From the OCT/NOV 2005 issue of Seed:
(Matthieu Ricard)
The experience of consciousness is entirely subjective. The joy of meeting someone you love, the sadness of losing a close friend, the richness of a vivid dream, the serenity of a walk through a garden on a spring day, the total absorption of a deep meditative state—these things and others like them constitute the reality of human experience. And all of these experiences—from the most mundane to the most elevated—have a certain coherence and, at the same time, a high degree of privacy, which means that they always exist from a particular point of view.
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But despite this reality and thousands of years of philosophical examination, there is little consensus today on what consciousness is. Neuroscience, which employs an objective perspective—looking at the brain as an object of study—has made strikingly little headway in this understanding, despite having tremendous success in observing close correlations between parts of the brain and mental states. A comprehensive scientific study of consciousness must therefore embrace both objective and subjective methods: It cannot ignore the reality of first-person experience but must observe all the rules of scientific rigor.
I am suggesting the need for the method of our investigation to be appropriate to the object of inquiry. Given that one of the primary characteristics of consciousness is its subjective and experiential nature, any systematic study of it must adopt a method that will give access to the dimensions of subjectivity and experience. So the critical question is this: Can we envision a scientific methodology for the study of consciousness whereby a robust first-person method, which does full justice to the phenomenology of experience, can be combined with the objectivist perspective of the study of the brain?
Here I feel that a close collaboration between modern science and the contemplative traditions, such as Buddhism, could prove beneficial. Buddhism has a long history of investigation into the nature of the mind and its various aspects—this is effectively what Buddhist meditation and its critical analysis constitute. Unlike that of modern science, Buddhism’s approach has been primarily from first-person experience. The contemplative method, as developed by Buddhism, is an empirical use of introspection, sustained by rigorous training in technique and robust testing of the reliability of experience. All meditatively valid subjective experiences must be verifiable both through repetition by the same practitioner and through other individuals being able to attain the same state by the same practice. If they are thus verified, such states may be taken to be universal, at any rate for human beings.
The Buddhist understanding of the mind is primarily derived from empirical observations grounded in the phenomenology of experience, which includes the contemplative techniques of meditation. Working models of the mind and its various aspects and functions are generated on this basis; they are then subjected to sustained critical and philosophical analysis and empirical testing through both meditation and mindful observation. This process offers a first-person empirical method with relation to the mind.
I am aware that there is a deep suspicion of first-person methods in modern science. I have been told that, given the problem inherent in developing objective criteria to adjudicate between competing first-person claims of different individuals, introspection as a method for the study of the mind in psychology has been abandoned in the West. Given the dominance of third-person scientific method as a paradigm for acquiring knowledge, this disquiet is entirely understandable.