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Topic Series
Russ Hurlburt
Saleem Ali on Natural Laws and Human Life
Coming Soon: What is Philosophy of Scientific Breakthroughs?
Coming Soon: What are Scientific Breakthroughs in Biology?
What Are Scientific Breakthroughs In Physics?
Tim Palmer on Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change
Manil Suri on How to Build the Universe with Math
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Russ, in trying to discern the old classic mind-body problem, we have to understand each of the components and we have to start with mind; what is the mind? There are a lot of definitions around. You've explored the mind through inner experience. I'd like to understand how that works, what it means and, and how can inner experience be used to give us a scientific understanding of what the mind is?
- Russ Hurlburt
- Well I'm not sure that I've actually done that Robert. I'd like, I'd like to be able to do that but I don't think I can actually do it. I'm, I'm as much interested in the mind as the next guy, but I have not found a way that I can actually explore that directly. So, what I explore is what I've called pristine inner experience. And by that, I mean your thoughts, feelings, whatever is going on before the footlights of your consciousness. And I think that's the- that is the basic data on which the study of mind rests. So, I don't consider myself actually a researcher on the mind. I consider myself a researcher on inner experience. And the difference there is, that inner experience is a directly experienced phenomenon. It's something which actually presents itself directly to you. And mind is not of that category. Mind is something which maybe leads to inner experience.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Or maybe you need it to have inner experience.
- Russ Hurlburt
- Maybe you need it to have it. Maybe a whole lot of other kinds of things.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Right, right.
- Russ Hurlburt
- But it's not something that you see directly. You don't see it, you don't taste it, you don't whatever. And so, I have limited myself to phenomena. Things which you actually do…
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Which is a good scientific approach to mind because people talk about mind and get involved in all sorts of crazy things that are nonscientific and opinions. Beliefs and, they're welcome to them but that's not science.
- Russ Hurlburt
- Well, it's not my science, that's for sure. So, so, I totally agree with that. And I think it's a difficult enough, it's a difficult enough task just to keep (BEEP) people talking about experience. Because they get carried away. And to thinking about mind or whatever, because that's our zeitgeist. That's the world in which we live. So, the method that I use tries to keep people to what I call cleave to experience. I want, I want you to stay directly on experience that was going on at the moment of the beep. So, I give you a beeper. I ask you what's going on right at the moment actually one millisecond before the beep goes off. Not really a millisecond but one… one moment just before the beep goes off. That is what I call the moment of the beep, and I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to help you to focus on that moment and the experience that's going on at that moment and nothing else.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Okay. And so, what are specific examples that you get when you ask that question? What's the range?
- Russ Hurlburt
- Well the range varies, from there was nothing going on, and I think that's actually true for some people. Not most people, most of the time, but most people have something going on. To some people have ten or more simultaneous ongoing experiences all at the same time. Asynchronous, not related to each other. Some people's inner experiences is quite…
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- At the same time?
- Russ Hurlburt
- Yes.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- That's hard to imagine. Or maybe shifting back and forth between a number of different ideas? So, when you say what happened when the buzzer went off, people would report I was thinking about pressing my shirt and cashing my check?
- Russ Hurlburt
- Well it's… it's more diverse than that. But your question I guess I would say it betrays the presupposition that the mind has to be one thing at a time. And I don't think that's actually true. Or maybe it is true. I don't actually know because I'm declaring myself an agnostic about the mind. But I don't think there's any reason to- I don't think there's any reason to believe that experience has to be monolithic. And so, when you asked, well I- going back and forth, it's like da, da, da, da, da, so back and forth. Well maybe that is the way the mind works, and maybe that is the way the neurology works. But it isn't the way experience works when you look at it carefully. I actually doubt that that's the way the neurology works.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Okay but it's interesting. So, describe what happens from the phenomenology, from what people report, on multiple simultaneous experiences?
- Russ Hurlburt
- Well maybe I should give you an example of somebody with multiple experience and it's an example that I've used for a long time because it actually shaped my thinking about this, this subject. It's a woman that I've called Fran. And I've written about her and talked about her in a lot of venues, but Fran was diagnosed when I met her as having Borderline Personality. She'd also been diagnosed as schizophrenic and a bunch of other kinds of things, and probably all those diagnoses were more or less adequate at one point or another. But she was a seriously disturbed woman who had multiple scars on her body from multiple suicide attempts or whatever. And she had been- she was referred to me by a friend of mine who was a therapist who she had consulted him because she had undesirable thoughts she said and she couldn't get those things under control and he'd work with her, being unsuccessful, and he finally said well you know you ought to go see Russ and see what you think. So, we hooked her up with the beeper, and it turned out that she had visual imagery, what I now call inner seeing. And her inner seeings were not the way most people's inner seeings are. That typical guys inner seeing is, you see some kind of a visualization and it's there for a second or two, or two or three maybe and then it's gone. She would have visualizations that would last for she said a half an hour, 45 minutes, or a couple of days, nonstop. And not only that, she had these images, multiple. So, she would have like ten images going on at the same time and they were very different from each other. So, for example, she would see an image of herself sitting on the bed with her daughter standing over saying you're a terrible mother and haranguing her. And then at the same time she would have an image of herself sitting at the dining room table and her father saying I wish you'd never been born. And these images are very floridly detailed. So, in that image for example, she could see through the doorway into the kitchen where her mother was at the sink looking back over her shoulder at what was going on. And then at the same time, she said, I'm seeing a… an image of a birthday cake that I made in the refrigerator. So, I see the refrigerator door open and then there's a birthday cake there and the milk and whatever. And she's got like ten of these images going on at the same time, she says.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- She claims they're at the same time.
- Russ Hurlburt
- She claims that they're at the same time. And of course, you might say well this is a seriously disturbed lady and she maybe doesn't understand what the method is about, and I think that's a reasonable thing. So, in one of those images, she said I'm seeing a picture of the local paper. And it's got a department store ad and they're selling gold chains. And the way this ad works is there's a bunch of teddy bears arrayed on this page and there are gold chains hanging off the arms and the neck or whatever of the teddy bear. And so, she describes these things and I say well right at the moment of the beep, which one of these teddy bears are you looking at? And she says, well I'm looking at all of them. And I said, well I understand you're looking at all of them, but I mean right at the moment of the beep which one are you looking at? And she says, I'm looking at all of them. And I said well, you know, I understand that, but I mean right exactly now which one are you looking at. She says, I'm telling you, I'm looking at all of them. So, I know, you know I'm a psychologist and I'm thinking well that's not possible. Everybody knows figuring out phenomena you've got to have (some to finger?) and everything else has got to be in the background. So, I drew her the ambiguous figure of the faces in the vase. On my notepad and I showed it to her and I said what do you see? And she said, well I see two faces and a vase. And I said, well I understand that but I mean right now which one do you see? And she said well I see two faces and a vase. And I said no, no, these alternate back and forth and she says no they don't alternate. I see two faces and a vase. So, the next time I brought with me some professionally drawn, I Xeroxed, whatever, a Necker cube and Jastrow's duck rabbit and Boring's old woman and young woman or whatever, and I brought those to her and asked her what she saw and she denied alternation in any of them. So, still you gotta think well, you know, should you believe a report like this? This is a woman who is maybe credible, maybe not credible. She's making claims which are pretty clearly incredible. But at the end of that interview she said can I have these pictures? And I said sure. So, she called me up an hour later, and she said I went back to the bank where I work, and I showed the pictures to my friend, and by golly, they alternate for them. And then she proceeded to give me a very clear explanation, description of alternation for her friends, and said but that isn't what happened for me. So, you can't just rule out that she didn't understand the question; now it's clear that she did understand the question. And furthermore, she said, we now figured out, my friends and I figured out why I make them mad all the time. And I said oh, why is that? And she said well one of the things that we do is to stand at a counter and count money. And when we count money then I engage them in a conversation and it causes them to lose count. But I can have a conversation here, and another conversation over there, and count money all at the same time. And furthermore, she said, I found out that they don't have three television sets in their living room. And I have three television sets in my living room and I watch them all at the same time and I don't alternate back and forth one at the other. I watch them all at the same time. And so that's the kind of thing that leads me to think well this is an experientially credible report. And there's more to that story too which I could tell you if you're interested in but…
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- What would the implications be of that in terms of how the, what we call the mind functions?
- Russ Hurlburt
- Well, most scientists, as you voiced a little bit ago yourself, think of the mind as being a unitary kind of a thing. And I think that's probably not the way it is. I think, I think it's possible for the mind to be unitary, and I think it's possible for the mind to be quite fragmented. And she, by the way, to make a very long story short, eventually got… she gave up this… she changed. I could tell you why I think she changed, but she changed. And as the result of that change, her perception got much simpler. And (figure ground?) phenomenon came back to her or started for her for the first time. But the- but in answer to your question, why is that an important story, is if it's true, which I think it is, then you can't just say well there must be a language processor and a visual processor because well maybe there's got to be several language processors or maybe even many language processors. There's several visual processors or many. And that has to figure into what- what your theory of mind has to- has to account for.