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Jack Petranker
Who Will Be the Scientists?
A Review of B. Alan Wallace’s ‘The Taboo of Subjectivity’
In the emerging discipline of consciousness studies, the bright-line distinction is
between third-person methodologies — honed to a fine edge by the physical
sciences — and first-person methodologies — usually associated with such
disciplines or approaches as phenomenology, introspection, and meditation.
Proponents of each approach tend to marvel that their opponents can be so
thick-headed, so downright perverse. Third-person methodologists maintain that
since physical reality is (a) all there is and (b) causally closed, consciousness will
yield its secrets to inquiry that follows the scientific straight and narrow. There is
simply no need to traipse off into the tangled thickets of subjectivity, where
lurk the wily monsters of bias and self-deception. First-person methodologists
respond that their opponents, blinded by loyalty to an inapposite research
program, reject the subjective and experiential qualities that are the very essence
of consciousness.
Given an intellectual tradition still in recovery from Cartesian dualism, it is not
surprising that this debate gets framed in ontological terms. Can the mental be
reduced to the physical; experience to its neural correlates? Does consciousness
‘exist’ in any causally efficacious sense, or is it an epiphenomenon? Such ques-
tions, however, obscure a more pragmatic methodological issue. Does first-
person inquiry have a methodology for arriving at useful and reliable knowledge
of consciousness? More fundamentally, can it give a convincing account of what
would count as ‘useful and reliable knowledge’? Such questions are best
approached at the level of epistemology. Issues regarding what is real can be post-
poned. Perhaps in the end they can be set aside entirely.
In
The Taboo of Subjectivity
,
Correspondence: Jack Petranker,
Center for Creative Inquiry, 2625 Alcatraz Avenue #605, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA
petranker@att.net
[1]
B. Alan Wallace
,
The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a Science of Consciousness
, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000, ISBN 0195132076, 256 pp., $29.95 (hereafter ‘
Taboo
’; page references not
otherwise identified are to this book).
Journal of Consciousness Studies
,
8
, No. 11, 2001, pp. 83–90
1
B. Alan Wallace invokes the meditative tradi-
tions of Asia and various suggestive remarks by William James to claim that
84
J. PETRANKER
suitable methodologies for first-person inquiry are indeed available. He lays the
blame for the failure of the Western tradition to develop such methodologies at
the door of scientific materialism, which he views as a dogmatic degeneration of
the original scientific impulse. As the title of the book suggests, he believes that
science has suppressed the study of subjectivity, and has done so for indefensible
reasons.
Since most of Wallace’s arguments with respect to the shortcomings of scien-
tific materialism have already been developed elsewhere (notably by Searle,
1992), the potential significance of
Taboo
has to do with the special perspective
that Wallace brings to the debate. A professor of religious studies, Wallace spent
some twelve years as a Buddhist monk and apparently continues to study with
Tibetan Buddhist teachers. A prolific author and translator of Buddhist works on
meditation and related topics, he has made himself into a spokesman for Buddhist
teachings within the consciousness-studies community, both in articles (1999;
2001), and in plenary-session presentations at the biennial Tucson conferences on
consciousness (from which he borrows the subtitle of his book).
The Buddha insisted that each individual must establish what is true for herself,
without relying on authority or tradition (Rahula, 1974). This alone makes his
teachings congenial to science. But the devil is in the details. Does Buddhism
offer a workable methodology for first-person inquiry? Should meditation
become part of the toolkit of consciousness investigators? Do Buddhist views on
consciousness portend a new or extended understanding of what should consti-
tute scientific inquiry into consciousness? As a practising, well-trained Buddhist,
familiar with several of the canonical languages, Wallace seems well situated to
address such issues.
I
‘Dismiss whatever insults your soul.’
This epigraph, taken from Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
, opens the final section of
Taboo
. It captures well Wallace’s own
attitude. Like others before him, he is dismayed that many cognitive scientists
consider experience irrelevant to making scientific sense of consciousness; that
some deny ‘the validity, and even the very existence, of their personal, inner life’
(p. 161). Truly shocked at this position, Wallace has few kind words for its propo-
nents (‘the resistance’), whom he regards as dogmatic, naive, illogical, terror-
stricken in the face of subjectivity, and (by implication) stuck in a ‘preadolescent
stage of psychological immaturity’ (p. 83). How can their view of the world, dis-
armingly characterized by Searle (1992, p. 90) as ‘in varying degrees repulsive,
degrading, and disgusting’, be countered?
In crafting an answer, Wallace distinguishes four elements or dimensions of the
scientific tradition. The first is science
per se
, a ‘discipline of inquiry’ (p. 17) that
relies on the disengaged observer, scepticism, and (often) experimentation to
arrive at knowledge. The second is scientific realism, the philosophical convic-
tion that science is not simply a methodology, but an approach to arriving at true
knowledge of reality. The third is scientific materialism, which Wallace
WHO WILL BE THE SCIENTISTS?
85
characterizes variously as a dogma, an ideology, and a religion. And the fourth is
scientism, which maintains that science alone can produce true knowledge.
As
Taboo
unfolds, this fourfold scheme mostly reduces to the distinction
between science (which Wallace approves of) and scientific materialism. The sci-
entific materialist holds that first-person experience is either a fiction foisted on
us by folk psychology or a category irrelevant to scientific inquiry. For Wallace,
this creed amounts to an intolerant belief system, whose contemporary triumph
makes fruitful inquiry into consciousness impossible.
In the first part of
Taboo
, Wallace surveys Western thought to explain how such
a misguided understanding can ever have arisen, let alone prevailed. On his
account, scientific materialism originated in a genuine religious impulse: the
wish to draw closer to the mind of God by reading in nature the record of his
works. With the death of God in modern times, that impulse was perverted into
dogma. Today scientific materialists treat the objective, material realm as sacred
and the world of sensory appearances as profane. As the great French sociologist
Emile Durkheim argued, safeguarding the sacred from contamination by the pro-
fane requires instituting taboos. The great taboo of scientific materialism is sub-
jectivity; in effect (though Wallace refrains from using the term), scientific
materialists regard subjectivity as sinful.
As history, all this is of course highly speculative. Wallace adduces enough evi-
dence to titillate, but not enough to convince. Those who value first-person
inquiry will find the analysis thought-provoking, and will come away with good
anecdotes and examples to use as ammunition. Practitioners of scientific materi-
alism, however, will see in it only an easily dismissed caricature of their views.
The real point of this analysis for Wallace is to lay the groundwork for his claim
that scientific materialists take an irrational and dogmatic stand when it comes to
first-person inquiry. To buttress this claim, he argues repeatedly that scientific
materialism is bad science, ignoring the role that subjectivity has come to play in
quantum physics and relying on blind faith in what science will one day reveal.
Missing from this analysis (except for a single sentence in the book’s closing
paragraphs) is any sense that the practice of science — even for scientific materi-
alists — may reflect the positive qualities of inspiration and awe associated with
religion. As for the proud claim that scientific objectivity serves to protect the
freedom of inquiry, Wallace dismisses this as a ‘textbook account’ of why scien-
tific materialism triumphed (p. 164). The truth, in his view, is darker and more
sordid: unreasoning commitment to a bastardized religious creed. The deeply
damaging consequence is that the study of consciousness has been suppressed
(p. 187):
[S]cience has not developed effective methods for exploring consciousness first
hand, and the reason for this is that scientific inquiry has been constrained by the
metaphysical principles of scientific materialism. This dogma allows science to
explore only those facets of reality that conform to its creed; and the experienced
mind is simply left out.
In other words, now that science has discovered the subjective realm, the dogmas
of scientific materialism have become a serious impediment to the growth of
86
J. PETRANKER
knowledge. Since consciousness is subjective at its core, understanding it
requires first-person approaches. When science, thoroughly under the influence
of scientific materialism, rejects such approaches, it blinds itself to what is obvi-
ously true and impoverishes our human capacity for discovering the truth.
II
Histories of science often recount the story of Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic
church, in the person of Cardinal Bellarmine. The standard account casts
Bellarmine as the villain — unwilling because of his dogmatic prejudices even to
consider the evidence of Galileo’s telescope that the universe could not be geo-
centric. As Searle points out (1992, p. 5), a common rhetorical move in debates on
the role of science
vis-à-vis
consciousness is to cast oneself in the role of Galileo,
with one’s opponents so many Bellarmines, championing dogma over truth,
ideology over empirical evidence. Wallace does not deny himself this pleasure
(p. 141).
In the revisionist version of this quarrel Bellarmine comes off much better. In
this telling, Bellarmine simply maintained that scientific observation does not
demand ontological commitments; that it might be fruitful to
treat
the universe as
heliocentric without claiming that this is the way things are (Rorty, 1979,
pp. 328–31). Thus rehabilitated, Bellarmine becomes Wallace’s natural ally
(p. 20). Free science from the dogmatic ontology of scientific materialism, says
Wallace, and the way lies open to develop a methodology both consistent with
science and appropriate to the subjective realm of consciousness. For Wallace,
this methodology is introspection.
Now, Wallace does not mean by introspection the largely discredited
introspectionism practised by Wilhelm Wundt and others around the turn of the
twentieth century. He critiques this kind of introspection on two grounds. First, it
badly distorted experience in order to make it amenable to scientific analysis,
destroying the object of inquiry in order to save it. Second, it lacked any way to
break through the barrier to first-person inquiry noted by William James and con-
firmed by modern psychological studies: that the maximum time on which an
observer can focus on a fixed object is about three seconds (p. 99).
At this point (Chapter Five of
Taboo
) Wallace introduces meditation. The Bud-
dhist meditative traditions, he explains, taught ways to violate the three-second
rule. Buddhist contemplatives learned to develop stable attention that could be
sustained indefinitely, the very capacity that introspection in its Western guise is
lacking. Able to free the investigating mind from disturbance, they could get clear
on the introspective objects to which mind alone has access, just as a scientist can
get a clear image through a microscope only if it is mounted on a stable platform,
has adequate optics, and provides good illumination (p. 96).
[2]
The Buddhist tradition itself uses a similar analogy (Wallace, 1999, p. 176).
2
For this analogy to apply, a more fundamental question must be resolved: Can
introspection give knowledge of consciousness? Is the relevant data even
detectable in the visible part of the spectrum? Aware of the need to deal with this
WHO WILL BE THE SCIENTISTS?
87
issue, Wallace considers a variety of objections to the validity introspection. Here
the argument begins to run into difficulty.
The most fundamental objection to introspection is that it is impossible in prin-
ciple. One cannot carry out two cognitive operations at once — cannot be aware
of one’s own awareness. To this objection, Wallace replies (pp. 87–93) that one
can practise introspection as
retrospection
: looking back on a mental event that
has just taken place. But this proposed solution (also advocated in passing by
James, as Wallace notes) will not do. Retrospection may give knowledge of the
contents of mental states, and Wallace argues convincingly that this knowledge is
as likely to be accurate as the content of external observations. Yet knowledge of
the
contents
of consciousness is simply not the same thing as knowledge of con-
sciousness itself. As Searle (1992, p. 98) puts it:
[O]ur idea of an objectively observable reality presupposes the notion of observation
that is itself ineliminably subjective, and that cannot be made the object of observa-
tion...
3
Taboo
considers Searle’s point in some detail, but never really comes to terms
with it. Wallace seems not to appreciate that introspection depends on the inten-
tional structure that assigns knower and known two completely different roles in
the process of cognition. As long as such epistemological dualism operates,
first-person knowledge of consciousness — in its defining role as subjective
knower — will remain impossible.
Since this point is so central, it is worth considering what answers to it can be
teased out of what
Taboo
has to say about meditation. For instance, Buddhist con-
templatives seem to agree — on the basis of their own meditative investigations
— that the content of an act of mental perception will normally be the previous
moment of perception (p. 108). Yet this will not serve as an answer to the funda-
mental objection. The aim of Buddhist practice is not to arrive at theoretical
understanding of the mind, but to end suffering. Meditative analysis supports this
end in part by allowing the meditator to recognize that the content of her own
mental experience is largely fictitious; i.e., based on self-deception. In this
respect, at least, Buddhism agrees with cognitive scientists who speak of ‘folk
psychology’ as delusory. Meditative retrospection gives adequate access to the
contents of an individual’s version of the prevailing folk psychology (i.e., it offers
an answer to the question: ‘What do I believe just happened?’). In this way it
helps clarify and loosen the hold of conventional patterns of thought. Yet using
contemplative inquiry in this way does not imply gaining access to the operation
of consciousness itself.
Wallace reads his Buddhist sources as offering another, more subtle endorse-
ment of introspection/retrospection as a source for direct knowledge of con-
sciousness. Several of the meditative practices he discusses (pp. 103–12, 115–18)
[3]
Wallace, who agrees with much in Searle’s analysis, regards Searle’s explicit rejection of introspection
as backsliding: ‘an abrupt withdrawal from experience back into the dogma of scientific materialism’
(p. 155). But Searle, despite some confusing terminology, is making a methodological point, not an
ontological one. He is arguing that the practice of relying on observations by a disengaged observer
cannot be applied to investigate consciousness.
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