Michel Bitbol

In this paper we list the various criticisms that have been formulated against introspection, from Auguste Comte denying that consciousness can observe itself, to recent criticisms of the reliability of first person descriptions. We show on the one hand that these criticisms rely on poor knowledge of the introspective process, and on the other hand on a naïve conception of scientific objectivity. Two kinds of answers are offered: the first one is grounded on a refined description of the process of becoming aware of one’s experience and describing it, the second one relies on a description of the methods of the experimental sciences. We conclude the article by providing a renewed definition of ‘the truth’ of a first person description.

This paper analyzes how conflicts of perspective are resolved in the field of the human sciences. Examples of such conflicts are the duality between the actor and spectator standpoints, or the duality of participancy between a form of social life and a socio-anthropological study of it. This type of duality look irreducible, because the conflicting positions express incompatible interests. Yet, the claim of “incommensurability” is excessive. There exists a level of mental activity at which dialogue and resolution are possible. Reaching this level only implies that one comes back to a state of undetermination between situations and interests whose best model is a superposition of states in generalized quantum theory. Some applications of this strategy of going back below the point of “state reduction”, from the psychology of perception to the history of civilization, are presented.

In our society, where interest in Buddhist meditation is expanding enormously, numerous scientific studies are now conducted on the neurophysiological effects of meditation practices and on the neural correlates of meditative states. However, very few studies have been conducted on the experience associated with contemplative practice: what it is like to meditate -- from moment to moment, at different stages of practice -- remains almost invisible in contemporary contemplative science. Recently, 'micro-phenomenological' interview methods have been developed to help us become aware of lived experience and describe it with rigour and precision. The present article presents the results of a pilot project1 aimed at applying these methods to the description of meditative experience. The first part of the article describes these methods and their adjustment for the investigation of meditative experience. The second part provides micro- phenomenological descriptions of two processes of which meditation practice enables the practitioner to become aware: the process of losing contact with the current situation and generation of virtual ones in 'mind-wandering' episodes, and the process of emergence of a thought. The third part of the article highlights the interest such descriptions may have for practitioners and for teachers of meditation, defines the status of these results, and outlines directions for further research.

The notion of “enaction,” as originally expounded by Varela and his colleagues, was introduced into cognitive science as part of a broad philosophical framework combining science, phenomenology, and Buddhist philosophy. Its intention was to help the researchers in the field avoid falling prey to various dichotomies bedeviling modern philosophy and science, and serve as a “conceptual evocation” of “non-duality” or “groundlessness: an ongoing and irreducible circulation between the flux of lived experience and the search of reason for conceptual invariants, is to function as conceptual evocations of this back-and-forth exchange between knowing and being. However, if this overall framework is discarded, as is often the case in contemporary accounts, enaction loses its radical impetus and becomes mellowed down to yet another version of naturalized epistemology. Implications: Taking the notion of enaction seriously implies a radical shift in our conceptions of science and knowledge, as it encompasses a theoretical and existential move away from a detached observer to embedded and engaged cognizer. Thus, our manner of thinking can no longer be considered in isolation from our manner of being, which indicates a deep interconnection between epistemology and ethics, and may entail profound changes in the definition of the aims, methods, and values of the research community: self-transformation as a consequence of, and condition for, understanding. Constructivist content: The target article advocates a critical approach to realist presuppositions in contemporary science and philosophy, and emphasizes a deep interrelation between being and knowing, between ethics and epistemology.

A complete reappraisal of the philosophical meaning of Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics is carried out, by analysing carefully the role of the concept of "observer" in physics. It is shown that Everett's interpretation is the limiting case of a series of conceptions of the measurement problem which leave less and less of the observer out of the quantum description of the measuring interaction. This limiting case, however, should not be considered as one wherein nothing is left outside the description. Something is still needed besides this description: pure cognitive capacity, the subject, or, in a very abstract sense: "mind". The set of branches which arise, according to Everett, from a measuring interaction, gain a renewed signification. They do not refer to distinct "worlds", but to the points of view "mind" can identify itself to. This idea is compared and contrasted with Squires' "selection" of a branch by the mind (without quotation marks). Finally, the notion of indeterminism in quantum mechanics gains an unexpected and new light from a strict application of the previous ideas.

Décio Krause has achieved a thorough reconstruction of logic and set theory, to account for the unusual objects or quasi-objects of quantum physics. How can one cope with the (partial) lack of criteria of individualization and re-identification of quantum objects, when the elementary operations of counting them, and constituting sets of them, are to be performed? Here, I advocate an alternative strategy, that consists in going below the level of logic and set theory to inquire how their categories are generated in the experience and activity of knowing subjects, and whether this mode of category generation is still relevant in the field of experimental quantum physics. This project of a “genealogy of logic” is borrowed from Husserl’s last treatise, entitled Experience and Judgment. It is transposed to the case of quantum physics by way of a QBist approach of Mott’s theorization of quasi-“trajectories” in Wilson cloud chambers. It is also shown that one of the most appropriate ontologies for quantum objects or quasi-objects involves reversing the (grammatical) roles of subject and predicate, as advocated by Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarô in reasonable agreement with both Schrödinger’s and Krause’s approaches of the concept of “particle”.

In its most radical version, Neurophenomenology asks researchers to suspend the quest of an objective solution to the problem of the origin of subjectivity, and clarify instead how objectification can be obtained out of the coordination of subjective experiences. It therefore invites researchers to develop their inquiry about subjective experience with the same determination as their objective inquiry. However, accessing lived experience raises the question of the investigation method, and of the reliability of its results. Here, we present an accurate method of exploration of lived experience: the elicitation (or microphenomenological) interview. In the course of this interview, one first triggers a form of “phenomenological reduction”, then assists the subject in retrieving or “evoking” past experiences, and finally helps the subject to perform acts of attention about this evoked experience, to describe it faithfully. It is shown that this method addresses a set of traditional objections against introspection.

This book is the final outcome of two projects. My first project was to publish a set of texts written by Schrodinger at the beginning of the 1950's for his seminars and lectures at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. These almost completely forgotten texts contained important insights into the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and they provided several ideas which were missing or elusively expressed in SchrOdinger's published papers and books of the same period. However, they were likely to be misinterpreted out of their context. The problem was that current scholarship could not help very much the reader of these writings to figure out their significance. The few available studies about SchrOdinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics are generally excellent, but almost entirely restricted to the initial period 1925-1927. Very little work has been done on Schrodinger's late views on the theory he contributed to create and develop. The generally accepted view is that he never really recovered from his interpretative failure of 1926-1927, and that his late reflections are little more than an expression of his rising nostalgia for the lost ideal of picturing the world, not to say for some favourite traditional picture. But the content and style of Schrodinger's texts of the 1950's do not agree at all with this melancholic appraisal; they rather set the stage for a thorough renewal of accepted representations. In order to elucidate this paradox, I adopted several strategies.

Ce livre renouvelle le débat séculaire sur la possibilité de réduire la conscience à un processus neuronal. Il fait du lecteur l'arbitre de l'enquête, non seulement en tant que spectateur rationnel, mais aussi en tant qu'acteur apte à se reconnaître conscient aux moments décisifs de l'argumentation. Le fin mot de l'énigme ne se dissimulerait-il pas dans l'évidence que la question sur l'origine de la conscience a une conscience pour origine? Au cours de cette investigation qui mobilise la phénoménologie, la métaphysique, les pratiques contemplatives, les neurosciences et la théorie de l'évolution, chaque thèse sur la conscience est alors mise à l'épreuve d'un questionnement lancinant : pour qui vaut-elle et dans quel état de conscience doit-on être pour la soutenir? L'objectif n'est pas d'opposer entre elles les doctrines (physicaliste ou dualiste), les stratégies de recherche (objective ou réflexive) et les directions d'étude (physiologique ou introspective), mais de les rapporter aux postures existentielles divergentes d'où elles tirent leur pouvoir de persuasion. Une réflexion singulière sur et au coeur de la conscience.

According to Husserl, the epochè (or suspension of judgment) must be left incomplete. It is to be performed step by step, thus defining various layers of “reduction.” In phenomenology at least two such layers can be distinguished: the life-world reduction, and the transcendental reduction. Quantum physics was born from a particular variety of the life-world reduction: reduction to observables according to Heisenberg, and reduction to classical-like properties of experimental devices according to Bohr. But QBism has challenged this limited version of the phenomenological reduction advocated by the Copenhagen interpretation. QBists claim that quantum states are “expectations about experiences of pointer readings,” rather than expectations about pointer positions. Their focus on lived experience, not just on macroscopic variables, is tantamount to performing the transcendental reduction instead of stopping at the relatively superficial layer of the life-world reduction. I will show that quantum physics indeed gives us several reasons to go the whole way down to the deepest variety of phenomenological reduction, may be even farther than the standard QBist view: not only reduction to experience, or to “pure consciousness,” but also reduction to the “living present.”

Few researchers of the past made sense of the collapse of representations in the quantum domain, and looked for a new process of sense-making below the level of representations: the level of the phenomenology of perception and action; the level of the elaboration of knowledge out of experience. But some recent philosophical readings of quantum physics all point in this direction. They all recognize the fact that the quantum revolution is a revolution in our conception of knowledge. In these recent readings of quantum physics, quantum states are primarily generators of probabilistic valuations. Accordingly, they should not be seen as statements about what is the case, but as statements about what each agent can reasonably expect to be the case. Three features of such non-interpretational, non-committal approaches to quantum physics strongly evoke the phenomenological epistemology. These are: their deliberately first-person stance; their suspension of judgment about a presumably external domain of objects, and subsequent redirection of attention towards the activity of constituting these objects; their perception-like conception of quantum knowledge. But beyond phenomenological epistemology, these new approaches of quantum physics also make implicit use of a phenomenological ontology. Chris Fuch’s participatory realism thus formulates a non-external variety of realism for one who is deeply immersed in reality. But participatory realism strongly resembles Merleau-Ponty’s endo-ontology, which is a phenomenological ontology for one who deeply participates in Being. This remarkable analogy is supported by Merleau-Ponty himself. Indeed, 50 years before QBism, Merleau-Ponty acknowledged the strong kinship between the status of quantum mechanics and his phenomenology of embodiment. He did so in two texts that remained unpublished until after his death: Visible and invisible, and the Lectures on Nature. The final part of this article is then devoted to a study of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of quantum physics.