A defense of experiential realism: The need to take phenomenological reality on its own terms in the study of the mind.

Abstract

In this article I argue for the importance of treating mental experience on its own terms. In defense of "experiential realism," I offer a critique of modern psychology's all-toofrequent attempts to effect an objectification and quantification of personal subjectivity. The question is "What can we learn about experiential reality from indices that, in the service of scientific objectification, transform the qualitative properties of experience into quantitative proxies?" I conclude that such treatment is neither necessary for realizing, nor sufficient for capturing, subjectively given states (such as perception, pain, imagery, fear, thought, memory)-that is, for understanding many of the principle objects of psychological inquiry. A "science of mind" that approaches its subject matter from a third-person perspective should, I contend, be treated with a healthy amount of informed skepticism.

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

“…Although, by definition, autonoetic experience refers to a subjective state and thus should primarily be assessed using subjective responses (Jack & Roepstorff, 2002;Klein, 2015), the additional collection of objective measures could be useful to further shed light on processes that give rise or modulate this subjective state. Of particular interest, recent fMRI studies have shown that subjective experiences associated with remembering past events can be reliably predicted from distributed patterns of brain activity (Rissman, Chow, Reggente, & Wagner, 2016), and that such patterns can give insights into the types of information that are used for making subjective memory judgments (Johnson, Kuhl, Mitchell, Ankudowich, & Durbin, 2015).…”

The unplanned obsolescence of psychological science and an argument for its revival.

“…Consequently, by accepting a false analogy between knowledge of nature and knowledge of mind, 18th century philosophers viewed the mental happenings as though they were just another part of physical nature, when in reality they are importantly different (for additional discussion see Klein, 2015). This disanalogy, I have argued, characterizes much of contemporary approaches to experiential reality.…”

“…tapraid5/trp-trp/trp-trp/trp00116/trp0177d15z xppws Sϭ1 11/30/15 2:04 Art: in our ontology (e.g., Klein, 2015). As Dewey (1958, p. 13) observes, "recognition of subjective minds having a special equipment of psychological abilities is a necessary factor in subjecting the energies of nature to use as instrumentalities for ends."…”

“…Physicalist arguments in support of the epiphenomenal status of "things mental" also are contraindicated by principles from within the physical sciences themselves. As many have noted, mental experience is the thing of which we can be most certain (e.g., Klein, 2015). But how can a constituent of mind attain the status of existential certainty if its presence, by definition, is invisible to natural selection (i.e., they are epiphenomena)?…”

“…But we have no way of knowing what such a reenvisioning might consist in. And until we do, it is unwise to tether our understanding of experiential reality to a metaphysics that has the effect of assigning the single most undeniable aspect of our existence to a lower grade of being (e.g., Klein, 2015).…”