Three Reasons to Mistrust Reports about Ongoing Conscious Experience
I'm off to Oxford tomorrow for the annual meeting of the Consciousness & Experiential Society Section of the British Psychological Society. Russ Hurlburt and I will be keynote speakers. We'll be talking about our forthcoming book, but for most of our 2 1/2 hours we'll be "beeping" the audience. That is, we'll set a random beeper to sound while we're talking. When the beep occurs, audience members will reflect on their "last undisturbed moment of inner experience" immediately before the beep. Then we'll interview people about their sampled experiences, right there on the spot, Russ as a long-time practitioner of experience sampling methods and I from a more skeptical perspective. (Hopefully, no one will say "I was thinking about how boring and awful your talk is and how ugly you are!")
For the more conventional part of the presentation (so people will have something to think about while waiting for the random beeps to surprise them), I've worked up a fifteen-minute essay on why I'm inclined to mistrust even confident reports about currently ongoing conscious experience. I have three main reasons:
(1.) Historically, even "expert" introspectors have tended to make radically different claims about the ordinary stream of conscious experience. Some of them must be pretty badly wrong, despite their evident expertise and care.
(2.) We don't have much practice thinking or talking about our stream of experience. Our vocabulary and concepts are built for making judgments about the world around us (or non-introspective judgments about ourselves). Yet the stream of experience is plausibly complex and fast-moving.
(3.) Although people often convey confidence in their introspective judgments, that confidence can be undermined and the confident judgments reversed under certain styles of questioning, suggesting that the confidence may not be well founded.
I've posted the full text of the talk in The Underblog.