Our Biggest Obstacles to an Inner Science

The Subjectivity Barrier and the Limitation of Language

Photo by Preslava Glushkova on Unsplash

In my previous posts Maps Within Maps and Building Good Maps, I describe the essential core of our experiential interface with realities both inside and outside of ourselves. I lay out how very important it is for us to bring high-quality observation to the task of identifying the stable entities and relationships for our maps. And I outline the necessary strategies of triangulation of such observation to elevate our maps to the status of a science, serving as universal guidance for people everywhere to navigate reliably through their lived experience of the world.

How do we carry out this strategy in mapping the territory of subjective inner experience? What are the challenges? Can it work? Up until now, it has seemed that the answer is no, it cannot. The challenges are too great.

Let’s take a look at those challenges as we approach a revised assessment of what might be possible.

The Reasonable Compromises of Science

In Building Good Maps, I present three complementary compromises science has made in service to progress:

• Focus investigation on portions of our experience that lend themselves to consistency relative to our existing tools for observation.

• Define reality as that which is confined within those portions our experience.

• Avoid any methodology in which changes to the observer impact what is being observed.

The scientific process as it has taken shape under these choices relies above all upon repeatable observational measurements that can be considered to reflect something of the truth of a stable reality. To demonstrate reality’s objective nature, the data of observation must be consistently harvestable by different researchers at different times. Set up the lab conditions, run the experiment, and you should get the same results.

This has proven to be virtually impossible when it comes to subjective, conscious experience. The only person with access to your inner experience is you, and you have no access whatsoever to the inner experience of any other person. How to make a universal map of such an idiosyncratic territory?

Language seems to be our most useful bridge, but language falls far short of being able to carry the rich complexity of actual, conscious experience from one person to another. We attempt to work with the spare information we are able to gather, trying to discern entities, relationships, and patterns, but the endless proliferation of variability from one person to the next makes such a project very difficult.

The Language Filter

Language itself contributes to the proliferation of variability in experiential reports from one person to the next. It’s our primary tool for conveying information about our inner experience, but its limitations make this tool too crude for the task. At least in its current form.

To make a more universal map of conscious experience requires that we make a few legitimate observations before we can even begin. The only place from which to observe is inside experience itself, as the person having the experience. The most comprehensive way to extract what is observed is through language, through introspection reports of various kinds. This presents a few problems.

First, the subjectivity barrier blocks the normal formation of shared vocabulary useful for describing inner experience. Language connects us to a collection of shared map components. Language itself is the medium by which we transfer experience and its interpretations — our inner entities and relationships — from one person to another. How do the entities and relationships of our personal maps become shared with others?

Extending personal maps into shared maps requires triangulation. Let’s say you have come to visit me from Meadowland, where there are no trees, only grass as far as the eye can see. We stand together in my back yard, I point at a tree, and say the word “tree.” You are able to refer to your own visual experience, notice visual properties that indicate, according to your past experience, something uniquely different standing in my yard, and you are able to assign the sound-pattern of the spoken word “tree” to this differentiated entity.

We may walk over to the tree, and you may gather more sensory information about what tree-ness is like. You touch the bark, lean against the trunk, reach up and pull down a branch to see how the leaves are distributed along its length. Then, when we go to a local park and see another tree, you are able to point to it, say “tree,” and receive my confirmation that yes, that is a tree.

This works well in the case that your senses work similarly to mine. As we triangulate our respective sensory experiences of tree-ness with the word tree, the images, sounds, and textures are similar enough for us to successfully use the word in the future to refer to that shared reference point.

When we attempt to use language to refer to inner, subjective experience, though, we are unable to triangulate successfully. Instead we are forced to fall back on correlates to make our best efforts.

For example, if I am a child, learning how to refer to what I feel inside, my parent may see my tears and tell me I look like I’m feeling sad. I attach the word sad to my experience in that moment. Later, when I see my friend cry, I might ask if they feel sad, and when they nod yes, I receive a further confirmation that I understand what experience the word represents.

We are using the physiological correlation of tears to confirm the vocabulary of sadness without ever having access to what that sadness actually feels like in one another. (You will see this made explicit in a later article detailing the amazing diversity in the actual inner experience of what our language assigns to the same term, sadness.)

Second, lived experience is far beyond what is possible to capture in language. As you will see in the revelations that emerge from psychotopology, our inner experience is rich far beyond anything possible to capture in existing words. Which makes sense. Because of the subjectivity barrier blocking triangulation of experiential specifics, there is simply no way to develop a rich vocabulary of inner terrain.

There’s not much more I need to say about this point. Current language is simply not up to the task of conveying something that carries an infinite wholeness and interconnection within itself and with everything around it.

Third, my language is not your language, my words are not your words. Because of the social pressure to agree to the shared meanings of the words we use, we’ve got to commit to something, even when the subjectivity barrier prevents adequate triangulation. So we link the word sad to one very rich inner experience and call it good.

The thing is, the experience I’ve linked to “sad,” and the one you have chosen, may be worlds apart. I share with you that I feel sad, you think you understand exactly what I mean. I hear you affirm that, and feel a kind of opening. But it doesn’t hold, and we wonder why the conversation continues in a way that feels awkward to us both.

As a result, some people tend to ignore these differences and impose their reality on others. Others find themselves not connecting at all to conversations around feeling and other nuances of inner experience, and they avoid these topics altogether, along with the people who tend to talk about these things. Both of these tendencies contribute to the endless misunderstandings people have with one another.

Fourth, we collude with one another in restricting our experience to fit within the definitions of our words. We want to be seen and heard, to see and hear others, to connect. Carrying the burden of the subjectivity barrier and the inadequacies of language, we tend to constrain our own experience in order to conform to what the words say. I want the words we share to fit my inner experience, and so I will be less likely to bring my attention to those places which fall outside the boundaries of our language. In this way, we weave an illusion of connection.

This is true even of the relationship we have with ourselves. To the extent that language occupies a dominant place in the structures of our inner maps, and to the extent that we are influenced by our culture’s prioritizing thought and objectivity over feeling and subjective experience, we are likely to constrain our awareness to fit our lived experience into the boxes defined by our words. At times, we may find this far more comforting than to face the infinite mystery of being.

Put these four together, and you have a total mismatch when you try to use language to compare one person’s conscious experience to another’s in order to discern patterns that might reveal entities and relationships that are sufficiently coherent to use in constructing useful, reliable maps for this richly textured inner landscape.

The result of these four factors is that language acts as a filter, withholding the vast majority of observational possibility from the actual transference of observed data of lived experience from one person to the next. When we put words to our inner experience, perhaps to say something like, “I feel sad,” we reduce a rich stew to a few drops of broth. If we’re lucky.

Absence of Solid Skills for Inner Observation

The combination of the subjectivity barrier with the language filter makes us all absolute novices in the art of inner observation. Because we cannot peer into one another’s inner experience, we have no direct access to learn how someone else experiences and navigates their inner world. The makes it difficult for both prospective teachers and students of potential inner sciences. And because language provides such crude transmission of experience from one person to the next, even if someone were to somehow become an absolute master of inner navigation, they would have great difficulty communicating their skill to others.

This leaves any prospective science of inner experience in an awkward position. To study inner experience, you absolutely must rely upon the observations conducted by your study subjects through the reports they provide. But how do you know what they are observing, and how? You are left sending them through the experimental conditions, asking about their experience using whatever protocol you’ve designed, and hoping for the best.

This activity rests upon an assumption that observing inner experience is done pretty much the same from one person to the next. But how can this assumption be justified if the actual activity of self-observation has never been rigorously investigated?

I’m going to jump ahead here to say that psychotopology has succeeded in developing an actual science of inner experience, and what it reveals suggests the following. In existing research into conscious experience, it is as if we have hired elementary school kids to operate our lab’s electron microscopes to conduct a study of mitochondrial DNA. Good luck with that. There’s just no way you’re going to get anywhere at all with your study.

Some people might bring up the existence of studies that bring meditation masters into the lab as contra examples. But here again, we have both the subjectivity barrier and the language filter in the way. There are assumptions made about what a meditation master is doing in their meditation, but no clear description of the activity or the experience itself.

Such masters gain their status through long decades of practice under specific teachers who do not teach explicitly, but implicitly, mostly through modeling and coaching behaviors. Most such teachings are pretty opaque to anyone who wants to understand what’s going on without doing the years of practice. So while some things might be revealed by such research, what exactly it is that’s revealed remains quite hidden to us.

The other thing that’s commonly done in research is to provide an experience through specific stimuli — watch this video, for example. The assumption is that the stimuli equals the experience, and that different subjects will have close-enough to the same experience for the research to yield some insight. But we don’t have any way to confirm this assumption.

Inadequacy of the Correlation Solution

The correlation of stimulus to experience as a way to constrain experience among research subjects is just one example of using correlation as a solution to the subjectivity barrier and the language filter. Pretty much all methods of collecting data about consciousness involve such correlation.

Now, we could argue that all observation involves interpreting correlates of what is assumed to be observed. Even our direct visual examination of the backyard tree is constructed by our brain from correlates of that tree including photonic activation of retinal cells all the way to neural assembly networks putting together the signals from all over the retina into a coherent model or map of tree-ness, with many steps between.

The fact is, we are always limited to inferences about the actual territory we are observing based upon the correlates as they present to our experience. If this is the case, maybe this is not a significant problem. But there is a distance factor: how far away are the correlates that you choose to interpret from the phenomena with which they are correlated? Are you measuring direct, first-order correlates of the phenomenon itself, or stretching your observation into correlate chains of unknown length?

Keep in mind that this effort is all about making more universally-useful maps. I would argue that we can decide whether our correlate chains are short enough by the results we get. Drift too far down the correlate chain, and your maps become mere back-of-the-napkin sketches, much less reliable.

Currently we have neuroscience, for example, attempting to reveal neural correlates of consciousness by linking second-order indicators of neural activity (e.g. oxygen flow, which is a correlate of neural activity, not the activity itself) with distant correlates of experience (e.g. a 0-10 Likert Scale self-assessment of the intensity of an emotion), never quite succeeding in incorporating direct observation of conscious experience into the flow of investigation.

We could go so far as to say that today, with our understanding of consciousness, the most significant mystery of our very existence, we are stuck on the back of the napkin. (Maybe in a smoky bar. After a lot of drinks. With a pen that’s running out of ink and a few blotches of whisky soaking through.)

My point is, we need to judge the adequacy of our approach by the results it gives us. Are we able to build a reliable-enough map for our purposes? If so, great. If not, we’ve got work to do. Today, because of the seemingly insurmountable challenges of the subjectivity barrier and the language filter, today’s sciences of consciousness turn only glancingly toward first-person reports and rely almost completely upon too-long chains of behavioral and physiological correlates of what’s going on inside experience itself.

The Challenge Before Us

Looking over these issues, it is difficult to imagine overcoming them. Subjective experience varies so widely, in ways we have no way of knowing because of the subjectivity barrier and the accompanying limitations of language, that the aspiration to develop reliable universal maps seems nearly impossible. Nevertheless, our model of science as the design of more universal maps does give us somewhere to begin.

Above all, we require a new method for observing subjective experience with greater fidelity, a method that enables us to get around the language filter to reveal more of what lies inside. Then we need to apply that method at a large enough scale to begin to discern patterns that could reveal reliable entities and relationships.

Optimally, our observation method needs to be paired with a controlled method of engagement, a method of interacting with what we observe in ways that enable us to test our observations. Is this what it seems to be? Does it behave the way we expect when we conduct this intervention? What relationships can we discern between the entities that emerge?

This is our challenge. This is the project of psychotopology. In upcoming posts in The Science, I’ll be introducing my discovery of the proto-language of virtual materiality that serves as the foundation of our lived, conscious (and unconscious) experience of feeling. This discovery, along with the fieldwork method that grew out of it, enables us to effectively pierce the subjectivity barrier and replace the language filter for the first time.

I’ll also be talking a bit more about the discovery process in science and how we need to adapt it to meet the needs of our pioneering endeavor. We want to make sure that we conduct our investigations with an approach that yields the most efficient progress in our research, given the unique frontier we are exploring.

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