Eric Schwitzgebel
speaker
445 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2011
last heard Jun 2011
Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So my, my skepticism about the accuracy of introspective report of, uh, currently ongoing conscious experience is, uh,
close to the skepticism that Titchener and some of the other early introspective psychologists had, um, once also, um, so Titchener thought that ordinary people, when they're asked to do introspective tasks and they're asked to report on their own experience would tend to do pretty badly.
Um, just like I think, but he thought he had the solution and he thought the solution was to train people, um,
And he wrote this, Titchener's really the best case for this, because he wrote a 1,600-page laboratory manual with separate parts for the students and for the instructors that detailed a course of introspective training.
So you could go through and you could train yourself over this 1,600-page laboratory manual to become an expert introspector.
And throughout, he's giving warnings about the different kinds of possible errors, and he's talking about, well, this task is easy, and this task is difficult for this reason, and this...
fascinatingly detailed examination of Titchener's perspective on introspective incompetence of untrained people and the heights of performance to which we can reach with sufficient training.
So Titchener was optimistic about introspective training.
And one of the things I do in the book is I look at a few of Titchener's exercises and display, I think, both, I hope at least, display both the promise of
of introspective training, and also some of its potential pitfalls.
I think there is some promise there, because if I'm correct, an accurate introspection of the stream of experience is difficult, that we do things like get swept up in metaphors without really realizing it.
then it seems like, well, one potential answer to that is to become better by training ourselves, learning how to avoid certain sorts of errors, or learning how to be better, more accurately attuned to what's actually going through our stream of experience.
And yet there are also some very challenging issues there, and there are reasons that Titchener's introspective training is no longer done.
Maybe the most... Go
Um, well, the, I think the two most promising things going right now, although I don't find, well, I think the jury is still out on both of them, but the two most promising things going on right now are, um, forms of meditation, um,
right?
That invite people to introspect on their experience, right?
There's, you know, there are lots of different types of meditation, but some involve trying to attend to your experience as it flows through your mind.
And, um, there is at least some preliminary evidence that suggests that people who are trained in this can give reports about their experience that, um,
can be corroborated neuroscientifically.
Showing 241–260 of 445 · page 13 of 23
← Previous
Next →