The Crucial Role of Observation
Getting Started with Our New Science — The First in a Series
Next post in this series:
OK, it’s time to get serious about the science side of things. To do so, we will be applying our new practice of fieldwork mapping as presented in The Practice. You might also wish to review the groundwork I’ve laid for The Science (The Beginning of a New Science is a good summary) including the latest post, Radical Curiosity. Here is some of what will guide our early efforts:
We have recognized that this virtual materiality of the feeling experience represents virgin territory. We do not know what to expect, and have chosen to shed our existing maps before entering this new territory.
We have established that the purpose of our science is to build useable maps for navigating the experience of life. Essential components of these maps include entities, relationships and contexts inferred from persistent patterns of experience. Our standard for map effectiveness lies in its reliability in guiding navigation sufficiently well to enable us to trust our map’s predictions about what our actions are likely to yield.
We have recognized that our highest priority at this early stage of our science is observation. We must gather the raw data of subjective experience in order to begin discerning patterns which might eventually form the components of our maps.
Our job at this point is simply to observe. At the same time, observing — by itself — requires us to have a working map in order to navigate the activity of observation. How do we know what counts as an observation? What exactly are we choosing to examine? We need to explicitly lay out a few points as our starting position so we don’t get mired in our own hidden assumptions.
Seeking the Thing-ness in Feeling
Maps, again, consist of entities, relationships and contexts. We’re going to try to keep things simple as we begin.
An entity is a persistent pattern of experience.
A relationship is a predictable pattern of coordinated change linking two or more entities or relationships.
A context is a larger, persistent pattern of experience which contains and supports the entities and relationships under examination.
The first entity we must establish in our inaugural map is that of a feeling state. We can define a feeling state as a specific feeling experience that occurs within a life context, over a contextually relevant time frame, and which can be discerned as uniquely different from other specific feeling experiences, and assigned a unique name.
We can define feeling experience as having the following qualities:
Not made of any of the following:
Ordinary sensory experience, including visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or other somatic sensation.
Ordinary thought experience, including mental imagery, memory or imagination.
Existing within the direct experience of being which would remain if the above were to be removed from conscious awareness.
Persistent or recurrent, with a sense of familiarity that enables us to attach a name to it and know in our experience what the name is attached to.
The second entity we must establish in our launch map is virtual materiality. Virtual materiality involves the observational experience of virtual material properties that correspond with the inner experiences of feeling. If we look in detail, we can break down virtual materiality into nearly infinite sub-components of specific virtual material properties. The larger categories include location, substance and color, and the micro-categories would include things like hardness, weight, and luminosity.
For the purposes of our observation methodology, we shall treat the combination of sub-components in any given observation as a whole, and we shall establish the first key relationship in our map as that between a unique configuration of virtual material properties and the associated unique feeling state.
For the purposes of our observation methodology, we will begin with an assumption that a specific configuration of virtual material properties corresponds directly to a specific feeling state and the name it is given. That is, if our observation yields a specific set of properties, then the relationship between those properties and the feeling state that generated their observation is one to one. If the properties change, the properties no longer correspond to that feeling state. If the feeling state changes, it no longer corresponds to its original configuration of properties.
NOTE: I offer this strong relationship between feeling experience and virtual material properties as a foundational presupposition for this stage in your own journey into this science. A truly new science must begin somewhere, and the science of psychotopology began with my own subjective perception of this relationship. By holding this as a starting map, I experienced leaps forward in what I was able to observe and accomplish in this inner world of feeling, and over the course of three decades of many thousands of observations in myself and many others, this foundation has become ever stronger.
So: The central entity is the unique feeling experience. The second, related entity is a set of virtual material properties corresponding to the given feeling experience. The primary “relationship” is between the unique feeling experience and the unique set of virtual material properties which correspond to it. We can say, in essence, that the virtual material properties are equivalent to the feeling experience, that the feeling experience is made of its virtual material properties.
Using the symbol “☰” to represent equivalence, we can elegantly write our first relationship as follows.
FeelingA ☰ VM-propertiesA
As soon as we establish this equivalence as a “thing,” we are struck with a new requirement. We must address the serious question: Will our virtual material property observations be legitimate? As in, are they reproducible? Are they accurate? Do they correspond to some “reality” about which we are interested?
Let’s explore this for a moment before we move on.
Bringing Discipline to Our First Efforts
As I prepare to write this section, I realize I need to share a bit more background. What I am about to present to you comes across with far greater confidence and clarity than what I was able to access back in the early days of this work.
In the early days, after I had developed the basic fieldwork questions and I was reaching here and there for opportunities to try it out on whoever I could wrangle into volunteering, I was flying by the seat of my pants. There didn’t seem much in the way, no apparent dangers, no reason not to simply dive in and try it with every opportunity that presented itself. It was a messy and irregular approach, to be sure, and certainly not conducted in the way of anything resembling a rigorous science.
Nevertheless, the territory I was mapping behaved in ways consistent enough for me to start learning my way around. Over time, I gained skill in recognizing the juicy spaces in which we were mapping something potent, and discerning those contrasting spaces where we were poking around at something that seemed not really to exist, or where our attempts simply did not connect with something that felt real.
In the course of a year or two of mapping scores of states in myself and working with probably a dozen or two volunteers, some for many hours, things began to take more tangible shape. And in the decades since then, that vague early territory has become steadily more firm and reliable in its congruence with my understanding.
What I am trying to say here is that after long consideration, I don’t think it makes sense for me to start you off where I started. This territory contrasts so much with our expectations that for me, there was no way around that first year of thrashing around. Although I could start things at a more rudimentary level and truly build from the absolute ground up, for me that would feel tedious, and it would take so much longer for us to get where I want us to arrive. It’s possible I may change my mind and decide to build this in the future, but for now, I prefer to provide a smooth on-ramp to make it easier for you to get the benefits of this work more quickly.
To that end, I will offer a more direct path to what I have learned about the mapping process itself and about how we can make sure that our observations are accurate and valid. In what follows, I will describe a number of ways we can confirm or disconfirm our observations, making sure that they are fundamentally reliable.
Ensuring Our Observations Are Valid
As soon as we begin our fieldwork practice, we are faced with a disconnect between the tangible and vivid perception of virtual material properties and our common-sense, ordinary shared concepts about what we feel. We are likely to have never talked about sadness in terms of its location, substance, temperature, color, movement and other properties in our efforts to share our experience with another person, whether a friend, loved one, or therapist. So it feels unfamiliar.
This unfamiliarity, right from the beginning, supports our desire to make sure that what we are observing is real in some way. These virtual material images that arise when we engage the fieldwork questions are unexpected, and being so, are unlikely to be generated by our existing knowledge, understanding, or ways of thinking about feeling.
A second aspect of our experience that supports our desire for valid observations is the simple, subjective sense of “rightness” about what we observe. When we settle on the specific configuration of virtual material properties that feels strongly like it matches directly with our experience of the feeling state, we have very much more a sense of perception than one of fantasy, metaphor, or conceptual expression. Our observation “fits” our experience in a way that can only be assessed from within the experience itself, and which feels strongly validating for the data we collect.
A third way that we can confirm for ourselves that our observations are valid is to revisit the feeling state at a later time. Whether hours, days or weeks later, we can revisit the memory of the experience that best expresses or integrates with the feeling state in question and go through the mapping process all over again, from the beginning, without revisiting our original observations. Time and again, when we do this, we find the same virtual materiality configurations as the first time, validating our original observation and perhaps even adding more detail to it.
A fourth method we can use to confirm our observations is, again, at a later time, to use the virtual materiality descriptions to “recreate” our feeling experience out of its raw materials of this location, that substance, etc. When we do this with fidelity and find ourselves restoring what feels to us to be the very same feeling state that originally generated that virtual material description, we confirm our observations.
Finally, to confirm our observation even more strongly, we have the slider test. I spoke about this in the Fieldwork Mapping Series, #11: Pro Tips. The slider test works quite simply: we zoom in on one of our virtual material properties and directly “slide” the value of that property in one direction, then in the opposite direction. Altering substance weight, for example, should result in an adjustment to the actual feeling experience, directly and instantly. When we experience that adjustment, we have confirmed that our mapping value is accurate.
The slider test is greatly expanded when we engage fieldwork’s moving phase. In moving a state, we adjust the sliders all the way to an optimum value for every property, completely transforming the state in the process. This simply doesn’t work when we haven’t mapped it correctly in the first place.
One way we can easily fail to make an accurate observation is through employing more of an imagination function to constructing what we think the feeling should look like. It’s too much for me to describe at this point in our journey just how that works, but just know this. If the image that arises through the fieldwork questions has a very high level of detail that includes multiple types of feeling substance, multiple colors, or other diversity of raw materials, question its validity. A flat board with a message written on it, or a crown studded with multiple types of jewels, to take two examples, would be unlikely to emerge from accurate observations of virtual material properties of a single feeling state.
When such a complex image arises in the mapping process, I usually meet it with a question something like, “As you gaze upon that [complex thing], what is the feeling of that experience? And if you were to say that the actual, felt experience of looking at that is located in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?” This often is enough to shift awareness from imagery to feeling.
Moving forward, as I take you through the various discoveries in the course of observing one state after another, rest assured that all of the examples I provide have been validated in one or more of these ways. At the same time, I encourage you to validate these emerging data patterns through your own mapping experience. Map lots of states. Invite your friends to join you in exploring their state maps as well. Compare and contrast the results of your own investigations with those I offer.
We’re in this together, first-person scientists of subjective experience. I look forward to rolling up our sleeves beside one another to share notes, cook up new questions, and stumble upon new discoveries as we expand the frontiers of psychotopology.
Curiosity About Patterns
Now that we have established our primary foundation — the equivalence between the experience of a specific feeling state and the unique configuration of virtual material properties of that state experience — and some assurance that our observations will be accurate and valid, we can begin to contemplate what we expect to find as we begin our observations. We will lay that next stone for our foundation in the next post. Stay tuned!
Reflections
Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!