Introduction

This lecture series asks us to address the question 'How may we understand science and religion as arising from, yet somehow transcending, the human experience?' My work bears on this question because I am interested in the relationship between human experience and the scientific investigation of the mind in cognitive science.[i] One of the central questions that has preoccupied me is 'What form should a mature science of human consciousness have?' By 'mature science' I mean one that has developed to the point where its researchers are experienced and knowledgeable with regard to their subject matter. I believe that a mature science of consciousness would have to include disciplined first-person methods of investigating experience in active partnership with the third-person methods of experimental science. 'First-person methods' are methods that subjects can use to become attentive to their own experience as they live it in the first person.[ii] This ability to attend reflexively to experience itself'to attend not simply to what one experiences (the object) but to how one experiences it (the act)'seems to be a uniquely human ability and mode of experience we do not share with other animals. First-person methods for cultivating this ability are found primarily in the contemplative wisdom traditions of human experience, especially Buddhism. Throughout history religion has provided the main home for contemplative experience and its theoretical articulation in philosophy and psychology. Thus my work intersects with religion not so much as an object of scientific study (as it is for Pascal Boyer),[iii] but as a repository of first-person methods that can play an active and creative role in scientific investigation itself.[iv]

Religion, of course, includes many other things besides contemplative experience, and many religions have little or no place for contemplative experience. On the other hand, contemplative experience is found in important non-religious contexts, such as philosophy.[v] For these reasons the term 'religion' does not accurately designate the kind of cultural tradition or domain of human experience that I and others wish to bring into constructive engagement with cognitive science. Better designations would be 'wisdom tradition' and 'contemplative experience.' Nor does the phrase 'science-religion dialogue' convey the nature of our project, for our aim is not to adjudicate between the claims of science and religion, but to gain a deeper understanding of the human mind and human consciousness by making contemplative psychology a full partner in the science of mind.

Three main bodies of knowledge are crucial for this endeavour. I have already mentioned two'cognitive science and contemplative psychology. The third is phenomenological philosophy in the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl. The importance of phenomenology is that it provides a third mediating term between cognitive science and contemplative psychology, especially in the case of a non-Western contemplative tradition such as Buddhism. Phenomenology is a Western intellectual tradition with strong roots in the Western scientific style of thought, but it is also a tradition that upholds the importance of rigorous attention to mental phenomena as lived experiential events. Thus, instead of the science-religion dialogue as it is standardly presented, the task in which I see myself engaged is one of circulating back and forth among the three spheres of experimental cognitive science, phenomenology, and contemplative psychology. 'Mutual circulation' is the term that Francisco Varela and I introduced to describe this approach (in our book The Embodied Mind with Eleanor Rosch). Let me illustrate this idea of mutual circulation with an image (Figure 1).

As you can see from this image, each sphere is distinct, but they overlap and share common areas. The central bold area with arrows flowing through them all depicts the method of back-and-forth circulation that we believe would be the mark of a mature science of human experience. Notice that each domain has its own degree of autonomy'its own proper methods, motivations, and concerns. But instead of being juxtaposed'either in opposition or as separate but equal'they share a common ground. Each flows into and out of the others, and so they are all mutually enriched.

In this lecture I will illustrate this approach through a discussion of the human experience of empathy. I choose empathy because it is one important aspect (though by no means the only one) of the intersubjectivity of human experience. Intersubjectivity is important in the context of discussing the relationship between cognitive science and contemplative experience because there has been a tendency in this area to focus on consciousness as if it were an intrinsically 'interior' phenomenon or 'inner reality' invisible to ordinary perception. I think this way of thinking about consciousness is misguided. It operates within the reified categories of 'internal' and 'external.' These categories are inadequate for understanding how human consciousness and experience are immanently manifest in the living body and the interpersonal social world. We see the experience of shame in the blushing face, perplexed thought in the furrowed brow, joy in the smiling face; we do not infer their existence as 'internal' phenomena from 'external' facts. Although it is true that not all experiences need be expressed in this bodily way, and that each of us has first-person access only to his or her own experience, these truths do not mean that experience is 'interior' in some special (and unclear) metaphysical sense. Focusing on empathy helps to remind us that we need a better framework for thinking about human experience and consciousness'whether in cognitive science or contemplative psychology'than the framework of inner and outer.

The key idea of the next part of this lecture is that human experience depends (formatively and constitutively) on the dynamic coupling of self and other in empathy. After presenting this idea by interweaving cognitive science and phenomenology, I will then expand the discussion to include the Buddhist contemplative perspective on the non-duality of self and other. Finally, I will return to the issue of contemplative first-person methods in relation to cognitive science.

Empathy Defined

At the outset, it is best to think of empathy broadly, and then to distinguish different kinds of empathy as we go along. Nevertheless, even in broad terms there are different ways of defining empathy'as a basic intentional capacity, as a unique kind of intentional act, and as a general intentional process. (I use the term 'intentional' here in its philosophical sense of 'mental directedness.') As an intentional capacity, empathy is the basic ability to comprehend another individual's experience, a capacity that underlies all the particular feelings and emotions one can have for another.[vi] To exercise this capacity is to engage empathy as an intentional act and an intentional process. As a unique kind of intentional act, empathy is directed toward, and thereby has as its intentional correlate, the experience of another person.[vii] Although empathy so understood is founded on sense perception (of the Other's bodily presence), and can involve inference in difficult or problematic situations (when one has to work out how the Other feels), it is not reducible to some additive combination of perception and inference'after the fashion of the theory that says we understand others by first perceiving their bodily behaviour and then inferring or hypothesizing that their behaviour is caused by experiences or inner mental states similar to those that cause similar behaviour in us. Rather, in empathy we experience the Other directly as a person, that is, as an intentional and mental being whose bodily gestures and actions are expressive of his or her experience and states of mind. Finally, as an intentional process, empathy is any process in which the attentive perception of the Other's state or situation generates a state or situation in oneself that is more applicable to the Other's state or situation than to the subject's own prior state or situation.[viii]

With this broad conception of empathy in place, we can turn to some of the different kinds of empathy. Psychologists have used the term 'empathy' to describe at least three different processes: (1) feeling what another person is feeling; (2) knowing what another person is feeling; and (3) responding compassionately to another person's distress.[ix] More structurally detailed analyses, however, have been given by phenomenologists, who have distinguished at least four main aspects of the full performance of empathy:[x]

1.     The involuntary coupling or pairing of my living body with your living body in perception and action.

2.     The imaginary movement or transposition of myself into your place.

3.     The interpretation of you as an Other to me and of me as an Other to you.

4.     The ethical and moral perception of you as a person.

Empathy as Coupling

The first kind of empathy'the dynamic coupling or pairing of the living bodies of self and other'belongs to the level of pre-reflective perception and action (what Husserl calls the 'passive synthesis' of experience). It is passive in the sense of not being initiated voluntarily, and it serves as a support for the other types of empathy. 'Coupling' or 'pairing' means an associative bonding or linking of self and other on the basis of their bodily similarity. This similarity operates not so much at the level of visual appearance, which forms part of the body image as an intentional object present to consciousness, but at the level of gesture, posture, and movement, that is, at the level of the unconscious body schema.[xi] Thus empathy is not simply the comprehension of another person's particular experiences (sadness, joy, and so on), but the experience of another as a living bodily subject of experience like oneself.

This phenomenological conception of the embodied basis of empathy can be linked to cognitive science by going back to the broad notion of empathy as process'as any process in which the attentive perception of the Other generates a state in oneself more applicable to the Other's state than to one's own prior state. According to what is known as the 'Perception-Action Model' of empathy,[xii] when we perceive another person's behaviour, our own motor representations for that kind of behaviour are automatically activated and generate associated autonomic and somatic responses (unless inhibited). For instance, it has been shown that when one individual sees another execute actions with different body parts (mouth actions, hand actions, and foot actions), the neural patterns of activation in the observer's brain correspond to those that would be active were the observer performing the same bodily actions.[xiii]

This kind of self-other coupling can be called sensorimotor coupling. In addition to sensorimotor coupling, there is affective coupling or 'affective resonance.'[xiv] In affective resonance, two individuals engaged in direct interaction affect each other's emotional states.

Empathy as Imaginary Transposition

The second kind of empathy'empathy as the imaginary transposition of oneself to the place of the Other'is more active and cognitive than the first kind. Instead of simply the involuntary, bodily pairing of self and other, cognitive perspective-taking processes are used to imagine or mentally transpose oneself into the place of the Other.

Comparative studies of empathy from cognitive ethology provide an important window on cognitive empathy. The presence and extent of empathy among non-human animals, especially primates, is a subject of much debate. According to the 'all-or-none' view, cognitive empathy (the only kind of empathy according to this view) requires the cognitive ability to attribute mental states to another individual and to understand the other's behaviour in light of them. This ability, usually called 'mind-reading,'[xv] is taken by some to require the possession of a 'theory of mind,' a theoretical body of knowledge about mental states and their role in generating behaviour. Advocates of this way of thinking have argued that chimpanzees fail certain mind-reading tests and therefore do not possess a theory of mind, and accordingly are not capable of cognitive empathy. On the other hand, as I have been suggesting here, and as others have proposed, most notably Frans de Waal, empathy should not be seen as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. In de Waal's words: 'Many forms of empathy exist intermediate between the extremes of mere agitation and distress of another and full understanding of their predicament. At one end of the spectrum, rhesus infants get upset and seek contact with one another as soon as one of them screams. At the other end, a chimpanzee recalls a wound he has inflicted, and returns to the victim to inspect it.'[xvi]

Other intermediate cases are consolation behaviour and tailored-helping behaviour. Consolation behaviour is friendly contact by an uninvolved and less distressed bystander toward a victim of a previously aggressive encounter. For instance, de Waal, in his book Good Natured, presents a photograph of a juvenile chimpanzee comforting a distressed adult. Consolation behaviour has been extensively documented in great apes only (and has not been found in monkey species despite great efforts to find it). Tailored helping is coming to the aid of another (either a conspecific or a member of another species) with behaviours tailored to the other's particular needs (as when one ape helps another out of a tree or tries to help an injured bird fly). Such behaviour, in de Waal's words, 'probably requires a distinction between self and other that allows the other's situation to be divorced from one's own while maintaining the emotional link that motivates behavior.'[xvii] There exists a large number of anecdotal reports of tailored helping in apes.

Cognitive empathy at its fullest, however, is achieved when one individual can mentally adopt the other's perspective by exchanging places with the other in imagination. Described phenomenologically:[xviii] I am here and I imagine going there and being at the place where you are right now. Conversely, you are here (the there where I imagine being) and you imagine you are going there, to the place where I am (my here). Through this imagined movement and spatial transposition, we are able to exchange our mental perspectives, our thoughts and feelings. Whether apes possess this kind of mental ability is unclear and a subject of debate.[xix]

In human children, the ability to mentally transpose self and other seems to be linked to the emergence, at around nine to twelve months of age, of a whole cluster of cognitive abilities known collectively as 'joint attention.'[xx] 'Joint attention' refers to the triadic structure of a child, adult, and an object or event to which they share attention, and includes the activities of gaze following (reliably following where adults are looking), joint engagement with shared objects or events, using adults as social reference points, and imitative learning (acting on objects as adults do). At around the same time, infants also begin to point to things and hold them up for someone to see, gestures that serve to direct adult attention actively and intentionally. Michael Tomasello has argued that 'infants being to engage in joint attentional interactions when they begin to understand other persons as intentional agents like the self.'[xxi] He proposes a 'simulation explanation' of this developmental cognitive milestone, according to which the infant uses her primal understanding of others as 'like me' (the grounding process of empathy, in phenomenological terms), and her newly emerging understanding of her own intentional agency, as the basis on which to judge analogically and categorically that others are intentional agents 'like me' as well.

Empathy as the Understanding of You as an Other to Me and of Me as an Other to You

The third kind of empathy involves not simply imagining myself in your place, but understanding you as an Other who accordingly sees me as an Other to you. In other words, the imaginary transposition in this kind of empathy involves the possibility of seeing myself from your perspective, that is, as you empathetically experience me. Empathy thus becomes reiterated, so that I empathetically imagine your empathetic experience of me, and you empathetically imagine my empathetic experience of you. We also talk to each about our experiences, and so linguistic communication and interpretation participate in and structure this exchange. The upshot is that each of us participates in an intersubjective viewpoint that transcends our own first-person singular perspectives.

We can turn again to developmental psychology for insight into the genesis of this third kind of empathy and the role it plays in constituting an intersubjective perspective. Let me quote a passage from Tomasello's book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition that lucidly describes this genesis in the human infant:

As infants begin to follow into and direct the attention of others to outside entities at nine to twelve months of age, it happens on occasion that the other person whose attention an infant is monitoring focuses on the infant herself. The infant then monitors that person's attention to her in a way that was not possible previously, that is, previous to the nine-month social-cognitive revolution. From this point on the infant's face-to-face interactions with others'which appear on the surface to be continuous with her face-to-face interactions from early infancy'are radically transformed. She now knows she is interacting with an intentional agent who perceives her and intends things toward her. When the infant did not understand that others perceive and intend things toward an outside world, there could be no question of how they perceived and intended things toward me. After coming to this understanding, the infant can monitor the adult's intentional relation to the world including herself' By something like this same process infants at this age also become able to monitor adults' emotional attitudes toward them as well'a kind of social referencing of others' attitudes to the self. This new understanding of how others feel about me opens up the possibility for the development of shyness, self-consciousness, and a sense of self-esteem' Evidence for this is the fact that within a few months after the social-cognitive revolution, at the first birthday, infants begin showing the first signs of shyness and coyness in front of other persons and mirrors'[xxii]

As Tomasello goes on to discuss, once the infant understands other individuals as intentional beings and herself as one participant among others in a social interaction, then whole new cognitive dimensions arise. The child comes to be able to participate in 'joint attentional scenes''social interactions in which the child and the adult jointly attend to some third thing, and to one another's attention to that third thing, for an extended period of time, and in which the child can conceptualize her own role from the same 'outside' perspective as the other person. Joint attentional scenes in turn provide the framework for the acquisition of language and other kinds of communicative conventions.[xxiii]

Although Tomasello does not use the term 'empathy' in this context, the cognitive achievement he describes of being able to conceptualize oneself from the perspective of another person corresponds to what phenomenologists call 'reiterated empathy.' In reiterated empathy, I see myself from the perspective of another and thus grasp myself as an individual in an intersubjective world.

Tomasello's discussion of the child's achievement of this intersubjective perspective emphasizes the developmental progression from the neonate's understanding of the other as an animate being, to the infant's understanding of the other as an intentional agent with attention and goal-directed behaviour, to the four-year-old child's understanding of the other as a mental agent with thoughts and beliefs (which need not be expressed in behaviour and can fail to match the world).

Phenomenologists, without neglecting the intentional and mental aspects of the self, draw attention to the ambiguity of the lived body in reiterated empathy. The lived body is that which is most intimately me or mine, but it is also an object for the Other. Because it is so intimately me, my body cannot stand before me as an object the way that other things can. No matter how I turn, my body is always here, at the zero-point of my egocentric space, never there. It is through empathetically grasping the Other's perception of me that I am able to grasp my own lived body as an object belonging to an intersubjective world. In this way, my sense of self-identity in the world, even at the basic level of embodied agency, is inseparable from recognition by another, and from the ability to grasp that recognition empathetically.

Empathy as the Ethical and Moral Perception of You as a Person

The fourth kind of empathy is the recognition of the Other as a person who deserves concern and respect. Empathy in this sense is not to be identified with any particular feeling of concern for another, such as sympathy, love, or compassion, but instead as the underlying capacity to have such other-directed and other-regarding feelings of concern.[xxiv]

This kind of empathy can also be introduced from a developmental perspective. As we have seen, there is a progression from the infant's understanding of others as intentional agents (with attention, behavioural strategies, and goals) to the young child's understanding of others as mental agents (with beliefs, desires, and plans). According to Piaget and Tomasello, moral understanding begins to emerge at around the same time as the child comes to understand others as mental agents. It derives not from the rules adults impose on behaviour, but from empathizing with other persons as mental agents and being able to see and feel things from their point of view.[xxv]

Within Western moral philosophy there is a long tradition going back to Immanuel Kant that privileges reason over feeling. To act out of duties legislated by reason is thought to have greater moral worth than acting on the basis of feeling or sentiment. Yet as Frans de Waal observes, echoing David Hume: 'Aid to others in need would never be internalized as a duty without the fellow-feeling that drives people to take an interest in one another. Moral sentiments came first; moral principles second.'[xxvi]

Empathy is the basic cognitive and emotional capacity underlying all the moral sentiments and emotions we can have for another. The point here is not that empathy exhausts the domain of moral and ethical experience, for clearly it does not. The point is that empathy provides the source of that domain and the entry point into it, because empathy is what enables us to develop concern and respect for others as persons.

The four aspects or kinds of empathy I have presented are not separate, but occur together in face-to-face intersubjective experience. They intertwine through the lived body and through language. You imagine yourself in my place on the basis of the expressive similarity of our lived bodies. This experience of yours helps constitute me for myself, for I experience myself as an intersubjective being by empathetically grasping your empathetic experience of me. Conversely, I imagine myself in your place, and this experience of mine helps constitute you for yourself. As we communicate in language and gesture, we interpret and understand each other dialogically. It is this picture that I had in mind when I said earlier that human experience depends on the dynamic coupling of self and other in empathy.

The Non-duality of Self and Other

To appreciate the experiential depth and developmental possibilities of empathy we need to turn now to the perspective of contemplative psychology. Buddhist contemplative psychology is particularly significant for this discussion because of the way it combines first-person contemplative practices of empathy with a philosophical vision of the non-duality of self and other.

For the purposes of this lecture, I will take as my reference point the classic text The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhisattvacharyavatara) by the eighth century Indian philosopher Shantideva.[xxvii] According to the Buddhist philosophical system Shantideva expounds'the Prasangika Madhyamaka or 'Middle Way Consequence' school'what we call 'self' and 'other' have no independent existence and intrinsic identity, but exist only on the basis of conceptual or mental imputation. In the words of a famous Tibetan commentary:

Although they have no ultimate grounds for doing so, all beings think in terms of 'I' and 'mine.' Because of this, they conceive of 'other,' fixing on it as something alien, although this too is unfounded. Aside from being merely mental imputations, 'I' and 'other' are totally unreal. They are both illusory. Moreover, when the nonexistence of 'I' is realized, the notion of 'other' also disappears, for the simple reason that the two terms are posited only in relation to each other. Just as it is impossible to cut the sky in two with a knife, likewise, when the spacelike quality of egolessness is realized, it is no longer possible to make a separation between 'I' and 'other,' and there arises an attitude of wanting to protect others as oneself, and to protect all that belongs to them with the same care as if it were one's own. As it is said, 'Whoever casts aside the ordinary, trivial view of 'self' will discover the profound meaning of great 'selfhood'.'[xxviii]

It is important to understand that no nihilistic point is intended when it is said that self and other are unreal aside from being mental imputations. The Madhyamaka philosophers uphold the middle way between nihilism and absolutism, and accordingly they distinguish between two kinds of truth'conventional truth and ultimate truth. According to conventional truth, individuals like you and me exist, and thus nihilism is repudiated. According to ultimate truth, on the other hand, there is no intrinsically existent and intrinsically identifiable ego or 'I' (and hence no intrinsically existent and identifiable 'other' or 'alter-I'), and thus absolutism is repudiated. The middle way is the ultimate truth of the dependent origination of 'self' on the basis of prior contributing causes and conditions, constantly changing mental and physical processes, and the conceptual imputation of 'I' and 'other' upon those mental and physical processes. Nevertheless, as unenlightened beings, we mistakenly believe on a deep instinctual level that there does exist a real 'I' or ego within our mind and body, and therefore our experience of ourselves and others is profoundly egocentric. According to Madhyamaka, and indeed all Buddhist schools, it is this egocentric attachment to a mentally imputed self that is the true source of all suffering. Enlightenment, it is said, consists in uprooting this egocentrism at its very source so that one's experience is no longer governed by this attachment to self.

There are, to be sure, significant differences between this philosophical viewpoint and phenomenology. What concerns me here, however, are not those important and interesting differences, but rather the parallel role that active empathetic imagination plays in both traditions in decentring the ego and thus opening human experience to an originary intersubjectivity prior to the reified mental imputations of 'self' and 'other.'

In the eighth chapter of his text, Shantideva presents two meditations, the meditation on the equality of self and other, and the meditation on the exchange of self and other. In the first meditation on self-other equality, one starts from the egocentric conviction that 'This is my self' and then critically reflects that 'my self' is simply a name applied to a collection of physical and mental elements. One mentally imposes an intrinsic 'I'-ness and an intrinsic 'otherness' onto phenomena, but 'I and 'other' are simply relative designations imputed onto elements in which there is no inherently existing 'I' and 'other.' Each 'I' is an 'other,' and each 'other' is an 'I.' All beings are in exactly the same situation of imputing 'mineness' and 'otherness,' and all are in exactly the same predicament of wanting to be happy and not wanting to suffer. On the basis of this realization of the equality of self and other, one then visualizes the sufferings of other beings as one's own. In the words of the Tibetan commentary from which I quoted earlier: 'the teachings affirm that by applying the name I to the whole collection of suffering beings, and by entertaining and habituating oneself to the thought 'They are myself,' the thought of 'I' will in fact arise with regard to them, and one will come to care for them as much as one now cares for oneself' [F]rom the standpoint of suffering as such, the distinction between 'others' suffering' and 'my suffering' is quite unreal. It follows that, even if the pain of another does not actually afflict me, nevertheless, if that other is identified as 'I' or 'mine,' the suffering of that other becomes unbearable to me also.'[xxix]

Training in this first meditation on self-other equality is the essential prerequisite for the second meditation on the exchange of self and other. In this second meditation, through empathetic and sympathetic imagination, one visualizes oneself in the position of others and how one appears in their eyes. This meditation also works explicitly with specific negative emotions, or unwholesome 'mental factors' as they are known in Buddhism.[xxx] These emotions are pride, competitive rivalry, and jealousy. One feels pride toward someone inferior; competitive rivalry toward an equal; and jealousy toward a superior. As an antidote to these emotions, one looks back at oneself through the eyes of someone inferior, equal, and superior, and generates the corresponding emotion toward oneself so that one knows what it is like to be on the receiving end. For instance, empathetically experiencing an inferior's envy toward oneself and the suffering it involves is the antidote to pride. At the same time one takes on the sufferings of those others as one's own (as prepared for by the meditation on self-other equality).

The meditation on self-other exchange is thus a disciplined contemplative form of reiterated empathy. By 'disciplined' I mean not simply that the meditation is a step-by-step visualization exercise. It is disciplined also because it requires for its performance'as does the first meditation on self-other equality'the fundamental Buddhist contemplative practices of attentional stability (shamatha) and insightful awareness (vipashyana). To accomplish the visualization one needs to be able to sustain the mind attentively on the image of the other as 'I' and on the image of oneself as seen by this 'alter-I,' and one needs to have insightful awareness of the myriad mental and physical phenomena that arise from moment to moment in the field of intersubjective experience.

From a cognitive scientific perspective the meditations on self-other equality and self-other exchange are remarkable because of the disciplined manner in which they intertwine first-person methods of attentional stability, visualization and mental imagery, and the cognitive modulation of emotion.[xxxi] From a phenomenological perspective, they are remarkable because of the disciplined manner in which they make use of the key phenomenological technique of 'imaginative variation''varying phenomena freely in imagination so as to discern their invariant forms.

The Madhyamaka philosophy underlying the meditations also readily lends itself to comparison with the phenomenological analysis of intersubjectivity in terms of 'ipseity' and 'alterity,' or 'I-ness' and 'otherness.'[xxxii] This level is deeper than the analysis in terms of empathy, and radically dismantles the egocentric perspective in a manner parallel to Madhyamaka.

According to phenomenology, alterity or otherness belongs to the very structure of experience prior to any actual empathetic encounter. Empathy exhibits alterity by being a 'self-displacing' or 'self-othering' experience. In empathy, I imagine myself as other'and in reiterated empathy I become other to myself by looking back on myself through the eyes of another. The same dynamic of self-othering displays itself throughout experience. It occurs in bodily experience when one hand touches the other, and the two alternate and intertwine in their roles of feeling and being felt. Self-othering occurs when I recollect my past self, when I reflect on my just-elapsed experiences, and when I imagine myself. What these self-displacing experiences indicate is that 'I' and 'other' are not simply co-relative and interchangeable, like the spatial perspectives of 'here' and 'there,' but that 'I-ness' is essentially constituted by 'otherness.' Experience is therefore intrinsically intersubjective in the sense that alterity and openness to the Other are a priori characteristics of the formal structure of experience. Thus the key presumption of egocentrism'that subjectivity can assert itself as ego and thereby exclude the Other'is exploded. [xxxiii]

We have now seen how both phenomenology and contemplative psychology transcend egocentric experience by revealing an originary intersubjectivity prior to the reified conceptions of self and other. In phenomenology'Husserl's phenomenology to be precise'this transcendence of egocentrism stays mainly within a theoretical and cognitive orbit (although other phenomenologists such as Max Scheler and Emmanuel Levinas shift the orbit to an affective and ethical one).[xxxiv] Therefore, one main contribution of Buddhist contemplative psychology is to show how the theoretical, cognitive, affective, and ethical can be yoked together using disciplined first-person methods.

Toward a Phenomenological and Contemplative Cognitive Science

The last topic I need to address is the issue of first-person methods in relation to the scientific investigation of the mind. Let me start with a phenomenological point: scientific cognition is itself a form of experience, one that aims to transcend ordinary (pre-scientific) experience. This aim of transcendence is shared by phenomenological and contemplative modes of cognition. But how is this transcendence to be understood?

Let me simplify and idealize scientific practice by pointing to what can be called 'the ABC strategy of science' (in which the aim is to go from A to C by way of B):[xxxv]

From:

A.   The level of ordinary (pre-scientific) cognition of the actual phenomena under study,

Via:

B.    The imagination-based cognition of phenomena as 'pure possibilities' subject to invariant laws,

To:

C.    The level of scientific cognition of the actual phenomena by applying the insights gained at Level B.

The classic example is Galileo, who in inaugurating the shift from Aristotelian to modern physics, gave a theoretical account (Level C) of the actual phenomena of falling bodies (Level A) by seeing them (at Level B) as instances out of a range of law-governed possibilities using the instrument of mathematics.

Suppose we apply this schema to cognitive science and its attempt to understand consciousness and human experience. The prevailing strategy in cognitive science has been to endeavour to go from ordinary (pre-scientific) cognition of conscious experience to scientific cognition by relying (at Level B) mainly on third-person observation and functional models. In other words, there has been no sustained effort at Level B to seek out the invariant structures of experience as such, that is, as they are lived in the first-person. Such an effort requires disciplined first-person methods. Thus the force of this analogy is to suggest that cognitive science needs to incorporate first-person methods into its research.

First-person methods aim to transcend ordinary experience, not by leaving it behind, but by cultivating another sort of experience that helps us to understand ordinary experience. Consider these basic generic features of first-person methods, common to both phenomenology and the contemplative tradition of mindfulness-awareness meditation (shamatha-vipashyana):[xxxvi]

1.     Suspension. Suspending preconceived ideas, beliefs, and prejudices about experience. Inducing an attitude of 'suspension' with regard to these.

2.     Reorientation. Orientation of attention not simply to the content of experience (the 'what'), but to the experiencing act itself and its quality (the 'how').

3.     Intimacy. Gaining intimacy or familiarity with experience on the basis of (1) and (2) (and through additional techniques such as imaginative variation).

4.     Training. Long-term training to acquire know-how and proficiency in (1)-(4).

In this lecture I have discussed some of what methods with these features disclose about empathy and intersubjective experience. Let me mention a more concrete example.[xxxvii] When two individuals are engaged in a social interaction, the density of their expressive behaviour (facial, vocal, bodily, and so on) is sufficiently high that it typically exceeds the capacity of an untrained individual to be conscious of such activity. First-person methods that incorporate contemplative practices of mindfulness may facilitate one's capacity to provide a first-person account of one's affective behaviour and experience in such a situation. This kind of detailed and nuanced first-person report can then be used to complement experimental research.

Cognitive science is only now just beginning to be open to first-person methods, so it is far too early to say what we can accomplish through the mutual circulation of cognitive science, phenomenology, and contemplative psychology. My own personal conviction is that cognitive science has for far too long been wedded to a reductionist methodology that denies or dismisses subjective experience. Such an approach cannot help but be unethical. What is at stake for me is whether we can have not simply a methodologically mature science of human experience, but an ethically mature one. Put another way, I think that giving subjective experience an active and creative role to play in cognitive science through the use of first-person methods is as much an ethical step as a methodological one. My long-term hope is to see in my lifetime a flourishing contemplative, phenomenological, and experimental science of the mind.

Dedication

This text is dedicated to the memory of Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001), whose presence as an 'all joyful bridge' among science, phenomenology, and contemplative wisdom is deeply missed and continues to inspire.