadness from unmet expectations or desires.

• Languishing – A subtle, listless sadness with a sense of stagnation or emptiness.

• Dejection – A low, defeated feeling of sadness.

• Hopelessness – A profound sadness with a loss of optimism or faith.

• Despondency – A deeper, more persistent form of sadness combined with despair.

• Anguish – A sharp, almost unbearable sadness.

• Malaise – A vague sadness tied to unease or dissatisfaction.

• Void – A profound emptiness that can accompany deep sadness.

• Heaviness – A weighted sadness, physically felt in the body.

• Tragic Awe – A sadness evoked by the immense beauty or fragility of life.

• Existential Gloom – A sadness arising from questions of purpose or meaning.

• Rejection – A sadness tied to feeling unwanted or unaccepted.

• Alienation – Sadness from feeling disconnected or estranged from others.

• Embarrassment – A subtle sadness mixed with self-consciousness.

• Inadequacy – A sadness linked to feeling insufficient or failing to meet expectations.

This is useful, of course. Expanding from a single term, sadness, to a few dozen provides us with a more nuanced vocabulary by which to match a word with our experience. This helps us make better sense of our own experience as well as providing more effective paths for communicating our experience to someone else.

At the same time, we are still bound by the limitations of language and the subjectivity barrier. We have no idea whether my experience of a feeling I have named “rejection” matches your experience to which you have given the same name. No idea. Something about the context and the general flavor matches well enough for us to have the experience that we understand one another when we use that word to describe our experience. But the experience itself remains vague.

Let’s compare this to the following fieldwork description of one person’s experience of what they have called “sadness.”

One Person’s Experience of Sadness

Description: In my gut; an energy, heavy; scalding; colorless, transparent; movement is trying to erupt up and out; held in by something at throat; a wailing protest, other voice, group, non-human. The movement is very active.

Thoughts/Beliefs: It wants to be expressed, let out, relieved, released. It doesn't want to be contained. It's sad around loss. It's sad around lost/missed opportunity. I think it's sad around limitations. Son growing and leaving. Death of loved ones.

Comparing Resolutions

So what do we notice here in comparing the relative advantages of a more nuanced vocabulary versus our capacity for more precise description of the actual feeling experience using the proto-language of virtual materiality? If we go to our names-for-sadness list above, we might dial in a little bit better by choosing a different name than sadness. Perhaps “mourning” might express the context a little bit better. But we’re at a loss for getting close enough to capture the fuller essence of the actual experience.

Looking at the description of the observations of virtual material properties, however, we can see a massive leap forward in what we are able to perceive about the actual inner feeling experience. Let’s look at a few qualities to see what the possible “range of motion” might be in the expressiveness they offer.

• Temperature — a linear spectrum from infinitely hot to infinitely cold. Too many perceptual possibilities to count.

• Location, size and shape — pretty much infinite in what might be possible.

• Substance, color/appearance, movement, sound — again, all of these offer virtually infinite realms of possible values for the property.

Put all of these together and we gain literally an infinite realm of possible observational specificity. The two approaches cannot be compared.

An Appropriate Tentativeness

To give ourselves a sense of what this new capacity for high-resolution observation offers us, let us consider what it would be like if our earth’s atmosphere was perpetually shrouded in a thick cloud cover. Let’s place ourselves a few hundred years ago, before our technology gave us the ability to fly. We would have light in the daytime, and darkness at night, but we would have no access to seeing the sun or moon or stars. In our earlier history, our theories about what brings day and night would be quite crude.

For example, perhaps the mythology of light and dark might center on the idea that the earth beneath our feet “breathes.” At night, the earth inhales, breathing in the light and sending our world into darkness. In the daytime, the earth exhales, sending light out into the clouds above to illuminate our daily activities.

Then imagine we discover a mountain range that enables us to climb above the cloud cover. Immediately, we would be able to see an unprecedented level of detail that would provide giant-step insights into the nature of our daily cycles. In our first step above the clouds, we would be dazzled by a new reality. Our first impulse, perhaps, would be to explain the sun as being “coughed up” or “spit out” in the morning by the earth below it, and then swallowed again as night falls.

But we would be best served by patience, taking our time to observe the daily rhythms from this new perspective. Eventually, we might recast our story, taking into consideration our new awareness of these bodies of light — sun, moon and stars, which travel from one horizon to the other. Eventually, using our new capacity for high-resolution observation, we would have the opportunity to travel a journey of discovery leading to our current understanding of our planet orbiting the sun and rotating on its axis as the explanation for our daily cycles.

In the same way, we want to apply caution and patience as we move forward here, taking our time to make these new observations, giving ourselves the space to notice fresh patterns and avoid imposing the old patterns on this new information. We discerned the old patterns, and built the stories around those patterns, from a meager supply of crude observations. It is time to release our perceived patterns and our stories about them. It is time to enter this new investigation with a fresh curiosity about what we might observe.

What We Need, Moving Forward

We’re entering unmapped territory here, a true frontier in our human exploration of reality. The territory we’re exploring is internal, off limits to our customary methods of observing and navigating the material world. At the same time, this territory is the closest of any to what it is to be human. It is an essential space for us to explore if we are to truly master our lives here together on this planet.

Our situation is even more tenuous that what I have described might suggest. Over the course of human history, for example, groups of people entered into territories previously unexplored by their people. But some things remained the same. Water still flowed from high places to low, plants still grew where water was plentiful, wildlife still lived where plants grew lush, and the same general principles and needs for safety and sustenance applied, no matter what landscape they might have traversed.

In our new inner frontier, we cannot be confident that anything we previously have learned will apply here. We simply do not know what to expect.

How will our investigation best be served as we enter this unknown realm? These are my suggestions to those of you choosing to join this endeavor of building a new, first-person science of subjective experience.

• Take things slowly. In order to make our observations, we must navigate our territory. But we have no maps by which to confidently navigate. So we must go slowly and carefully, prioritizing small steps, harvesting our learning with each step, attempting to make our first rough maps and testing them as we go.

• Cultivate curiosity and openness. The bottom line is, we do not know what to expect. Consequently, we serve our investigation best by expecting to be surprised. If we conduct our investigation as a solo explorer, we carry a curiosity about what we might discover. If we facilitate someone else’s exploration, we support them by welcoming whatever shows up.

• Maintain steadiness and consistency. Our prime asset is a method for observation. It has been developed sufficiently enough to provide a thorough scaffolding for collecting high-quality observational data. We will serve ourselves by relying on the structure of the process to carry us, and we will serve the process by executing it steadily and consistently, going through the same process with each new observation.

• Optimize thoroughness in collecting data. We are looking for patterns by which to make sense of this new territory. But we do not know, yet, which information will best serve us in discerning the most relevant and useful new patterns. Because of this, our investigation is best served by thoroughness. We take detailed notes of our observations.

• Avoid imposing existing frames. It is entirely possible that our observations may confirm an existing map of inner territory. But it is also possible that what emerges requires a wholesale revision of all existing maps. We simply do not know. Consequently, at the beginning, we must proceed as if we know absolutely nothing beyond the raw data of our observations, and let the patterns emerge from that data and nowhere else.

This is a lot. And it is new and fresh. We have an opportunity before us to make genuine new discoveries. Standing at this frontier, do you feel both the uncertainty and the excitement? We do not know, and we can discover.

For those of us whose nature is one that resonates with the essence of science, this is exactly where we want to be. This is exactly what we were born to do. For us, nothing is more satisfying than to step into a new frontier such as this.

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Reflections

How does this post land for you? Do you find yourself becoming more motivated to engage as a fellow explorer? What questions do you have?

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