Radical Curiosity

Committing to a True Science of Subjective Experience

Caption: Photo by Alexey Ruban on Unsplash

This post builds on a previous one here in The Science: Principles to Guide Our Early Observations. Some of this might seem slightly redundant, but this framing is crucial to what we're undertaking.

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Fieldwork introduces a new mode of observation which makes visible a realm previously impossible to investigate. By opening the door to the virtual material properties of feeling experience, we gain access to this new realm. In walking through this door, we enter a new frontier, and we literally have no idea what we will find. Because of this, it is imperative that we check our expectations at the door and enter with high levels of openness — a radical curiosity — and maintain this throughout our investigations.

In this effort, the front-row scientist is the first-person explorer who engages in the immediate, direct discernment of what is being observed. The facilitator (if there is one) functions more like a lab assistant, supporting the explorer in operating the instrument of observation and recording the data.

Whether you enter this territory as a solo explorer or with a facilitator, the following attitudes and frameworks will prove essential.

The Question of What Is Real

Perhaps the most prominent assumption built into the practice of science is that we are seeking to learn about something we refer to as objective reality. Ultimately, though, we do not simply want to build abstract knowledge. We want to learn how to engage with reality in ways that are reliably useful.

This priority becomes even more important in pursuing a science of subjective experience. In my posts Maps Within Maps and Building Better Maps, I suggest that we need to release our grip on the idea of a fixed, objective "reality" from which we want to construct knowledge. Instead, we need to acknowledge that our “reality" is in fact the domain of subjective experience, which includes “knowledge" and everything else in our lives. Our experience is what is most real in this science.

Experience-as-reality immediately frees us from the requirement to maintain an objective separation from our object of study. To study subjective experience, we must acknowledge that we are 100% immersed in it. Always! And in that acknowledgement, we gain permission to step into the center of our investigation.

The only access to subjective experience is in the first person. At the moment, the subjectivity barrier is firmly in place and there is no way around this. There must be a first-person investigator, either solo or with a facilitator holding the structure.

This approach sweeps us into a swirl of questions: How do we observe from within the experience? What portion of our experience do we observe? How do we avoid altering the experience itself through our attempt to observe it? How do we know that what we are “observing" is “real" and not something we're “making up"? How do we include “making things up” in the domain of what we are studying — it belongs there, right?

These questions can lead to paralysis. Fortunately, psychotopology fieldwork provides a direct path forward.

Fieldwork Mapping as the Beginning

When we approach subjective experience, we might wonder: Should we observe our thoughts? Perceptions? Somatic sensations? Feelings? And how do we track this ever-changing, nebulous inner experience?

Some researchers have turned to disciplines like meditation to reduce subjective experience's squirrely nature by using trained subjects. But what they examine still falls into standard buckets of thought, perception, sensation, or general feeling categories, often defined more by brain activity on instruments than by rigorous explication of the actual experience.

Psychotopology addresses this challenge by focusing our awareness on a portion of subjective experience which has previously evaded precise observation — that of the most subtle experience of being, manifested in the proto-language of virtual materiality. We enter directly into the “what it is like to be" that lives at the center of conscious experience.

The Advantages of Observing Feeling

The experience of fieldwork feels both novel and familiar. The novelty comes in translating feeling experience into a highly detailed description built from the proto-language of virtual materiality. While this overlap has shown up in limited contexts, it remains an unfamiliar way to conceptualize what we feel.

This novelty makes it less likely we'll be swept into collective, shared meaning-making. It enables the explorer to simply report observations without fitting them into existing categories. Describing frustration as having qualities of a dark, hot solid that vibrates with high tension seems just as valid as describing it as a vividly glowing liquid sloshing in a pit. There are no value judgments attached, no interpretations, no imposition of societal norms. The data is relatively free of cultural obfuscation.

At the same time, the experience of materiality is a universal constant among living beings. My experience of a hard solid is likely similar to yours. This allows us to share data among observers with greater reliability.

As we bring discerning awareness to feeling experience and surface its properties, something feels “right" about it. It feels more like observation than interpretation or imaginary construction. There's an experience of validation that accompanies answering these questions, creating an affirmative reward that motivates the explorer.

Additionally, feeling experience itself tends to remain relatively stable as we engage with it. When we name a feeling state, we identify something with persistent existence. Often, a state we explore has been a familiar occupant of our interior life for years, if not decades. When we bring our awareness to it for mapping, it tends to hold still as we examine it.

Not only does it remain stationary during observation, but we can often return to it hours, days, or months later and find the same properties in place. This consistency offers a much more stable terrain for mapping and trusting our maps.

We also have the "slider test" for validation: If we doubt our observation, we can manipulate the virtual material properties. If I make a solid harder or softer and nothing changes in my feeling experience, I probably need to revisit my mapping. If the feeling experience adjusts with the changing properties and I can reset it to recover the original feeling, I can be more confident in my observation's accuracy.

These factors help both explorer and scientist gain confidence in the data's accuracy and relevance, making it easier to build a science upon such a stable base. We can bring fieldwork practice to our investigations with rigor and discipline, with strong hope that this standard of application might yield true discovery.

How to Hold a High Standard for Your Mapping

In what follows, I want to offer guidelines for conducting fieldwork mapping successfully, whether working alone or with a partner, for personal growth or scientific investigation.

Setting Aside Our Existing Maps

In engaging with our experience, we often turn to existing ideas about inner reality. Here are a few simplified examples that might arise with anxiety:

• Freudian: “That's your unresolved Oedipal complex resurfacing."

• CBT: “Your anxiety stems from a negative belief that needs re-framing."

• Somatic Experiencing: “That's your nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode."

• Attachment Theory: “This feeling is your anxious attachment style kicking in."

• Psychiatric/Medical Model: “It's your neurotransmitters being out of balance."

• Mindfulness-Based Approaches: “You're clinging to your thoughts instead of observing them non-judgmentally."

These reifications are normal features of the maps we create to navigate experience. We need entities and relationships to construct our maps, and we extract those from experiential patterns.

The subjectivity barrier has made extracting these entities and relationships much more difficult in inner realms than in the physical realm. This has led to an endless proliferation of maps over millennia, exploding in diversity as we make ever more intensive efforts to make sense of our inner mysteries.

Any of these maps can be valuable for someone making sense of a nebulous inner world, especially within a relationship of trust with a therapist or friend. Nevertheless, as we commit to developing a true science of inner experience, we must set these maps aside as much as possible and enter fieldwork with nothing but fresh curiosity.

Honoring Subjectivity

As we enter fieldwork, we must bring absolute respect and deference to the explorer's subjective experience. We want to avoid allowing existing concepts to shape perceptions and interpretations.

Our observations should be as pure as possible, carrying an absolute beginner's mind into this new territory. We don't know what we'll observe each time we enter, and we want our observational data to be as faithful as possible to the inner experiences we're observing.

Most importantly, within ourselves and with everyone for whom we facilitate fieldwork, we must enter the space of observation with respect for whatever shows up. We affirm its existence, confirm our observation of it, and support it in fully entering into awareness. In doing so, we honor subjective experience as the frontier of reality we've chosen to enter.

Shedding the Standard Scientific Frame

Our goal in this science of subjective experience is to map the territory of our actual, conscious, lived inner worlds. When coming from materialist sciences, we might want to jump right into making universal maps that apply to every conscious human.

One approach might be mapping a specific feeling state—say sadness—across many people. We might expect some distribution of virtual material properties, but that those properties would aggregate to suggest sadness being a particular substance, temperature, and color. We'd expect joy to have different properties, anger yet others.

We might anticipate these virtual material properties plugging into the body's machinery—high temperature stimulating certain hormones, substance vibration triggering specific brain patterns—through which we could learn about emotional structures and interventions.

If you notice this impulse, simply notice it. As we engage with fieldwork, be open to these expectations being challenged. Hold them lightly.

Not Knowing What to Expect

We want to return to the breakthrough of being able to observe feeling experience's virtual materiality. This is momentous, and we simply do not know what we'll find.

This is virgin territory, and when entering such territory in any science, we must proceed with humility. This is especially true here because we're entering the most precious, sacred realm possible—the most interior, vulnerable places within human experience. In doing so, we carry profound responsibility. Whether that explorer is ourselves or someone we're facilitating, we must enter in the spirit of service.

Our tool, fieldwork mapping, enables us to enter this previously inaccessible space and bring vivid awareness to its shapes and features. Our goal must simply be to support the explorer in using this tool to observe and create maps of their own private inner terrain. In every session, we must bring respect and humility, enfolded in this attitude of service.

We are serving the explorer in making a personal, unique map of their own personal, unique inner terrain. As we begin our science, that is all. And as you will see, that is enough.

Our Long-Term Intention

Entering an unknown frontier is a long-standing human practice. We enter new territory and produce maps to help navigate it. To produce a map, we make copious observations and discern patterns that form entities and relationships. When done well, these become integrated into a reliable, consistent, useful map, and our frontier gradually transitions into the familiar. We master the frontier.

That's what we're up to here. Over time, as we accumulate observational data from many individual, personalized maps of inner realities, we will begin to notice connecting patterns that help us make sense of the universal features of this inner realm.

What turns out to be most important in the emergence of these new, more universal maps will be a new distinction in what we observe. Traditional approaches have focused on collecting information about experience's contents: What is the person seeing or hearing? What are they thinking? What memory is being called to mind?

Our new approach prioritizes structure rather than contents. For now, we'll avoid over-interpreting what we observe. We're going to take our time. Eventually, we'll begin to notice patterns we could never have expected. These patterns will reveal a previously hidden structure to conscious experience, an underlying, universal architecture.

That's all I can say for now. Just know that we're embarking on an extraordinary journey. To get started, we must absolutely let go of our expectations and bring our full presence and commitment to investigating the actual, lived experience of feeling deep within ourselves.

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Reflections

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

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