Describing , Debating , and Discovering Inner Experience Review of Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel ( 2007 ) , ‘ Describing Inner Experience ?

In the spirit of the competitive-collaborative approach that Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel take to examining the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method, I review ‘Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic’ — and consider the scientific potential of DES — from the inside, in light of my own subjective experience as a DES subject, as a person who lives with the unusual symptoms of Tourette Syndrome, and as a cognitive psychologist who conducts idiographic and experience-sampling work on volitional control and mind-wandering experiences. This is an unusual review of an unusual book. In Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic, authors Russell Hurlburt (a psychologist; hereafter, ‘Russ’) and Eric Schwitzgebel (a philosopher; hereafter, ‘Eric’) debate the possibility of faithfully — or, ‘pretty faithfully’— assessing people’s momentary conscious experiences. What makes their discussion so engaging, and so novel, is not simply that Russ’s and Eric’s arguments and counterarguments are remarkably clear, compelling, and thoughtful; rather, the bounty is in the discussion’s form and target. First, the reader experiences the debate playing out as a ‘real time’ conversational Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18, No. 1, 2011, pp. 150–64 Correspondence: Michael J. Kane, Department of Psychology, 321 McIver St., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27412, Phone: 336.256. 1022 Email: mjkane@uncg.edu Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -not for reproduction exchange, in the forms of interview transcripts and boxed-off discussions about those transcripts; in this way, the book harks back to the ‘old days’ of published conference proceedings that included verbatim text of the question-and-answer periods, thereby humanizing the participants and conveying the excitement of the scientific process. But second, and most critically, Russ’s and Eric’s dialogue focuses on the intensive examination of a single subject’s actual conscious experiences, as data gathered by all three of them via the ‘Descriptive Experience Sampling’ (DES) method (Hurlburt, 1990; 1993). The DES subject, ‘Melanie’ (a pseudonym), wore a device with an earpiece over several days, which beeped her at random intervals as a cue for her to apprehend the contents, features, qualities, and extent of her conscious experience at that beeped moment (in Russ’s words, ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ about the experience); she then took notes to help her recall the details of that moment when subsequently interviewed by Russ and Eric. These DES interviews, where Melanie describes her inner experiences and Russ and Eric interrogate them, form the bulk of the book and the grist for the mill of the debate. Russ, the DES proponent, hopes to use the Melanie interviews to convince Eric, the sceptic, (and the reader, as well) that DES avoids most of the pitfalls of other introspective methods and therefore should take a prominent place in advancing the science of consciousness studies. This academic text is unusual, then, because it features not only a probing dialogue among two researchers and their research participant, but also a vigorous (yet exceedingly civil) meta-dialogue between the researchers about the discussion. This review, however, is pretty conventional so far. Where it diverges somewhat from the ordinary is that, in the same way that Russ and Eric anchored their arguments to Melanie’s reported experiences, I will consider both Melanie’s and my own DES data in my comments on Describing Inner Experience. With Eric’s blessing, I wore the beeper and served as a DES subject for three sampling days with Russ as the interviewer (by phone). I had two purposes. First, as a researcher who uses the normative form of beepercued, experience-sampling methodology (ESM; Csikszentmihalyi, Larson and Prescott, 1977) in my cognitive-psychology research on individual differences in attention, memory, and mind-wandering, and as a prospective reviewer of Describing Inner Experience, I thought that ‘doing’ DES from the inside might provide me with insights unavailable through second-hand accounts. Second, I have Tourette Syndrome (TS) and, based on my observation of my own experience and the DESCRIBING, DEBATING, & DISCOVERING 151 Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -not for reproduction reports of others, I once proposed a framework for understanding TS that made phenomenological claims about the bodily (somatosensory, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive) experiences that seemed to precede and even precipitate tics (Kane, 1994). Although this TS framework was consistent with previously and subsequently published research (e.g. Bliss, 1980; Prado et al., 2008), and although it was anecdotally supported by periodic ‘thank you’ notes I received from lay readers with TS, it was based on subjective, introspective evidence and so it might be fundamentally wrong. I speculated that DES might eventually provide a novel, rigorous means of testing whether my claims had merit. Thoughts About DES, and the Book, Before Sampling On Russ’s recommendation, I made careful notes about my reactions to Describing Inner Experience before undergoing DES, in order to prevent my DES experience from retroactively biasing my original responses. I should note, however, that my knowledge of DES was not limited to the book, for I’d previously or contemporaneously read other reports about the method and its results (e.g. Heavey and Hurlburt, 2008; Hurlburt, 1997; Hurlburt and Heavey, 2001; 2006; Hurlburt, Koch and Heavey, 2002; Scwhitzgebel, 2007); my pre-DES views were thus informed by this broader literature. Objective Corroboration of Inner Experience From the outset, I was sympathetic to Eric’s concerns about corroboration and external validation of DES reports, at least about the specific details of Melanie’s reports, and especially about those details that were drawn out of the interview-exposed reports not present in the raw reports offered by Melanie before questioning. Should we really trust, given the hours elapsed between Melanie’s experiences and her reports, that she felt the yearning to scuba dive as a tensionlike, and forward-moving, feeling throughout her entire body, from her head to her toes (Beep 4.1; pp. 139–165)? Or that the Greek woman in Melanie’s complex, sprawling image while reading was looking to Melanie’s right and ‘gesturing a little bit’ with her hands (Beep 2.1; pp. 95–108)? Or that, while driving, Melanie experienced an awareness, or a knowledge, of being anxious about keeping an appointment as being located in the back of her head (Beep 5.1; pp.