Ezra Klein

He is now regarded more as a philosopher, and that's because psychology is so empirical now.

He was really, I don't know if he used this word, but he acted like, wrote like a phenomenologist, which is to say about the lived experience of thought.

I first got acquainted with him when I was working on How to Change Your Mind, because he'd written the varieties of religious experience, and there's a fantastic chapter there on mystical experience.

And he experimented with drugs himself to look at these kind of outer reaches of consciousness.

He's kind of unreadable, yet he's also a great writer at the same time.

There's something about his sentences that are so long and intricate that he loses a modern reader about 80% of the way to the period.

Yeah.

At least me.

But the observations are just so refined, and they kind of put to shame all the scientists working on consciousness.

I mean, I hate to say that because I respect a lot of them, but that he's onto the subtlety of mental experience, and they, of course, are reducing it to fairly simple things like visual perception or...

um, qualia, which is their word for, you know, the qualities of experience.

He goes so far beyond qualia to delve into these details of thinking that it was.

So I had a head full of James when I was doing this experiment and it seemed to keep doing violence to that.

I was, I recognize my thinking more in James than in Hurlburt's questions.

I think it's just a reminder that our mental life is just far more intricate, complex, and shadowy than we give it credit for.

And that, you know, it's in the nature of reductive science to simplify things in order to better understand them.

It'd be very weird to start from a Jamesian view of the world

Yes, that is what really interesting.

I mean, the more I thought about consciousness, the more elusive the phenomenon becomes.

And meditators get acquainted with this pretty quickly.