The Beginning of a New Science
Making Note of Our First Milestone
At this point in our journey, we’re just getting started. But it’s a good start — we’ve made some progress. Let’s review.
Over the first seven posts here in The Science (not including the Facets intro), I’ve laid out a few basic ideas for how a new science of subjective experience might be founded. The following is a more concise summary of what I’ve described, to help connect the dots more elegantly (I hope). This is an OK place to start in exploring the science of psychotopology, and you can choose to dip into the original posts in greater depth if you want that and have the time.
The most important context I want to offer is this. Our current science, shaped the way it is, has done very little to illuminate the inner world of subjective experience. It is very possible that there really is no way to do better within the current framework.
Similarly, it is very possible that if we step outside the current scientific framework and start fresh, from the bottom up, that we just may get somewhere useful.
This is what I have done in developing psychotopology. This was not my intention at the beginning, by any means. This science emerged from the natural human activity of making sense of new things. I stumbled into something new, and over a period of three decades I gradually made sense of it. My sense-making had no way to anchor itself in the existing framework, so I was forced to invent a more inclusive one to accommodate the new discoveries. I am not rejecting existing knowledge but making space for this new understanding. This is what I have outlined for you in these first posts.
One way to think about this is that we are starting fresh. This science could have been initiated hundreds of years ago or more. It is based on a fundamental, universal human activity, that of making inner maps of our lived experience in order to navigate our inner and outer worlds. And at this point, we do not need sophisticated technology or advanced statistics to make sense of what we will be observing and discovering. The raw data of simple, direct, conscious experience is all that we need, as you will see.
Post #1: Introducing the Fundamental Framework of Maps
In Maps Within Maps, we set things up for a unique science of subjective experience, expanding what we consider appropriate for science to study into the realm of inner experience. In doing so, we began to look at how we might need to think about that larger territory of investigation.
We established that science itself is, at its root, primarily a subset of a universal human (at least) activity involving how we navigate the experiences of life. We engage in lived experience, notice stable patterns within that experience, extract those patterns into the entities, relationships and contexts of our inner maps of everything from the structures of our body to the social networks of community and meaning.
Our maps are typically supremely personal. Science expands this map-making and navigating activity with the intention to construct more universal maps that can be relevant and useful across different contexts and people.
Post #2: Introducing the Central Role of Observation
In Building Good Maps, we establish the crucial role of observation in our map construction activities, and we look at what it takes to conduct observation that is good enough to support the design of very good maps.
We begin with a recognition that even at the most foundational activity of our nervous system’s processing of sensory data, we are constructing maps that support our moving through the world. We also examine the critical activity of many forms of triangulation to support the assembling of observational data into reliable structures that form our maps. This triangulation happens all the way down to the level of our binocular vision and up to the holding of each component of every map, and each map held as a component in larger contextual maps.
Then, we look at how these principles are applied in conducting standard scientific activity. We dig into a review of the science of forest mycorrhizal networks to provide a clear, detailed example of this.
Next, we look at how observation is not separate from the territory it observes, but is instead a very intimate engagement, an “omni-directional interaction” that both observes the territory and changes what it observes at the same time. This was identified in the science of quantum physics, but if we are honest with ourselves, we can see it in action at all levels of science.
Finally, we look at how this fundamental limitation has led science to narrow its activity in order to minimize the squirreliness of observation. Three compromises have taken shape:
Limit the territory under investigation to regions of experience which are more reliably consistent.
Define reality as fixed and objective as a way to force consistency.
Restrict investigations to forms in which observers can remain effectively outside of the process, unchanged by the act of observing in any way relevant to the realm of study.
These compromises have, thus far, established an insurmountable barrier to the study of subjective experience.
Post #3: Introducing the Primary Challenges to a Science of Subjective Experience
In Our Biggest Obstacles to an Inner Science, we delve more deeply into just why the study of subjective experience has not been amenable to standard science. We look at the roles played by the subjectivity barrier, and the resultant filter which our reliance on language places upon our attempts to bridge that barrier.
We examine how these obstacles not only handicap any attempts to study subjective experience right from the beginning, but they also interfere with any of us developing reasonably solid skills for observing our own inner experience. We have been able to form no adequate system for direct engagement with inner experience. Without that, there is of course also no framework for learning. Nobody who would want to develop such skills has anywhere to turn. (There are, of course, attempts to work around this, including for example eastern traditions in which during long study with a teacher, one can sometimes learn inner skills implicitly, as if by osmosis.)
This, perhaps more than anything else, handicaps all efforts to scientifically study conscious experience. Any subject participating in any study is essentially a novice in the art of observing inner experience. Whatever the structure of the study, any subjective information gathered from actual subjects is likely to be diffuse and imprecise at best.
We then look at how the typical compensation for this is for science to train its tools of observation upon places more likely to provide consistency and precision. Places like brain activity or other physiological measures. The problem with this is that we set up our observations and experiments with a focus on elements that are merely correlations of actual experience. Not only that, but because we cannot directly observe experience itself, we have no clear idea how long the chains of correlation might be. Because every step in a correlation chain introduces unknown numbers of potential factors influencing the end data, our interpretations of whatever data we are lucky enough to collect are bound to be flawed.
Post #4: Introducing Feelingmind, the Most Challenging Obstacle
In The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind, we examine what is perhaps the most difficult aspect of conscious experience to examine with any kind of scientific approach. This is the raw, actual, felt experience of being, the essential core of what it is like to be alive and conscious.
We engage with an exercise designed to bring awareness to this dimension as something distinctly different from our more common points of focus in turning our attention inward. We define this essential experience of being as feelingmind, and demonstrate its difference from sensory perceptions, somatic sensations, thoughts, memories and imagination.
In highlighting the nature of feelingmind, we gain further insight into the formidable obstruction of the subjectivity barrier and its accompanying language filters. At the same time, we establish the absolute requirement for a science of subjective experience to address this challenge if it is to have any hope of moving forward.
Post #5: Introducing the Flow of Discovery in Science
In How Discoveries Are Made, we use the recent scientific discovery of what has been called a new organ that extends throughout the body, the interstitium, to outline the key steps in making new discoveries in any science.
We review the following six steps of discovery:
We reliably and methodically observe something we haven’t observed before.
We make sense of our observations through discerning stable patterns that can become new components in new or existing maps.
We triangulate our observations with other observational methods to enhance our map design (understanding).
We triangulate our observations with other observers examining similar territory using the same or similar methods to confirm the reliability or initiate revision of our maps.
We engage in wider-reaching inquiry to strengthen, challenge, and refine our new map components.
When map components fail, we go back to the beginning and start all over again.
One central theme in our discovery process is that of holding interpretations of our observations lightly. It is very important that we give full freedom to our map-making process to take into consideration the aberrant, the peripheral, the mysterious elements of our data while simultaneously maintaining methodological discipline in our observational practices.
We end this section with an affirmation of the exciting thresholds offered by new methods of observation and look forward to the observational possibilities offered by psychotopology’s fieldwork method.
Post #6: My Approach to Science, Part 1
In My Approach to Science, Part 1, I tell a bit of the story of how I came to develop this work, and the unique advantage I brought to the challenge.
Key to my approach was a grounding in feeling as my primary interface with being, along with my mode of thinking by way of felt-sense structure over logical analysis. This enabled me to bring a fresh perspective to the challenge of investigating subjective experience.
At one point in the course of investigating my own inner experience of bipolar mood cycles, I stumbled into an anomalous experience that led to the discovery of virtual materiality as the substrate of feeling experience. Because of my preferred mode of engaging through feeling and structure, and my centering of conscious subjective experience as my primary reference point, I was able to enter this new territory relatively unencumbered by the restrictions of conventional science.
Post #7: Introducing a New Method of Observation and What It Reveals
In A New Method for Observing Inner Experience, we review the journey of emergence that led to the development of psychotopology fieldwork. Here, we learn about the unlikely combination of factors that led to this breakthrough. We see how very quickly this method revealed a unique, qualitative dimension of the inner feeling experience that enables its highly precise, methodical observation.
This unique dimension of feeling experience seems to be constructed of a familiar substrate — that of our broad-ranging experience of being a material body inhabiting a material world. We discern qualities that include
Location, size and shape
Substance properties including solid, liquid, gas, light and energy
Temperature
Color and other properties of appearance
Movement, force and pressure
Sound
It is important to note that at this point, all we have is a new tool. We have not yet been able to confirm that what this tool reveals is “real” or valuable in some way to our purposes of investigating subjective experience. All we know for sure is that something unexpected beckons us forward.
However, one of the most compelling features of this new method is that not only does it enable us to observe feeling experience with what seems to be unprecedented precision and scope, but it also seems to enable us to interact directly with what is observed, making deliberate changes to the territory under observation. This makes possible a broad array of possibilities for testing our observations, and offers great promise for the initiation of some kind of actual science of inner experience.
Fieldwork Quick Start: Conducting Your Own Observations
In Fieldwork Quick Start, we get to dive in. Here is a presentation of fieldwork basics, and a clear invitation for readers to apply its structured questioning method for turning attention toward precisely observing the actual inner experience of feeling.
In fieldwork, not only do we get to observe, or “map” a given feeling experience, but we get to interact with it, making deliberate changes to the feeling experience in order to expand our observational opportunities.
My strong desire is for you to engage. I want for you to notice what is new, different, unexpected about this territory. Please do give it a whirl.
Starting Down the Discovery Trail
At this point in our discovery process, we do not know for sure what we are encountering. We have no reliable reference points. But we can say that our observation feels valid.
Something about the information we elicit from the nebulous space of feeling seems to correspond to a deeper, felt sense of the actual essence of what we are feeling. It feels “right,” or like a “good fit.” Our feeling state has the properties of this substance, not that one. It has this temperature, not another. It exhibits this color, not the shade lighter or darker, and definitely not its complement. If it feels like it is moving, well, there is definitely a moving-ness about it. It is not still. And if it is still, it is definitely not jiggling or jostling or behaving like a geyser or an exploding star.
This observation informs us. It gives us more precise access to the thoughts and beliefs that live in this feeling space, and the relationship between this feeling state and the rest of our being. This understanding may be explicit, easily spoken in words, or it may remain implicit and intuitive. Nevertheless, the insights we gain through observing our feeling state are with us to stay.
We cannot say what is the “reality” of the stuff we are observing, but we can say that our observations seem to correspond to some properties living in that reality. Our direct engagement with these properties, deliberately modifying them and experiencing immediate changes to the feeling state, seems to confirm that we’re working with something significant. The correspondence seems strong enough for us to proceed with our new observation tool, to accumulate many observations in order to discover more about what this might be.
We can also say there seems to be a fairly strong possibility that we may learn something new. It seems that by applying this new method with discipline and curiosity, opening to what shows up, and making our best efforts to discern stable patterns in our observational data, that we may succeed in constructing at least a few new components for our maps of the inner world.
What does all this mean?
Pause for a moment, take a step back, and think about this. What does this mean, that you can take any feeling state and deliberately turn it into any other feeling? At first glance, it seems as though this technique could put an end to all human suffering virtually overnight. WTF?!
It’s clear to me, and I hope to you as well, that we are faced with serious confrontation with our ordinary ways of thinking about psychology and consciousness. We have no reference for what we are observing, no way to make sense of it, no maps we can trust. We’re on our own to forge ahead into the wild frontier and find out for ourselves what’s here.
There is an unprecedented opportunity here. To take it, we must turn away from all we know. While we will serve our investigation best by remaining alert for aspects both congruent and incongruent with our existing maps, we must avoid locking ourselves within our familiar theories and knowledge.
Instead, we must walk into the unknown and make ourselves fully available to nothing more than the direct, raw data of experience. We must observe, and observe some more, and observe even more than that. In our observations, we must seek to make sense of what we encounter by identifying stable patterns that can be extracted into entities and relationships, and we must reach for contextual frames by which to make sense of these emerging maps.
This is our task. This is our mission. This is our sacred duty to ourselves and to all who come after us.
Just Getting Started
In closing, I want you to know we are just barely getting started. I’ve given you enough to start getting some glimpses about the significance of what we’re working with, especially if you take my lead and start using fieldwork to explore what’s inside you.
You will encounter these mysterious incongruencies with existing knowledge. And you will be faced with a choice. Embrace the mystery and walk headlong into it. Or turn away and recommit to the beliefs and frameworks you have found comfortable so far.
If you feel yourself drawn to the latter, I ask you: How is that actually serving you at this point? How are the current paradigms serving us all? Look around and look within, and answer that question as honestly as you can. Perhaps for you, it is of greatest importance to retain your existing framework.
If instead you feel yourself drawn into the mystery, welcome to psychotopology, the new science of subjective experience!
Perhaps check in with yourself right now. What are you feeling as you read this? Give that feeling a name and consider taking it through the fieldwork process to learn more about this part of yourself. And consider reaching out to me to connect in some way that affirms and expresses your interest.
Reflections
Here’s your chance to influence how I move forward by adding your reflections in the comments below.
How does this post land for you?
What in you feels like it is being spoken to in this post?
What questions are you left with? What are you most curious about?
What feedback would you like to offer me, in service to my being able to share this new work with you and the world?
What feedback could you offer toward improving my writing of this post?
Comments are open to all, and I do hope you will consider also subscribing so we can stay in the loop with one another as this evolves.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for sharing your thoughts in the comments below. I look forward to meeting you soon.
One last note. I’d love for you to thoughtfully spread the word about Frontiers of Psychotopology. For example, reach out to someone you think would appreciate this, and tell them why. Alternatively, here on Substack, feel free to share with your beloved subscribers.
What am I feeling as I read this?
I feel excited about this work. I feel we are standing at the beginning of a new groundbreaking discovery.
I feel the air becoming thinner, lighter, and more translucent all around, as I am standing on the ridge of a mountain range. A new landscape is stretching out into the distance, all the way to the horizon, filled with promise and wonder.
From the diaphanous landscape below I can see structures emerge. Ethereal structures shimmering in a spectrum of colours providing some kind of guidance.
I am reminded of a childrens' book by French illustrator and author Philippe Fix called 'Seraphin'...