Thinking out loud.

Master’s thesis · Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin · 2017

Towards the measure of all things — why we need to apply the scientific method directly to the mind

The title is not a boast. It comes from an idea I found useful and still do: that it is worth seeing the world in terms of measurements, and seeing ourselves as a kind of measuring apparatus. What shows up as the world has a great deal to do with our individual ways of measuring it.

The first half examines the assumptions about world and self that feel so obviously true that most of us never notice we are holding them — realism, the self as an entity and various dualisms. I call this default ontology, and then bring arguments against it from Eastern and Western philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and modern physics. Because the essay is about examining experience directly, I try throughout to point the reader back to their own, with examples, analogies and small experiments rather than assertions.

The second half is the argument in the title. You might reasonably object that we already do this — isn’t that what cognitive science is? Yes and no. Cognitive science studies the correlates of mental events: brains, behaviour, report. What I argue we are missing is a science that looks at our own minds in exactly the way science already looks at outer phenomena, treating awareness itself as the laboratory, thoughts and emotions as observable phenomena, and taking seriously the possibility of refining our measuring instruments and experimenting with mental states. We can call it inner psychology, or inner science.

Getting there means moving from objectivity to intersubjectivity as the standard (all scientific data are ultimately intersubjective data), setting up the inner laboratory, and working out the discipline it would require: stillness, non-interference and some equivalent of reproducibility, reliability and peer review. The last section is about how inner and outer psychology might constrain and improve each other, rather than one replacing the other.

Most of the criticisms in this master thesis are still not addressed and I plan to work on creating a rigorous first-person science in the coming years.

• SupervisorsProf. Dr. Arno Villringer and Dr. Marisa Przyrembel
• Submitted7 July 2017
• Length80 pages, in English
• DownloadFull text (PDF)