Eric Schwitzgebel

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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.

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New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

And people will claim that experienced meditators in these types of meditation will sometimes claim that they have better knowledge of, say, the stream of their emotions than do people who don't engage in these kinds of meditation.

So that's one kind of thing.

But I think that's still pretty much scientifically in the pretty early stages

And the other sort of thing, the other kind of training that I think has some promise is what I actually wrote my first book on with Russ Hurlburt, which is experience sampling methods, where you give people beepers and then set them loose in their environment, and then the beep goes off, and you're supposed to attend to what was going on in your experience at the last undisturbed moment right before the beep.

And then you come in,

And then you write a report about it.

And in the way Hurlburt does it, you come in and he interviews you about it and tries to pull you away, direct you away from the kinds of things that lead to error, like overgeneralizing and having a lot of background assumptions about what must be the case and thinking a lot about the causes of your experience.

Hurlburt tries to train the subjects to focus really on what was that going on in that precise moment, um, stripping away, he hopes their presuppositions, um,

And the reports that you get from subjects doing that are interesting and the subjects will often be surprised by what they report.

Someone will say, oh, I never have any visual imagery at all, right?

And then you beep them and they report lots of visual imagery.

So that some sort of experience sampling method I think also has some promise as a way of trying to get at somewhat more introspective reports.

But again, as I said, I'm not

I think the jury is still out on how far we're going to get either through meditative training or through Herbert-type beeper training.

that's right.

That's right.

I think that we...

have vastly underestimated how difficult the task is to get it right about what our experience is.

I mean, you think this would be low-hanging fruit for first science, right?

You know, what could be easier to reach?

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