Toward a Science of Consciousness, Day 1: Appreciating William James

The first day of the conference began with a plenary session on William James, marking the centenary of his death. I am a huge fan of James, so this was an excellent session for me.

Plenary One: William James Centennial:

Eugene Taylor (), Could Radical Empiricism Guide Neurophenomenology as the Future of Neuroscience? (Humanistic/Transpersonal Psych, Saybrook University, Cambridge, MA)

Neuroscientists such as Francis Crick and Francesco Varela have touted William James as a player in the solution to the so-called Hard Problem in the neurosciences - that elusive relation between the brain and the mind. William James’s phenomenology of immediate experience, what he called radical empiricism, in fact has much in common with contemporary developments in neurophenomenology. Not the least of these involve an overthrow of the subject/object dichotomy in favor of intersubjectivity, the motives of the scientist influencing what he or she studies, the phenomenology of the science-making process itself, and the humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution that forecast an end to reductionistic positivism. But what is radical empiricism? Following Peirce’s semiotics of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, James developed a tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism. Radical empiricism was pure experience in the immediate moment before the differentiation of subject and object. Noetic pluralism meant that each person is capable of experiencing those moments of pure experience, such as in transcendent states, in which the Universe became One, except that this one-ness might not be the same from person to person. Finally, pragmatism was a method of evaluating truth claims about peoples’ beliefs in the ultimate nature of reality, particularly when they appear contradictory. James scholars such as John McDermott and Charlene Seigfried have shown that radical empiricism was actually the core of James’s tripartite metaphysics, though it remained an unfinished arch at the time of James’s death. Radical empiricism is radical because it abandons the classical definition of empiricism as sense data alone and makes empiricism stand for the full spectrum of human experience. Thus we ask, “Might not a more Jamesean focus on immediate experience from the standpoint of contemporary neurophenomenology define the future of neuroscience?”


Bernard J. Baars (), How William James Accidentally Created Behaviorism (The Neurosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA)

William James’ Principles of Psychology (1890) is regarded as the greatest summary of empirical knowledge about consciousness of the 19th century. James covered perception and cognition, language and the fringe, and much more. He defined psychology as ‘the science of mental life,’ meaning ‘conscious mental life.’ The 19th century was a Golden Age of Consciousness Science, with discoveries about hypnosis and conversion disorders, the brain and emotions, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, imagery, feelings, multiple personality disorder, the limits of consciousness and immediate memory, and more. James’s book was greeted almost immediately as a masterpiece, and three years later, he produced his Briefer Version (1893), which became the most widely used introduction to psychology in American colleges until about 1920. It established James as a founder of empirical psychology. James placed consciousness at the center of psychological science. And yet, paradoxically, he triggered seven decades of scientific rejection of human consciousness. His paper of 1904 called ‘Does consciousness exist’? was published in Psychological Review, under the editorship of John B. Watson. James’ 1904 paper reflected his ambivalence about a science of mind and free will. James suffered from repeated near-suicidal depression, which often focused on free will. By 1904 James was looking to psychic phenomena and the soul as a solution to his crisis of meaning and spiritual comfort. The 1904 paper sought to eliminate mind-body paradoxes by decomposing ‘consciousness as an entity’ into a series of conscious moments; but James never denied that mental life consisted of such subjective moments. It was John B. Watson who decided to cut the mind-body knot, proclaiming his radical behavioristic manifesto two years after James died in 1910. To make psychology into a ‘respectable’ science Watson argued for a complete purge of consciousness, volition and self. Watson’s radical behaviorism erased almost the entire psychological vocabulary. He was strongly encouraged by Bertrand Russell in England, and by a parallel purge in Russian physiology, beginning with Sechenov and I.P. Pavlov, in Germany by Helmholtz and positivism, and by a radical reductionistic movement in biology. In a political context Watson, Pavlov (and later Skinner) promised utopian manipulations of the human condition, simply by analyzing and controlling human beings by reflexes and operant training. Reflex-reductionism became the orthodox wisdom in the newly made academic sciences of psychology and physiology, in spite of a total absence of proof. Even today ‘reflexes’ and ‘conditioning’ are still viewed as ‘atoms’ of behavior. But behaviorism gave a consistent physicalistic basis to the new and insecure academic fields of psychology, sociology, political science, and analytic philosophy. The behavioristic purge was pursued for almost a century. The result was a kind of psychic wound in the Western intellectual tradition, a Dark Age comparable to the purge of classical learning by the medieval Church. While literature and Continental philosophy built upon James’ work, the new academic sciences rejected some 25 centuries of humanistic scholarship, going back to ancient Greece, and in Asia, to Vedanta, Buddhism and Taoism.


Bruce Mangan (), James in the 21st Century (Institute of Cognitive and Brain Studies, Oakland, CA)

William James stays forever new, but his phenomenological analysis of the “fringe” of consciousness, especially the feeling I will call “rightness”, has been relatively neglected. Now various strands of experimental research – from metacognition and tacit learning to the study of intuition – have confirmed the thrust of James’ account, linking a wide range of empirical findings with the most powerful, scientifically grounded phenomenology in our language. This offers a new way to integrate and extend consciousness research, and opens up what might be called a bio-engineering investigation of the mechanisms of conscious/nonconscious interaction. We can begin to explain the character and structure of our phenomenology via its function, just as we explain other aspects of our biology. This new kind of functional analysis is not hostage to functionalism in its current sense nor to the disembodied presumptions of AI. Fringe experiences are diaphanous, have no evident sensory content, and elude the “grasp” of focal attention. Yet on James’ analysis they are at the heart of conscious cognition, constituting among other things feelings of meaningfulness, expectation and evaluation. The evaluative aspect is paramount: “the most important feeling in these fringes ... is the feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought.” (Psychology: The Briefer Course, 183.) James did not develop this point, but it throws light on some of our most puzzling and rewarding experiences: the intense feeling of rightness that apparently constitutes the “Aha!” of great insight, the zap of great art, the sense of universal coherence and ineffable disclosure of mystical experience. Functional analysis links James’ phenomenology to two basic findings of the cognitive revolution: while the relative capacity of consciousness is miniscule, consciousness is supported by vast amounts of parallel, non-conscious processing. We argue that the fringe finesses the limited capacity of consciousness by radically condensing context information. Rightness signals the degree of integration: the more tightly our conscious/nonconscious cognitive system is integrated, the stronger the experience of rightness.

Of the three presentations, Dr. Taylor was the most interesting and engaging. He seems to be incredibly knowledgeable about all things related the James and his work, thinking, and friends. Dr. Baars' work built on Dr. Taylor's presentation in some ways. Bruce Mangan was interesting but his presentation was a little disjointed, so I am ignoring it here.

Taylor offered a great explanation of James' evolution in thinking, which culminated in his "radical empiricism" (1912, posthumous) - this longer explanation is from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Essays in Radical Empiricism

This posthumous collection includes James's groundbreaking essays on “pure experience,” originally published in 1904–5. James's fundamental idea is that mind and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff — pure experience — that (despite being called “experience”) is neither mental nor physical. Pure experience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories… a that which is not yet any definite what, tho' ready to be all sorts of whats…” (ERE, 46). That “whats” pure experience may be are minds and bodies, people and material objects, but this depends not on a fundamental ontological difference among these “pure experiences,” but on the relations into which they enter. Certain sequences of pure experiences constitute physical objects, and others constitute persons; but one pure experience (say the perception of a chair) may be part both of the sequence constituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person. Indeed, one pure experience might be part of two distinct minds, as James explains in a chapter entitled “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing.”

James's “radical empiricism” is distinct from his “pure experience” metaphysics. It is never precisely defined in the Essays, and is best explicated by a passage from The Meaning of Truth where James states that radical empiricism consists of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a conclusion. The postulate is that “the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience,” the fact is that relations are just as directly experienced as the things they relate, and the conclusion is that “the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience” (MT, 6–7).

James was still working on objections to his “pure experience” doctrine, replying to critics of Pragmatism, and writing an introduction to philosophical problems when he died in 1910. His legacy extends into psychology and the study of religion, and in philosophy not only throughout the pragmatist tradition that he founded (along with Charles Peirce), but into phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Mind is indebted to James's doctrine of “pure experience,” Ludwig Wittgenstein learned about “the absence of the will act” from James's Psychology (Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James, p. 81)), and the versions of “neopragmatism” set out by Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam are saturated with James's ideas. James is one of the most attractive and endearing of philosophers: for his vision of a “wild,” “open” universe that is nevertheless shaped by our human powers and that answers to some of our deepest needs, but also, as Russell observed in his obituary, because of the “large tolerance and … humanity” with which he sets that vision out. (The Nation (3 September 1910: 793–4).

This incredible contribution from James, which has yet to be fully integrated into neuroscience and psychology, also contributed to his repression. Following his death, James B. Watson argued in 1912 that James' version of consciousness is the infiltration of the unscientific idea of a soul into psychology, which he wanted to be a "hard" science. He sought a complete purge from psychology of the concepts of consciousness, volition, and self (sounds like modern neuroscience, a la Dan Dennett).

That was the subject Baars' presentation - essentially, that William James' efforts to explore the toughest questions of psychology and philosophy resulted in the behaviorist ascension as the dominant model in American psychology through most of the 20th Century.

James published an essay in 1904, Does consciousness exist? (included in his Essays in Radical Empiricism) that questioned the existence of consciousness as a result of his sense that the term had lost its meaning.

I believe that 'consciousness,' when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy. During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness, and substituting for it that of an absolute experience not due to two factors. But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.

James Watson, who became editor of the journal in which this article appeared, saw his opening with this piece to put James' version of psychology (explained in Psychology: The Briefer Course, which was the standard introductory text in most colleges) on the fringes of academia and bring his "empirical" behaviorism into the mainstream - and it worked.

Now, a century later, James' ideas have been "rediscovered" and are making an impact in a variety of fields from psychotherapy to cognitive science, from philosophy to religious studies, and even in integral theory.

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