Introspection Research

The purpose of this page is to provide a broad overview of my current approach to investigating the nature of introspection and the normative principles of introspective practice. For now it is just a high-level overview that gestures at various ideas and directions, but I hope to fill it out over time as I put more of my thoughts into writing.

What is introspection research?

Introspection is using the mind to look at the mind. It is reflection on direct experience.
The aim of my research is to understand the patterns and principles of self-reflection and how different self-reflective systems unfold under different circumstances.

Why introspection research?

Many sophisticated and powerful systems of inner work have been developed throughout human history. They can be found in most spiritual and psychological traditions. There are tantalizing similarities between these practice traditions and our contemporary traditions of science and engineering.

Science has contributed so much to opening up new possibilities that would have been impossible to find without it. Maybe it could do the same here. My own personal practice and experimentation has led me to believe that there are general principles behind how minds unfold under different forms of introspective practice.

Despite this, most contemplative traditions arose in pre-scientific times and even modern versions that make use of scientific language seem to me to fall short of the actual practice of science. For example: there are no public journals of contemplative practice. Why not?

Unique Challenges

Despite the many similarities between traditions of contemplative and scientific practice, there are some key differences that go a long way to explain why this particular domain has lagged behind others in the age of science.

I've come to believe that these differences arise from the ways in which self-reflective observation is different from external observation. More specifically, they arise from the fact that the subject and object of observation are not separate from each other in introspection. Observer and observed are, in an important sense, the same thing. Because of this difference and its consequences, introspective observation winds up violating several key assumptions that conventional scientific methodologies rely upon. These assumptions include:

Independence of observer and observed - the intentions and the concepts employed by the mind in observation actually change what appears in awareness
Objective measurement and external verifiability - by definition, introspection is a mind's own awareness of itself; on a practical level you can't directly transfer introspective methods between practitioners (with some interesting exceptions); methods are in some sense unique because the whole of the mind is engaged in the act
Observation without change - introspection often changes the object of observation
Repeatability of experiments - because introspection tends to change the mind that engages in it, it is generally not possible to repeat the same introspective "experiment" twice

Does this mean that a scientific study of introspection is impossible? I'm not sure entirely sure, but I don't currently think so. I suspect that each of these issues can be addressed and I have some tentative ideas about how we might do so.

We can share introspective reports even though we can't share direct observations. These reports can be quite detailed and revealing. The errors and distortions present in these reports are themselves a kind of data because they imply things about the person's introspective process.
We can study the process of learning introspective methods and how different components of the skill affect how objects of awareness show up.
We can include the specific details of our observation intentions in our introspective reports and notice how changes in them appear to change the objects of awareness.
We can study the trajectories of practitioners over time and compare them to each other instead of trying to study fixed objects under controlled conditions.

The objects of study become trajectories of change and dependencies between different contents of awareness (such as subject and object).

Unique Possibilities

Because of these differences the normative/pragmatic application of introspection is also distinct in form from that of science. In science it is engineering. Engineering involves precisely controlling many conditions so as to produce desired outcomes specified in advance. In the domain of self-reflection, there is another intriguing possibility that seems to be available.

This new possibility follows from one the key differences in particular - the impossibility of observation without alteration. This may seem like a limitation at first, but it has a flip side. There is a particular relational-observational stance that empirically leads to spontaneous beneficial change through introspection alone. No intentional intervention is needed and any attempt at doing so actually tends to suppress this effect.

This stance could be described as "intimacy without reification". It consists of feeling the impact of whatever is arising in experience (intimacy) without trying to make it into a stable thing (non-reification).

The beneficial change that arises from this is always surprising in some way and seems to take more into account in a more nuanced and appropriate way than you could possibly have planned or intended to. I call this phenomenon "unfolding" because it feels like a natural movement of the entirety of your being.

It turns out that the conditions for this kind of unfolding are actually closely connected to the very properties of self-reflection that seemed like barriers to scientific investigation:
Intimacy is necessary because it reflects an aspect of the truth - the lack of separation between observer and observed. Trying to not be affected by your own experience is only possible through maintaining some false notion that "you" are somehow separate from "your experience."
Non-reification is necessary because observation always changes what is observed, so attempting to artificially stabilize an experience requires the imposition of some false notion.
These are not only practical principles, they are epistemic principles. They follow from the true structure of the domain of investigation - a mind reflecting on itself.

I propose that the normative equivalent of engineering in the domain of self-reflection is this "unfolding."

Research phases

I think of the trajectory of my research in this area as having taken place over three phases so far:

In the first phase of my introspection research, I investigated whether there were identifiable principles of introspection within an engineering-oriented framework.
In the second phase of my introspection research, I began to encounter the difficulties, limitations and paradoxes inherent in the engineering frame around introspection and Major group epistemic unknowns.
Now, in the third phase of my introspection research, I am working to reframe how it makes sense to approach introspection research on both an individual and group level taking into account all that I’ve learned from the past two phases.

Research directions

My current priorities are:

Exploring the idea of grounding the principles of introspective practice in the nature of self-reflection
Thinking through the group-level epistemic principles of introspection research to see if something like the social practice of science is possible in this domain
Developing my research mindset and process such that it functions in harmony with the nature of the domain