Minds and Brains

Phenomenological Experiments: a how-to-do-it guide

Overview. Among many other adventures, in this course we will be working toward a systematic survey of the types, aspects, and dimensions of ordinary human consciousness. The raw data for this survey will be a series of phenomenological experiments, in which you (yes, you) develop examples for the rest of the class to reflect on. Based on Husserl's variational method (as explicated in Ihde), each of these experiments will shed a bit of light on what it is like to be you (i.e. one of us, i.e. human). You develop one such experiment every week of the course, and hand them in via email, with a deadline of 10 PM every Tuesday.

The purpose of each experiment is to help us focus on the subjective (noetic) pole of experience, the part we usually discard as we attend to the world of things outside of us. In other words, we examine how we experience, rather than what we experience.

The experiment.
Each phenomenological experiment (PE) is a short comparative study of two experiences. The experiences may be easy to generate in a classroom (e.g. seeing colors in different lighting conditions), or not. They may be commonplace (e.g. tasting butter vs. smelling it), or not (e.g. a first kiss vs. the thousandth). The example may be inspired by our readings, but it may not. All the senses or aspects of cognition or emotion are fair game; all the different modes of thinking and feeling are also fair (belief, doubt, disbelief, dread, hope, fear, wishing, fantasy, etc.). In general, both experiences will have the same objective reference (same noematic correlate) -- that is, each will have the same objective content, but will vary the subjective framing of that content. For example, a PE might compare the perceptual experience of going to the dentist with the remembered experience of going to the same dentist. The going-to-the-dentist is constant. What varies is the subjective relationship toward that content, perception as it happens vs. recall of it after the fact.

Your report on your PE will have two parts:
1) Instructions: How the two experiences were generated.
2) Analysis.
The two experiences will share some features. Briefly describe the shared features. Then also identify the unique elements or features of the two experiences.

For some examples, see below.

Deadline. In order to use your experiments in class, I ask that you aim for the following weekly deadline. Your weekly experiment will be due VIA EMAIL on TUESDAY NIGHTS AT TEN PM. Email them to dan.lloyd@trincoll.edu . Submissions after this deadline will incur a substantial penalty.

Free advice:
1. A PE may occur to you at any time. Watch for ideas all week long, and jot them down as they happen. Then review the possibilities and hand in the best.
2. Unsure which idea is your best? Develop as many PEs as you want during the week, and hand them all in. I'll give you your best grade from the batch!

The criteria I use for evaluating PEs...

Examples of topics for PEs:

Warm up one hand in warm water, and chill the other in cool water. Then plunge both into tepid water and compare the way the water feels in each case. (Original in Berkeley.)

Taste butter with your nose pinched shut, and without.

Listen carefully to a complex word (or pronounce it). Then repeat the word hundreds of times and note how your experience changes with the repetition.

And here is one that is fully presented. Note that PEs need not focus on perception, and can involve some subtle effects.

PE # 1 "Plausible And Implausible Imagination"

"Imagine someone who is very familiar to you but far away: a lover, a sibling. Case 1: Imagine the person as they are at this moment, in his or her "natural context" (a place you are probably familiar with). Case 2: Imagine the person sitting a few feet behind you, very quietly, and out of sight.

Analysis: Both cases have in common the physical features of the person imagined. I thought about my brother, putting him in his living room in a Boston suburb. Then in case 2, I imagined him sitting in a chair four feet directly behind me as I typed. He looked about the same in both cases. But there was a difference In case 2, his relationship to the background and the context of my room was a bit ghostly or uncanny, as if he was weightless or a hologram. (Note that in both cases I place him in a scene which I am only imagining, not actually perceiving.) So in case 2, he "stuck out" or seemed pasted in to the imagined scene, while in case 1 the overall scene, with him in it, had a uniformity that case 2 lacked. Case 2 also came with an odd sense of my brother's presence. I felt a bit watched, and after thinking about it for a while, I had to turn around to make sure he wasn't there. Overall, I think that in case 1 all the elements of my mental image were equally plausible (real, believable), while in case 2 the image of my brother, although vivid, was not a believable part of the very believable image of the room behind me. Although there is no visual difference, there is a detectable difference in my experience. It is something invisible that I can nonetheless see."

And some genuine student PEs, 1997:

#1: Background knowledge and the perception of a photograph:

Before going to bed a few nights ago, I was setting my alarm when I looked to a bit to the left of it and noticed a picture of my girlfriend and two of her roommates in their apartment in Sydney, Australia. Having just returned from there a few weeks ago- and moreover, having spent almost two weeks in that apartment, I found the experience of the picture was entirely different.
She sent me the photo last semester. Her and her roommates are dressed to go out, and they are all sitting on the arms and backs of two chairs. There is a wall running back to the left, which recedes further back to the left, but then runs parallel to the first wall. There is a desk in that recession, and beyond that, on the right, part of the kitchen can be seen.
When she sent me this photo last semester I was really only able to get a relative feel for her apartment. I could tell what the furniture was like, I could see some of the decorations, and somehow, I developed my own imaginary layout of the apartment- knowing only that it had three bedrooms, a living room, bathroom, and kitchen. Two of those were placed in the picture, and I assumed that the bedrooms were off to the right of the picture. I was wrong.
What looked like a recession only for the desk in the background is also the hallway to the bedrooms, although it can't be seen in the picture. In the area where I thought the bedrooms would be, there is the front door, and a small eating area. But it is not these missed guesses that comprise the phenomenon of seeing the picture again in a new way, it is the possibilities which I now see in the picture- it seems to be alive.
When I look at the picture now, I hardly see her of her friends in the foreground. Instead, I see people walking in the apartment, doing things- cooking, relaxing, getting up in the morning, coming home at night, slouching into a chair, walking right in front of the camera- walking right up to the camera (because I now know that the picture was taken with a timed camera atop the TV). Having lived there for a short while, I know now which trans-room routes are common and which are unlikely. In the background there are photographs on the wall, and once they were mere blurs, but having seen many of them , I know remember those photographs too. Not only that, but I can see and imagine the whole world beyond the small world of the picture; where she might be coming from or going to from the pictured room.
To put it all in some phenomenological language, or to try, I would say that my initial apartment layout was my apodictic apprehension. Now, however, I have actually been in the world, and I approach the colored paper polymorphic-mindedly. I am not sure if this type of experience constitutes the use of a hermeneutic or transcendental strategy. Neither seems to match the example given in the book- mostly because I was given the opportunity to see two dimensions in three; sort of like stepping into the page and walking around the cube or the hallway. At the very least, it is an interesting phenomenon, and I am wondering how it translates into the language- is this type of experience something that requires new vocabulary?

#2:: "Automatic Multiple Vision Negation"
Take any given written phrase or sentence.
Case 1: Read it out loud casually.
Case 2: Rewrite the phrase by duplicating each word in it at least once and read it out loud again.
Analysis: Case 1 could use the following phrase:
DON'T WORRY, YOUR EYES ARE NOT PLAYING TRICKS ON YOU.
Case 2 would have the phrase look like this if the words were, say, duplicated twice:
DON'T DON'T DON'T WORRY, WORRY, WORRY, YOUR YOUR YOUR EYES EYES EYES ARE ARE ARE NOT NOT NOT PLAYING PLAYING PLAYING TRICKS TRICKS TRICKS ON ON ON YOU. YOU. YOU.
I found that when I would read the Case 2 phrase as casually as I read the Case 1 phrase, I would read it as if it were the Case 1 phrase; I actually would delete the extra words. In fact , it took a conscious effort to read the Case 2 phrase exactly as it appeared to me, repeating each word the requisite three times before moving on to the next triple word. It seems that the mind, when confronted with this multiple image sensation, tries to automatically counteract the problem by causing you to completely ignore the successive repetitions of each word in the phrase when you read it; the extra words apparently are perceived as being illusory or hallucinatory or an example of persistence of vision, and are not taken into consideration when the Case 2 phrase was read. It wouldn't matter if the Case 2 phrase had duplicated each word only once, or wrote in as many as three repetitions or even more, I would still read it casually as if I were reading the Case 1 phrase, and only read it correctly if I were actively concentrating on the task. Maybe Ren=E9 Descartes was correct when he said that the senses could not be completely trusted with providing you with information about the rest of the world, since humans can be the victims of visual hallucinations and optical illusions such as this from time to time.

#3: Strep

The subject of this PE is my 1st experience with strep throat several years back. Specifically, this PE deals with my conscious feelings about my sore throat -- 1) before finding out I had strep 2) having tested positive for strep First, a little background regarding the illness. In October 1994, I came down with a persistent (if not severe) sore throat. The pain persisted long enough that I took the test for strep upon visiting the infirmary on campus. I knew they would test for strep since I had had the test many times in the past with more acute symptoms. I remember being shocked at the results since I didn't perceive myself to be that sick.
Analysis--Before the test
It was a sore throat like any other sore throat I had experienced. It was followed by the obligatory headache,cough, aches and pains, and congestion of any other flu bug. The sore throat itself had several common features to it: the most persistent and acute pain came from the back of the throat, the pain was most acute in the morning upon waking, and swallowing was generally a painful experience. There was not a moment during my waking hours that I was unaware of these unsavory feelings. Yet after several days of waiting for illness to recede, it had not. In fact, the pain became more immediate in a particular region in the back of my throat. It felt almost like a burn in which the skin is sensitive to any kind of stimuli (swallowing, inhaling, exhaling, etc.). I did not believe for one second that I had strep primarily b/c the pain wasn't as intense overall as with past sore throats.
Analysis--After the test
My reaction to the condition of having strep immediately moved the emphasis from the pain in the back of my throat to the experience of strep. When that happened, I felt my awareness of the sore throat disappear. This happened in a matter of minutes (obviously before the effects of the antibiotics could take place). The other symptoms of my illness also became secondary to this experiencing of what having strep meant. It was as if the "condition of knowing" failed to live up to my perception of what strep was and would feel like. The word "strep" itself now embodied the feelings of discomfort which, until moments earlier, had been reserved exclusively for the back of my throat. I was consumed by the state of having strep. I sat in my living room in a trance-like state -- as if still taking in the experience of being told the results of the test. I believe this was all due to my perception of strep, which I was not necessarily afraid of, since I knew it was a treatable condition. Yet I think it was that state of being that concerned me most and I discovered that the actual state of having strep wasn't at all as I had perceived it would be. In fact, I didn't experience the pain in my throat again although some of the other symptoms persisted for a few days. In terms of Ihde, I achieved the noetic context of polymorphic-mindedness in that I was able to recall the feeling of each state of mind while losing the naivete of my previous literal-mindedness in the process.