Is Inner Speech Universal? Descriptive Experience Sampling & Myths of the Mind | Russell Hurlburt - Mind-Body Solution

Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Thank you so much for joining me, Russ.
It's it's an honor to chat to someone who's spent decades
exploring this field we both love so passionately and dearly.
You spent, as I said, decades inthis field exploring something
that's deeply fascinating, Innerexperience.
For those new to your work, I'm I'm pretty sure this podcast

(00:29):
people are quite familiar. But for those who are not
familiar, how do you define inner experience and why does it
matter? Well, I define inner experience
as whatever is occurring. What I would say is before the
Footlights of consciousness at some particular moment.
So I usually define almost always in my work to find that

(00:52):
moment by a beep. So I give you a beep.
So I'm like beep. And I want to know what is, what
is what you, what your bag of neurons and bones has selected
as being of enough interest to to be present to you.
What I call directly apprehendedat the at some particular

(01:12):
moment, not in response to the beep, but what I call the last
undisturbed moment just before the beep, which is of course not
really undisturbed. And it's not really the last
moment, but it's. But I think what I have found, I
guess, is that most people most of the time know what I'm
talking about after a couple of iterations of going through that

(01:34):
kind of a conversation. So that So what I would say is
that there are a welter of things in the universe in the
immediate environment and your past environment and whatever
that that could that you could be interested in at the moment.
But out of those you have probably chosen one or two or a
few or none to be interested in at some particular what I would

(01:59):
usually have as randomly selected moments and inner
experiences. Whatever it is that that you
have found interesting enough tohave placed before your
Footlights of consciousness. So that's what inner experience.
Why, why is it important? I I guess because I think since
the beginning of time, it was probably the most interesting

(02:20):
question in the in the world andpeople are asking a penny for
your thoughts. What as soon as there were
people, I suppose. And if you go back and read
Gilgamesh or the very earliest writings, they're, they're about
people interest, interested in other people's consciousness.
And that's what I'm interested in.
I'm, I'm, I'm no more and no less interested in it than than

(02:45):
trying to get a good answer to the to the question of what's in
your experience at some particular moment.
Russ, it's your work touches on such deep philosophical,
psychological, neuroscientific topics.
What I love to do is for the audience, for myself, is to try
and define concepts. If you had to think about your

(03:05):
definition of consciousness, youmentioned that that word
experience and mind. How do you differentiate or
define these concepts? Well, that's either an easy
question or a difficult question, depending on how you
ask. I I don't know what
consciousness is, so I don't tryto define it.
I don't know what the mind is, and so I don't try to define it.

(03:27):
I do think that there is things that are directly apprehended
and that's what I call inner experience.
What causes that? I presume other people presume,
I don't really care, but other people presume is consciousness
or mind or something. And and that's, I think that's

(03:49):
too hard a problem for me, probably too hard a problem,
maybe too hard a problem for anyone.
And So what I, what I try to do is to limit myself to what I
think I can say with some confidence, which is to say I'm
interested in what I call inner experience, what is directly
apprehended. And I think anybody who is

(04:09):
interested in consciousness or mind or whatever ought to take
my work seriously or, or do better than, than me.
I don't, I don't consider myselfthe pinnacle of, of this kind of
thing. I've, I've been working at it
pretty hard, doing it as best I can for quite a quite a while.
But I think there might be otherpeople who come along doing it
better. If I, if I knew of any, I would
be doing it their way. But, but I think, I think

(04:36):
directly apprehended inner experience ought to be something
like a building block or at least item of consideration for
someone who is interested in consciousness or mind.
But I don't, I I'm not being glib when I say I don't know
anything about consciousness or mind.
I just don't know anything aboutconsciousness or mind.
And I'm telling you that as straightforwardly as I can.

(04:58):
I, I think that's the perfect answer.
It's kind of like the more you understand the mind, the more
you learn about it, the more ignorant you become about the
fundamental essence of what thisdeeply fascinating experience
is. And that's how I feel the more I
explore this topic. And this this podcast is
obviously dedicated to the mind body problem.

(05:18):
And, and while I came to this podcast with a certain view, the
more I explore this with, with professors from different
backgrounds, different thought processes, it's very difficult
to give a definition. Do you find that that's been the
case when you first started out?I mean, in the 1970s, you put
beepers on people. Firstly, what was that like?
What, what were you hoping to uncover at the time?

(05:40):
And how have your views changed over time since you've done
something so strange and yet so incredible?
Well, it's true. I, I, I invented a beeper in
1973, started using it in 1973 and, and I at that time was a
first year graduate student. Basically, I figured out how to

(06:02):
build a beeper on the truck on the way to my, my graduate
training in clinical psychology.And when I got to the, when I
got there, the director of clinical training said, what do
you want to do, Russ? And I said, I want to randomly
sample people's thoughts. And he said he didn't think that
was possible, but I said, I think I can do it.
And, and, and he said, well, then go for it.

(06:24):
Much to his credit, Carl Saprellwas his name.
Very nice guy. But so, so basically, I, I was
brought up, I, I grew up in the behaviorist tradition and, and
came of age more or less at the same time as the behaviors
tradition was maybe beginning tocrumble a little bit.

(06:46):
There were cracks in the behavior.
The behaviors have been the by far the leaders for quite some
number of decades by that time. But there was dissatisfaction
because, because most people, many people, including me,
thought that behavior was important.
But it, it wasn't the only thingit would, what people were

(07:07):
thinking was, was important. And at that time in the 70s, I
was, well, let's put this way, what I, in my version of the
history, the, the behaviorist tradition cracked in the
direction of the cognitive tradition.
And so I was there at the beginning and contributed to

(07:28):
the, to those cracks, I would say.
And the cognitive tradition was primarily interested in thinking
and, and so my original work wasmostly about thinking.
So I asked people about their thoughts.
I gave people a beeper. What made me different from from
other folks is I gave people a beeper and a questionnaire so
that you, if you had a pad of paper, which was a bunch of

(07:50):
Likert scales, questionnaire scales, and you were supposed to
respond to those about your thoughts or thoughts about the
past or the president, about sexor about whatever.
And and then I analyzed those inthe way that people analyze
questionnaires. So I factor analyzed and
whatever. And very soon I discovered that

(08:13):
I didn't know what a, what it really meant when I was so some
subject was saying a three and a, some Likert scale about
whether this is about sex or not.
And I didn't know what that meant.
And so I started to ask people all, you know, you called this a
three wouldn't why did you do that?
And so we started having conversations about that and
they didn't know what why they put a three on there.

(08:34):
And I didn't know why they put athree on there.
And so I came fairly early in mycareer, very early in my career
to say science. Science can't be built on that.
A science that's going to last can't start on observations that
nobody knows what the fuck they're talking about.
And it just, it would so, so I started asking people tried to

(08:58):
try to tell me about something that they knew what they were
talking about. And very soon within a well with
very soon with like 5 years maybe I'm, I, I thought, well,
I, I so, so I abandoned questionnaires pretty early on.
By the, by the time the 70s had ended, I, I was pretty sure that

(09:19):
questionnaires about inner experience couldn't do it.
And, and I had decided that thinking was not necessarily the
most important thing. Because when I started asking
people about what was important to them, it turned what was
going on with them. When the beep beeped, which is
what my interest was, they were telling me about things that
were not necessarily cognitive. So the cognitive start became

(09:42):
one thing that they might be interested in, but they were
also interested in feelings and sensations or whatever.
And I was became interested in that it's.
So I had a beeper which I thought was a good idea.
I had a questionnaire which I thought was a bad idea.
I had interviews which I thoughtwere pretty good idea.
And then the, and the question became, well, what to do with
that? So I started to read the

(10:05):
literature that was available and it seemed sort of relevant
to this stuff, which would have been the phenomenology
literature and the cognitive science literature and the
memory literature and the eyewitness testimony literature
and Buddhism and Christianity and Jainism and people who were,
who were trying to take take consciousness or whatever

(10:27):
seriously. And out of that came the
descriptive experience sampling by about 1980.
And, and it's changed a little bit over the years since 1980.
Not very much, but I think I've gotten better at it over the
years. But the the thrust of it was
pretty much set for me and whichwhich was basically it was worth

(10:51):
it, I thought in 1980 and still think to try to get somebody to
tell me in a way that I found believable what was occurring
already in their consciousness, whatever that was in which I
prefer to call in her experience, whatever, whatever

(11:11):
they were directly apprehending just before they were disturbed
by the beep. Now I've forgotten.
I've forgotten what your original question was, but that
was what my what I was. Trying to answer your answer
perfectly lays out so many things I want to dissect and
discuss moving forward. One being, you mentioned
behaviorism as a huge fundamental shift in philosophy

(11:34):
and science. And at some point, while it grew
and peaked and then obviously sank at some point, you often
defend BF Skinner as being misunderstood.
You, you know exactly what he meant when he said certain
things within the field of behaviorism.
I, I know that you met him once and you had one encounter with
him. What was it like?
What was that experience like? And just for all of those who

(11:56):
are not familiar with BF Skinner's work, maybe perhaps
you could describe what his thesis was, How's yours, how
yours perhaps differs from it, and why people interpret BF
Skinner's work incorrectly. That, that is a very difficult
question. I only, I only ever met him once
in A and it was not an importantdeal for him.

(12:17):
I'm sure it was a, in a crowded,crowded room.
And I was one of several people that, that he met at that time.
I, I have spent some time with some people who were his
disciples and what he, what he, what he said was that the world
before him. So we're, he's we're now we're
talking about the 1950s, maybe forties, 40s or 50s before him,

(12:40):
the world was interested in mental events and habits and
things. And he said, and I think
entirely correctly. So I'm going to, I'm what I'm
going to say about about Skinnerright now.
I totally agree with it. What what he said was the the
world, the world of philosophy and psychology was built on what
he would call mentalisms, which was the people people gave

(13:06):
mental existing in the mind or conscious of something credit
for causing behavior. And so people would do things
like measure habit strength or memory strength or or whatever.
And, and, and Skinner thought that was a mistake because it
turns out when you try to measure habits or, or even even

(13:31):
things like hunger, that turns out to be a very different, very
difficult thing to do. But the world, the, the
philosophical and psychological world at that time was, was
trying to do that. And so it would say things like
I eat because I'm hungry. And hunger would be a, what
Skinner would call a mentalism. But then people would use that

(13:51):
as an explanation for why they eat while I'm eating because I
got this hunger stuff. And so people are trying to
measure hunger. Well, that turns out to be a
very difficult thing to do even in in a rat.
For example, when you try to measure hunger in a rat, you can
do that by the number of hours or days or whatever since you
have allowed him to eat. Or the amount of quinine that
you can put in his food before he'll stop eating it.

(14:13):
Or the amount of shock that he will endure to walk across a
grid to get to something to eat or, or a variety of other kinds
of things. And they don't correlate very
well with each other. And, and even if they did, well,
I guess I don't have to say thatbecause they don't.
So they so, so Skinner came to believe that you just shouldn't

(14:37):
credit mentalistic events. And I think he's 100% correct
about that. And so his solution was to say,
well, then we should just look at directly observable behaviors
and we should count, we should count them and we should observe
them. And then we can say, well, the
behaviors that occur in Skinner said that behaviors that occur

(14:58):
at at high frequencies are ones which have been followed by
things which are reinforcement. But, and this is where Skinner
and I sort of part ways. I think he was sort of partially
right about that. But, but, but he said, and his,
his version of the world was what he called radical
behaviorism. And by radical he meant
radically eliminating mentalisms.

(15:21):
So radical is the same way as you would say about a radical
surgery. Radical mastectomy is to remove
the whole thing to remove, to remove everything.
That's so that's he didn't mean radical as being like a
revolutionary. He meant radical by me as being
complete. So his his version of radical
behaviorism was to say, let's stick with it, with what we can

(15:44):
observe. That's so he is given credit.
Skinner is given credit as saying, well, what they didn't
think that mental life existed and that is not true.
That I think is not what Skinnerthought.
Skinner understood that that there were things would happen.
You took touched a hot stone. There was pain that that

(16:05):
occurred and that was you know, I didn't I don't see your pain
when you touch a hot stove. I don't see your pain.
I see you recoil from the stove or whatever, but the so Skinner,
Skinner understood that that that experience existed.
He just didn't think it was easyto measure.
And so I came along a generationafter Skinner and said, well,

(16:29):
Skinner was right about mentalisms.
You can't, can't do mentalisms. But he was overly zealous, I
would think, about eliminating inner experience because inner
experience, as I came to define it, I think is as directly as
apprehended as external behaviorin the sense that someone is

(16:50):
seeing it. So when I see you recoil from
the stove that I am experiencingyour recoil and I'm counting it.
And I can, you know, I can say, well, stove was a punishing
event for whatever, but it but it comes down to an observation,
which is basically a private event.
And what I call inner experienceis a private event.

(17:10):
But it's as is, is, I think as directly apprehended as your
stove recoil. I'm, I am directly apprehending
that. So my job, as I saw it in 1980
and still do basically is to say, well, Skinner was right.
We shouldn't try to credit things that we can't directly

(17:33):
apprehend. But he was overly zealous in
saying, well, we should then just eliminate all inner
experience from our from our science.
And so the question is, well, what do you do about that?
And my answer to that, there might very well be better
answers, but my answer is, well,we should accept that inner
experience is directly apprehended.
We should try to try to make that more public, more

(17:55):
accessible, even though it's fundamentally private.
So I'm a, I'm, I'm 100% in agreement with Skinner and, and,
and Skinner. Skinner was quite clear, but he
doesn't get, doesn't get enough credit for it.
He was. He was quite clear that inner
experience existed. But they're private.

(18:16):
Russ, you, you, you mentioned descriptive experience sampling
and that's one of the deep foundations of your work.
For for anyone not familiar withit, could you explain how DES or
deep experience sampling? Descriptive, sorry experience
sampling works from the beeper signal to interview process in a
way that's clear for most listeners who are either

(18:38):
familiar or not familiar with your work.
And for anyone who are familiar,anyone who is familiar, sorry,
would you perhaps take it further for them?
So I will let me grab a beeper. Oh, this is perfect.
I've actually been. I was hoping you'd do something
like this. So I have a beeper.

(18:58):
This is this is this is the beeper that I've used.
I've I've used, I can actually probably still have this is the
original beeper. This is the this is the beeper
from 1973 and this is the beeperfrom 19 #2000 maybe.
And I've been using this, this beeper, and this is, this is the

(19:19):
beeper that I have a patent on. This is a beeper that uses a
little computer that this has a little computer in inside it.
But basically it, it, this beeper is nothing more than
basically a, a, a random interval generator.
And you turn it on and it delivers a beep, but you
probably can't hear because zoomis zoom filters it out.

(19:41):
But let's see whether you can hear a beep.
Did you hear anything? No.
So zoom, zoom is very aggressiveabout that and, and effective
and, and, and so, yeah, I can't,I can't argue against against
zoom for that. But there's a beep and it goes
and it's a 700 Hertz signal which which sounds like beep and

(20:03):
it go and, and, and the the moment that I am interested in
is the moment that's right before that beep so.
If I were to draw time going like this, here's time going,
something beeps and the thing continues to beep until you stop

(20:25):
the beep. So you push the button on the
top of the beeper to stop the beep and time continues to mark
March along like that. So this is time going in this
direction. The moment that I'm interested
in is this one right there. One, I sometimes say 1
microsecond just before the beepoccurs.
It's not really a microsecond. Sometimes I say it's a

(20:45):
millisecond. It's not really a millisecond
either. Sometimes I say it's the last
undisturbed moment. It's not really undisturbed, but
but that's the this is the moment that I'm interested in.
I want us to focus in on what was happening just before the
beep interrupted your environment.
So I sent, I give you a beeper, send you out into the natural

(21:06):
environment in your natural environment doing whatever it is
that you would normally do because that is what I think is
interesting. I'm not particularly interested
in what you do in a laboratory when I'm setting you up to do
artificial stuff, but I send youinto your natural environment.
The thing beeps. You write down in a notebook.
It's a little 3 by 5 regular little notebook.

(21:26):
You jot down some notes about that.
You can put them in your phone. If if if you if you prefer.
I think the notes are better, but different people do a
different way. I don't really care.
And, and then we'll get so you so you get a half a dozen of
those samples, you get a half a half a dozen notes in your
notebook. And then we get together and
talk about that. And, and we do that in what I

(21:49):
call an expositional interview. And the expositional interview
is basically I say to you, well,what was going on Tevin in, in
the first beep? What was, what was it?
What did you directly apprehend at the first beep?
And then we have a conversation about that in which I, if that's
the only question that I'm interested in, but I'll ask
follow up questions to try to get it, try to get you to tell

(22:12):
me what was in your, in your inner experience.
And you're probably not going tobe very good at it.
And so you tell me about a lot of stuff that's not at the
moment of the beep and that's not in, in your experience.
So you'll tell me what was happening before the beep and
what was happening after the beep.
I was startled by the beep. Well, that's obviously after the
moment that I'm interested in. And you'll tell me about things
that you always do rather than things that were happening right

(22:34):
then and things that you, that you want me to hear instead of
what was actually going on. And you'll tell me about all
kinds of stuff that's not directly apprehended.
And I will point that out to you.
And I, and I would say, tab, you're not telling me about what
I'm what, what I'm asking about.I'm, I'm really interested in
what was actually going on with you.

(22:55):
And my art is to, is to be confrontational like that.
So I, I will be very confrontational, but I say, you
know, that's not, not experiencethat, but the art of it is to be
confrontational and have you recognize that I'm on your side
in, in this regard. I'm not being critical of you
because I will tell you nobody is any good at it on the first

(23:16):
day. And I'm not very good at asking
questions about your experience on the first day either because
I've never, I don't know what your experience is going to be
like. So we have to learn together how
to how to do this, which I call the iterative process that we're
going to, we're going to get better at it as as we go.
Yeah, Russ, those and so sorry Icut you off there.

(23:38):
This was back in the 1970s. My one of the questions I
thought about many years ago when I when I saw this work come
out was as a as a young, let's say up and Comer.
What, what, what actually made you think that this would work?
Because obviously when people grew up in certain philosophical
views, particularly someone who's a fan of BF Skinner, you

(23:58):
have a certain behaviour as outlook on life.
At what point did you think thatthese idiosyncratic detailed
descriptions, rather than these broader generalizations would
give us these fine grained details about someone's inner
experience? I don't know the answer to that.

(24:19):
I think I'll, I'll tell you somestories and you can, and you can
speculate as well as I can aboutthat.
I was, I was trained as an engineer.
I have an engineering, a master's degree in engineering.
And so I have AI have a an appreciation for knowing,

(24:40):
knowing what I'm doing. That's what engineers are trying
to do. You know, they're trying to
build a bridge that actually doesn't fall into the lake.
And so, so and, and, and I was an aeronautical engineer.
So you want to, you want to build airplanes that actually do
fly. So you, you take seriously what
you know and what you don't knowand how much you know so that
you can sleep because you know people are going to be on your
airplane and, and you want to beable to sleep with the knowledge

(25:04):
that they're going to be able totake off and land with an
incident. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in the, I
exist clearly in the real world.And I, I after, after I worked
as an engineer for a while, I decided I wanted to really be a

(25:25):
trumpet player, a classical trumpet player.
And so that was Vietnam time. And I was, I was working as, as
an aeronautical engineer for a company that built nuclear
weapons that was keeping me out of the Army basically.
But if I wanted to be a trumpet player, then I, I didn't have
much choice in the, in the matter except to join the Army.
So I joined the Army and audition for the United States

(25:49):
Army Band, which is the official, what they call the
Special band of the in in the United States Army.
And it's stationed in Fort Myer,VA, which is adjacent to
Arlington Cemetery, which is right across the Potomac River
from Washington, DC. So basically I spent three years
in the environs of Washington and my job, much of it became

(26:11):
playing Taps in Arlington Cemetery for people who were
killed in Vietnam. And that job involved sitting in
my car and the cemetery waiting for a funeral to arrive.
So I drive to where the funeral was going to be, and then I'd
wait and the funeral would arrive and I would get out of
out of my car and play taps and get back in my car and drive to
the next place and wait there. So I spent a lot of time waiting

(26:34):
in my car and I would went to the Arlington County Library and
and put a arm load of books in my car to give me something to
do while I waited. And the books were everything
that a engineer doesn't get a chance to read, which would have
been history and literature and philosophy and psychology and
sociology and mathematician peerpeer math and whatever.

(26:56):
And eventually I discovered thatI had read the entire psychology
collection. So I had read all the original
sources in psychology as curatedby the Arlington County Library
and, and what I my reading. So I'm still trying to answer
your question, I think. And, but the, but what I found

(27:16):
was that the, the books in psychology started out by
saying, I'm going to tell you something really interesting
about people. And then I'd read the book and
I'd get to the end and I'd say, well, I didn't learn anything
that was really interesting about people.
I learned some theory about it that was not that was not good
enough for me. So I developed in that I
developed an appreciation for really wanting to know about

(27:40):
individual people. I wanted to I wanted some access
to to something that I thought was real.
That's my engineering band, I suppose.
And my musical band, I suppose is I have AI have an
appreciation for the way things sound and look and whatever.
And, and then I went back to, I went back to Sandy where I

(28:02):
worked for a while and worked asa computer person in there as a
aeronautical engineer department.
And one of my jobs there was to maintain the computers, which at
at that time were big, big things.
This is the 70s. And, and they, they gave me a, a
version of BASIC. I don't know whether you know
anything about computers, but BASIC was those sort of the

(28:25):
first language for operating systems of, of computers.
And they gave me this. And the problem, the problem was
that the engineers were using these computers to turn on
switches and make readings and whatever.
And when something got their particular temperature, then
they were going to flip this switch.
And when something else happened, they're going to flip
that other switch. And the computers wouldn't keep

(28:46):
up because BASIC was slow. And so they said to me basically
make BASIC run faster. And they gave me a, they gave me
the source code of, of digital equipment basic and said, and
said, this is not fast enough. And So what, what do you do
about that? And, and I, what, what I did

(29:09):
about that was I hooked up an external clock to the computer
and I, and I put the clock in these guys laboratories and I
said, run your experiments. Do whatever it is that you do in
this clock. Every now and then it's going to
emit a signal. And when it emits a signal, it's
going to keep track of what instruction your computer is
operating and run that for a while.
And then, and then, and you know, it's going to store it on,

(29:32):
on a floppy disk at that time and, and bring that floppy disk
back to me. And then I'll try to figure out
what's going on. And well, it turned out that was
very successful because it pointed out where the bottleneck
was in digital equipment BASIC. And I could speed up BASIC by a
factor of 10 by by improving theway, the way that little, it was

(29:53):
a just a little section of code.It was only like, you know, 100
lines worth of worth of code. But but every it, it went that
it went to that little section all the time.
And so I became a a proponent ofrandom sampling, which, you
know, I, I was an engineer, I knew about random sampling.
I knew, I knew about all that stuff.

(30:14):
But but this, but, but it was obvious to me that this was a,
this was a very complicated thing that this computer was
doing. There was no way that I was
going to be able to figure it out.
But random sampling was the key to that.
So I'm sorry, continue. You mix, you mix all that, you
mix all that stuff together and that that's and, and, and the

(30:37):
readings and, and philosophy andpsychology and cognitive
psychology and behaviors and whatever.
And out of that comes descriptive experience sampling.
The rest with with DES or descriptive experience sampling.
Some might argue, let's say thatif you take or if you ask people

(31:01):
about their thoughts, isn't it too subjective?
Let's say you're trying to critically analyze someone's
thoughts. Whether it's, whether it's
random, whether it's not. How objective is this, or is it
too subjective? How do you generally respond?
Well, if you ask somebody about their thoughts, then I would, I

(31:22):
would be absolutely as critical as you would as you might be
about that because that's a mentalistic question you're
asking. You're asking, you're asking
about, you're presuming that there are thoughts that are
going on and ask somebody to tell you about them and people
being nice guys and cooperative and whatever they will tell you,
they will tell you about that. And the answer that they give
you is mostly baloney because you've asked about a mentalism

(31:45):
and they've given you a mentalistic explanation, which
makes sense to them, but it probably doesn't have anything
to do with anything really. And I'm just parroting Skinner
there, assenting to what what Skinner had to say.
So that's that, that's not the that's not a question that that
is worthy of being asked the question.

(32:05):
It's a different question to askwhat was going on, what, if
anything was going on in your experience at some particular
moment that I want to. I want to know what you are
directly apprehending. I don't want to know about your
thoughts. I don't know about thoughts.
You don't know about thoughts. Nobody knows about thoughts.
There are a lot of people who write a lot of crap about
thoughts, but nobody knows what they're really talking about.

(32:26):
I don't think they have some theories about them, which a lot
of people confuse as being aboutthings that were actually
happening in some mind somewhere, which maybe they are.
I don't know anything about it. I don't think they do either.
But that's I that they criticized me for the questions
that they ask, which is not the questions that I ask.

(32:46):
The question that I ask is the same question over and over
again. What do you directly apprehend
as being ongoing before the Footlights of your
consciousness, whatever that means, but directly apprehended,
that's a synonym for before the Footlights of your consciousness
for me at a particular moment. And that is not tell me about
your thoughts, that is about whatever it is that you happen

(33:10):
to be apprehending. If that's a thought, well then
tell me about a thought. If it's a feeling, tell me about
a feeling. If it's a sensation, tell me
about that. Whatever it is that is directly
apprehended, then tell me. So Russ, it's the 1970s.
You start, you create these beepers, such a ground breaking
thought experiments and then youapply this practically.

(33:34):
What have been the most surprising or counterintuitive
findings from DES SO? You broke up a little bit.
What was the end of that sentence?
What has been surprising about? I was saying that it's the
1970s. You make this beeper, you start
to experiment to people, and DESreveals certain things about
experience. What have been the most

(33:56):
surprising or counterintuitive findings of your descriptive
experience openly? OK, so I think the answer to
that is almost everything. And, and by almost everything, I
mean I, I mean that with not a hint of irony.
The when I started out, I was interested in thoughts.

(34:19):
I would have asked the question,you know what?
Tell me about your thoughts. And when people, when people
started telling me about they, they were telling me about stuff
that weren't, that weren't thoughts.
So that was surprising. And, and whenever and, and I
would, I would say, and this is an absolutely true, not ironic

(34:39):
statement. Whenever I feel like I know what
I'm talking about, I'm generallydemonstrated to be wrong by the
next guy that I sample with. And, and, and, and I've had,
I've had to cultivate that over the, over the years that, that
the, when, when a feeling arisesin me, like I know what I'm

(35:00):
talking about. I know I'm in deep trouble
because I'm not going to hear anything.
I'm not going to hear what you are going to tell me about your
inner experience anymore. I'm going to hear what confirms
my, my theory. So I, I would say a big part of
my art, if you want to call it that, my big part of my art is

(35:21):
recognizing when that feeling ofI know what I'm talking about
arises and then working against that.
I'd say that's a very big part about what I do.
But but almost almost everythingis surprising.
I some some surprises are biggerthan others, but well.

(35:45):
One one of the things was you found that inner experience, for
example, occurs less often than many people assume.
Now what does that actually tellus about how the human mind
actually works? So that's not true.
What you just what you just saidis not a characteristic
characterization of my work because what I have found what

(36:06):
what I took you to say was that inner experience occurs less
frequently than people think. That's not I.
Meant in a speech. That that I would agree with.
No, that, that that. But.
In a speech. That's what I thought you meant,
but what I want to ask, I want to answer your first question
too, because it's actually an interesting question, probably
more interesting than the inner speech question, but but inner

(36:26):
experience does occur. Most people most of the time
have something going on and, andwhat that and what's going on is
their own creation. It is not, it is not just simply
what's falling on their retina or falling on their stirrups and
anvil or whatever. Whatever is, whatever their

(36:47):
apparatus is, they're, they havecreated something and, and it is
there in front of the Footlightsof and that's true for most
people, most of the time. There are some exceptions about
that. There are some people who have
basically nothing going on in their inner experience and
they're totally successful people, but they're the
exception rather than the rule. Most people have something going

(37:10):
on and that that is a, a fundamentally interesting thing.
And, and, and the thing that they have going on is, is their
own creation. That's, that's also
fundamentally important for me. And by their own creation, I
don't, I don't mean that they, they sit down and say, well, I
think I'll create something and then I'm going to review it.

(37:32):
What I mean is they're, they're,they are choosing what is of
interest to them out of the welter of things that are, that
are possibly out there. They're, they're paying
attention to this and not to andnot to that other thing, which
is why I call it inner experience.

(37:54):
So but your question was about the people don't have a lot of
inner speech. The remarkable thing about that
is that everybody thinks they dohave inner speech.
And the question is, well, why is it that everybody thinks they
do have inner speech? And one possible answer to that
would be, well, because everybody does have inner
speech, but that turns out not to be true.
It turns out that my research I think pretty robustly shows, but

(38:19):
some people, a few people do have inner speech a lot and most
and a lot of people have inner speech occasionally and some
people have inner speech almost never heard.
And so if you take all of the samples that I have collected in
my non random 500 or a thousandish people that I've
sampled, sampled with maybe 1/4 of the samples include inner

(38:40):
speech. And, and, and that is because,
well, so if your question is why, why do people think that
they have inner speech a lot? I think there's two reasons for
their, there are many reasons, but two that I will tell you,
maybe I'll tell you more. 11 is when you pose the question to

(39:02):
yourself, what I call the armchair introspection question.
What's going on in my experiencenow that generally starts as a
verbal question. What's going on?
In my experience now UN quote which puts you into a verbal
whatever, it puts you into the verbal realm.

(39:24):
So almost like a linguistic experience sort of changes the
way or the part of the brain you're kind of using.
That I that I don't know too much about, but but but yes,
what it does, it awakens whatever part of the brain is
required to do to do verbal stuff.
It it, it, it does that. I don't know what, what that
part of the brain is, but it, itputs you into a verbal mode and

(39:47):
then you ask, well, what what's going on in my inner experience?
And what you find is you're in averbal mode.
So more or less whenever you askthat question, you're in a
verbal mode. But that's the refrigerator
light phenomenon. You're only looking inside the
refrigerator when the doors openand you're only looking inside
the inside your mind, whatever that is when you, it occurs to

(40:08):
you to look inside your mind. So that's why.
That's why the randomness of thebeeper is an important deal.
I don't want you to be looking inside your mind when you think
about looking inside your mind. I want you to be looking inside
your mind at times that are chosen by something other than
your mind, like the beeper. Yeah, I think it's it's it's one

(40:31):
of those things where I look back at a philosophy and
science, when we look at humans and how I would say we use
heuristic adaptations. We have very limited processing
powers. And when we experience reality,
we often find these shortcuts or, or ways to interact with
reality in a way that's effective.

(40:52):
And, and in a sense to assume that we all have this narrative
or this inner monologue that's always ongoing, it's kind of
easier because everyone else sort of does it.
It's one of these consensus reality things when when you
figure this out or when you sortof notice that people lack this
inner speech, how much of A shock was that to you?

(41:13):
Or did you already have this preconceived idea that this is
something that would happen? Well, if you're talking about my
personal history, I would say asbest I can reflect on it 50
years later, I expected to find a lot of inner speech.

(41:34):
I, I thought like everybody elsedid, The thinking was in words
and I was interested in thinkingand therefore I thought I was
going to find words. But what I, what I, what I found
for my satisfaction was there wasn't thinking that was
actually going on. And so that was I guess the
most, the first surprise. It wasn't just the words weren't
there was that thinking in general, wasn't there?

(41:56):
I'm paying attention to the colors or the feelings or, or
something else. So the so by the time, by the
time I was actually focused on words, which I never really
have, my work has never actuallybeen focused particularly on
words. I've always been focused on
whatever it is that's a before the Footlights of your
consciousness. I'm, I'm known, I guess,

(42:20):
because, because the popular culture thinks that words are
super important. And I've and I've said fairly
consistently over a lot of yearsthat that's not the case.
And so I get credit for for being a word inner speech guy,
but it's not really true. Yeah, it's it's, it's almost
like the words do require so many more conscious efforts post

(42:44):
production almost. It's kind of like you want to
catch something in the spot that's a lot further in.
Well, the, the, so the kinds of things that are surprising if
you're interested in words, whatI what I would say is that if,
if, if you start to look carefully at words, these are

(43:05):
the, this is this is the phenomenon that you're going to
find, you're going to find that much most of the time words
occur in complete sentences. There's a theory, there are
theorists out there about inner speech that following Bygotsky
who, who's thought that all inner speech was going to be
condensed and you didn't really need to have the whole subject
and the predicate because you knew what you were talking

(43:27):
about. So you didn't really need the
subject. So I guess he thought that inner
speech was going to be predicated just just the
predicate without the subject. And that turns out not to be
true for most people. For some people it is.
But, but for most people they're, they're, it's a
complete sentence. And it turns out, So if you, if

(43:49):
you, if you really are going to be interested in what, what
passes for inner speech, this, these are the kinds of things
that you have to take into consideration.
Is it a complete sense or not? It could be one way or the
other. Is it really the experience of
speaking or the experience of hearing, which turns out to be
very different things, just as different as when you speak into
a tape recorder and when you hear your voice playback.

(44:11):
Those are two very different things.
Experientially, you wouldn't there, there's no way that you
would be in a position to say, well, am I saying that or am I
hearing that coming back to me? Then that's, those are, those
are very different and they're very different in, in inner
experience as well. Philosophical, philosophical
types often refer to inner speech as a auditory phenomenon,

(44:32):
as if it was really inner hearing, which most of the time
it's not. Most of the time it's more like
speaking than it is like hearing.
I think you can always argue with what I think about it, But
but, and, and, and I wouldn't, Iwould also, I want, I want to
give you the opinion. I want to give you a
characterization of the richnessof this phenomenon.

(44:52):
Sometimes there are words missing and they can be the most
important words. So you can have, you can speak
a, a complete sentence without one particular word in it or
several different words in it, or you can speak without having
any words. You can have the experience of
speaking with no words at all. I'm, I'm speaking them.
Sometimes they'll be a rhythm toit.
Sometimes they'll just I experienced myself a speaking,

(45:14):
but I don't experience the wordsthat I'm speaking.
Sometimes you will people will experience the words as having a
physical location. Sometimes it's in their head,
sometimes it's in the back of their head.
The expression, the I was thinking it in the back of my
mind. For some people, it is
absolutely meant literally. For other people, it's entirely

(45:34):
metaphorical because the metaphor, the metaphor has come
to be the predominant way that that's understood.
I'm not really interested in that, but I'm I'm thinking about
it in the back of my mind. For some people, it's actually
there. I've written about one woman who
who had sentences that divided up.
Some were the first couple of words in the sentence would be
in the back of the head and the next word would be in the front

(45:56):
of the head and the next word would be in the back of the head
and back and forth like that. Sometimes you can speak in your
own voice, and sometimes you canspeak in Barbra Streisand's
voice or. I think, I think that's one of
the most fascinating things about studying the human
experience. I often say that to not consider

(46:18):
a typical phenomenon or or pathological states of mind, you
often make a very misinformed opinion on what reality is for
human beings. So all the human experience and
my work in psychiatry, when I used to work in psychiatry, I
often found that when you study the atypical mind, you have so
much more access to various states of mind.

(46:42):
And I know for you, for example,studying patients like the ones
you just mentioned or someone with schizophrenia, maybe a
borderline personality when you look at these patients.
Because for me, it makes a lot of sense that someone would not
have an inner speech when in a dialogue because I've interacted

(47:02):
with patients who have said thatto me.
Maybe they weren't as accurate as I hoped.
But when that first happened to you, what, what did that feel
like? Was it a was it a very strange
moment to have this random statistic that, OK, most people
we expect to talk to themselves or experience this feeling of
having it in his speech just don't have it?

(47:24):
Was it very shocking to you or was it just a normal walk in the
park type of thing? So, so I want to push back on
the premise of your question 1stand that is the, all of those
things that that I listed that that's normal experience.
This is not, this is not impatient.
This is, this is people that you're going to walk, that

(47:45):
you're going to run across when you walk from here to the
grocery store, you're going to, you're going to run across
people who have those characteristics that I now,
people who have, who have disturbed inner experience have
a lot of other kinds of characteristics as well.
And, and, and, and they're all fascinating.

(48:06):
They're but for me personally, they're not that much more
fascinating than the everyday non pathological they're.
So I, I think inner experience is of vital importance in
understanding psychopathology. I don't think psychological

(48:28):
science, psychiat, psychiatry understands inner experience
very well. And if they did, they'd have a
better idea about psychopathology, I think.
And it might be very, very different from what it is that,
that, that we do now, you know, we divide people up into this is
the depressed camp and this is the anxiety camp, and this is
the bulimia and the roast camp or whatever we're going to.

(48:48):
We, we, we get into the diagnostic categories based on
external, mostly externally observable thing.
My guess is that there might be more productive if we had a
real, a real science of inner experience, which we don't from
my point of view. But if we did that, would we
divide people up into different categories or we would probably

(49:10):
even abandoned categories all together and.
It's kind of disappointing because we know that we use
certain classification systems like the DSM, the ICD, We go
through all these processes and yet there's so much data like
the work you've done and many others with that, that sort of

(49:31):
show that human experience is sodiverse with so much variation
and difference that to actually box certain experiences is such
a flaw and and yet we always do it.
Does that still surprise you? It doesn't surprise me.
It disappoints me greatly, but it doesn't surprise me.
And it is what if? If you want to know what really

(49:54):
surprised me about the whole, the whole thing is that there
aren't, there aren't just a whole lot of people doing what
it is that I do or better. When I, I wrote my first book,
which was in 1990, my first bookabout about inner experience,
which is in 1990, I thought I just put myself out of a job.
I thought, you know, I'd, I'd told people what it is that,
that you could have a beeper andyou could pay attention inner,

(50:14):
inner experience and everybody was going to do that and nobody
was going to care about what I thought anymore, which just
turned out to be absolutely not true.
Nobody has really paid much attention to any of them and any
of that stuff for the largely, largely speaking.
And and that is fundamentally surprising to me.

(50:35):
I just, I, it amazes me the drug, a drug company, for
example, making psychotropic medications for anxiety,
depression or whatever. I would have thought those guys
would be blind up outside my door saying I, you know, I'm
going to make Prozac here and I want to know what happens to
Prozac. You should can you can you can,

(50:55):
you talked to some people who were before they took Prozac and
after they took Prozac and tell me what happened in their inner
experience. I just, it amazes me that I
don't get those requests. I but I don't and, and, and so
that the explanation of why thatis either either there's only

(51:17):
two possibilities. 1 is that Hurlburt's crazy, which is fine.
Take take that as a as a possibility that he's just wrong
about most everything. I think that's possible.
I don't think that's true, but I'm the I have the care capable
of delusion as much as anybody else does.
So but but that's possible. Or that there are forces in the,

(51:38):
in the social world or the economic world or the whatever
other world that says, well, youjust can't do what it is just
that Earl Bird says they've got to do.
And then, Russ, have you noticedthat certain DES or inner speech
monologues exist more in others and less in other subtypes?

(52:00):
So mostly I don't know the answer to that question.
The the one of the and it and itexposes the the weakness of the
work that I have done. So I have not done anywhere near
enough cross cultural stuff. I think it would be totally
interesting to see whether a person who speaks Chinese and a

(52:22):
person who speaks English has the same same processes.
A person who has not been exposed to the Western
civilization in the jungles of wherever what, what, what their
inner experience would like. I I think that would be totally
interesting. Absolutely totally interesting.
If I had another life to live, I'd probably start start that
way, but it's difficult. In my defense, it's difficult

(52:45):
because the DES is not a trivially easy thing to do.
You got to be paying attention pretty carefully to what people
say and how they say it and whatthey don't say.
And you. So you got to know the culture
and you got to know the languageand you got to, you got to be
willing to hear and willing and able to hear what people are
saying and not and not saying. And so it to the thought of

(53:09):
doing DES through translation isa little bit is a little bit
scary to me and. The, the reason why I ask that
question, Ross, is I'm not sure if you're familiar with this,
but I'm, I'm a huge fan of, of magic illusions, tricks of the
mind. And, and something I always
found fascinating was, well, visual illusions.

(53:31):
For example, when you take a psychiatric patient with
schizophrenia. And I'm not, I'm not trying to
say that these experience have to be psychiatric or mental
illness, but the human experience is so diverse, as we
just discussed that it's quite cool that certain patients who
have psychosis, let's say, and, and are currently acutely

(53:52):
psychotic, they don't fall for certain visual illusions, which
is quite interesting. So if you take the checkerboard
illusion and you put put a psychiatric patient there, they,
they don't see the difference inShades of Grey that the average
human would see. And so if you take that in a
philosophical way, you can almost say that they have a

(54:12):
better understanding of the veridical nature of reality than
we do. So it's a fascinating question
in the sense that not only does cultural diversity or
neurodiversity play a role in how we perceive reality, but
reality in itself is very much subjective.

(54:34):
And, and whenever someone thinksthey're seeing a vertical truth,
that's still always up for debate because no one
technically does. Is that something you ever think
about or? Absolutely, absolutely.
So I, I agree with almost every everything that you said, except
possibly that people who are seriously disturbed see things
more accurately. I'm, I don't, I don't think, I

(54:56):
think that might be true in a, in a pretty narrow, narrow
sense. So the, the, the way I
conceptualize that is I think that most people, most, most
perception, let's put it this way.
If you, if you ask a perceptual psychologist, they would say,
since the Gestalt psychologist of the 1910s or whatever and

(55:18):
onwards would say that people are people have a figure in the
ground. That the figure ground
phenomenon is the fundamental perceptual deal.
And the figure is a sort of a coherent thing that's usually in
the center of the visual field if we're talking about vision.
And what's in the ground is around that usually, and it's
not usually seen as distinct. And if there's a border between

(55:38):
the visual visual figure in the ground, the border belongs to
the figure and doesn't belong tothe ground.
And whatever all that stuff is has been known since that time,
you know, and, and I have written about people who have,
who do not have a figure ground phenomenon.

(55:58):
And they're, they're pretty seriously disturbed.
And, and, and I think that I think that's a fundamental
observation. And, and, and what, what that
allows them to do is to see like10 or 10 or 20 different things
going on at the same time. Because the bigger ground

(56:19):
phenomenon is basically to take the whole welter of perception,
make one thing, figure out what that one thing is and put
everything else back into the background.
That and I and I think that sortof healthy everyday people do
that kind of thing a lot. And so the so you pay attention

(56:39):
to my voice and then you pay attention to the book that's on
like over my shoulder. And then you pay attention to
the itch that's on the neck thatyou just scratched.
And then you pay attention to that and your experience goes
all over the place. And each time you're making
something in the figure and everything else is going to the
ground. So when you pay attention to
your itch, you destroy Hurlburt.And when you when you're paying
attention to Hurlburt and the itch doesn't matter.

(57:00):
And then when the itch 10s comesback and then Hurlburt, then you
destroy Hurlburt. And so all this time is I'm
creating this and destroying that.
That's normal human perception. But in abnormality, I think that
break or that breaks down or doesn't happen.
And so I've sampled with a with some schizophrenic individuals.
My first book is actually about schizophrenia in a way.

(57:21):
It's about more about Sam more more about whether you should do
sampling. But it involves some
schizophrenia people and the their their visual environment
is not the way I just described it.
So their, their visual environment bends around to some
degree or they splatter. There's like their thing, their

(57:46):
visual experiences splattered and things splattered on it.
So, so let me, let me merge backaway from this.
So most, most people, including most philosophers, I think,
think, think about the visual experiences and at least inner
experience and maybe external experience as well as seeing an
image. I think that's, I think that's

(58:08):
bad, bad way to think about the world because I don't, because
it, it's a Cartesian view and itsays that the, the, the mind,
whatever that is, creates an image and then some other part
of the mind creates a viewer of that image.
And then you get these two things going on there.
And I think that's probably baloney.
I don't really know. But, but I, but I think most
people don't see an image and intheir, when they, when they see

(58:32):
something in, in their inner world that is not out there in
the real world, they're not seeing an image of it.
They're just seeing it. So if you see a castle in Spain,
it's not like you're seeing an image of a castle in Spain.
You're seeing a castle in Spain,and the castle in Spain doesn't
happen to be there. So I think you should talk about
as as innerly seeing rather thanseeing an image.

(58:57):
But if you talk to a schizophrenic individual, it
makes sense to say that they, they see an image because they
don't see an, a castle in Spain.They see an image of a castle in
Spain which has borders to it, and they can see the image curl
around and they can see the image float away.
And when I was talking about thespattering, which is what
brought me to tell you this story, they would say that they,

(59:19):
they, they see black crap that'son the image.
And the image might be the castle in Spain, but the black
crap would be some on the castleand some on the trees that are
on the castle and some dripping off the side of the image.
And whatever it's it, they see an image.
And when they see you, they don't see you.
They don't have a perception of seeing you.

(59:39):
They have a perception of seeingan image of you and the and, and
you in the image, instead of having a tan shirt, they it
might have a red shirt in their image of you because they are in
fact seeing an image of you. And that image might be like
ripped in half. And when they RIP it in half, it
might RIP right down the middle of your, your, your face or, or

(01:00:00):
whatever, which you wouldn't do if you were seeing me, but you
could do if you were seeing an image of me.
So I don't care. I don't mostly I don't care
about words, what I care about. And so I don't care about the
word image. But what I, what I want people
to do is to recognize that most normalish people don't see

(01:00:23):
images. They innerly see things.
I I appreciate the the clarification about that because
it reminds me of something that Thomas Metziger once told me
about when he used to say that the self is an illusion.
When he looks back at it, you often regrets it.
And he doesn't. He, he, he believes he's wrong
in certain ways, but also doesn't like the psychological

(01:00:46):
impact it's had on certain people because many philosophers
and thinkers started to believe that certain abnormal mental
phenomena that justified illusory selves almost explained
normal selves. If, if, if I'm explaining that
correctly. But he, he sort of didn't like

(01:01:06):
that once he was at a lecture and he, he noticed a lot of
people from a psych ward had entered his lecture just to
appreciate the fact that he would justify how many of us
don't have a self. But it's almost like they didn't
understand the nuance of what hewas trying to say about certain
human experiences. And it's easy for anyone to sort

(01:01:27):
of fit into whatever we're talking about South the way the
same way you're talking about animage versus the actual
experience of it. Two people might not necessarily
have that same first person subjective experience, but it
might sound or seem similar whenwe describe it.

(01:01:48):
So that's an interesting story and I got a couple of reactions
to that 11 is it it is the case that whenever I describe inner
phenomenon to somebody that tookthe modal response to that is
oh, oh, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
I know for a fact they don't know what the fuck I'm talking
about. They're they couldn't possibly,
but they but people believe thatthey do.

(01:02:11):
So I I'm on Mexico side, Mexicanside about that.
I don't that well, the end. That's one thing.
Another thing is the self is a mentalism and I think it's risky

(01:02:32):
to delve into the mentalism world.
So I don't know anything about selves.
I doubt that. If, if you ask me, if I had to
bet, you know, like, yeah, I'm at the gate, I'm at the, I'm at
the pearly gates and, and, and the question is you can come in.
If you give me the correct answer, whether there is a self
or not, then if you get the wrong answer, then you're going
to spend the rest of your life in nether regions.

(01:02:52):
If I I would say there probably is not a self, but I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that question.
I would have preferred to Saint Peter asked me if I knew the
answer to that question and I confidently say no, then I could
probably get in, but I don't. I don't know the answer.
But the problem, the problem that he's telling you about is
that if you define the self, then you get people who are into

(01:03:15):
it some kind of an argument about whether the self exists.
And everybody's got a different definition of what the self is.
If you try to define the self, you're in real trouble.
I spent quite a number of years early, very early on in my
career wrestling with this issue, trying to could it, could
I, you know, people wanted to tell me about themselves.
And was that really true for most people, what that meant?

(01:03:37):
And I think most people, most, most people have stories about
themselves, but they very rarelyoccur in inner experience.
And so my work is to say, you know, I, I, I would prefer to
limit myself to talking about things that I know what I'm
talking about. And the self is not one of them.
And the, the reason why that came up, that came to my mind as

(01:04:00):
well was everything about DES orthe way everything you're
talking about reminds me of a certain paper that Thomas wrote
about mind wandering. And he was sitting with two
people, 2 professors discussing the fact that every time you
talk to them and you ask them exactly what are you thinking

(01:04:20):
about right now, Almost always people are incorrect.
People are incorrect usually when they when they're directly
asked about that question, whichis fascinating because that is
the main premise of this currenttalk is is this current
subjective encounter with that moment.
But when people try to recollectwhat they were talking about,

(01:04:43):
more often than not, they're wrong.
So. So I guess my question would be
how is DS different and almost more reliable?
So I agree with the premise of this question that people, that
people are mostly mistaken when they think about their own inner
experience. So doubling back to one of your
earlier questions, what is surprising about that?

(01:05:06):
What is surprising to me about the work that I've done?
That's one of them. The people, the people for the
most part don't know about theirinner experience.
I wouldn't have expected that, Idon't think 50 years ago now.
I think that's maybe the fundamental thing that I have
established to my satisfaction is the people, people are
largely mistaken about their owninner experience.
And so the, the question of why is the question of armchair

(01:05:30):
introspection? So the, the problem, the problem
with armchair introspection is that it's, it's an impossible
task because armchair introspection at its heart is
something like, I'm going to askmyself the question, what's
going on in my inner experience right now.
But I'm going to rule out the fact that I'm asking myself the
question, what's going on in inner experience right now,
because that doesn't count. I'm looking for something beyond

(01:05:52):
that. But the problem is that when
you're asking yourself that question, there isn't anything
beyond it. And so if you're really sort of
honest about that, the answer toyour question is either nothing
is in my experience or I'm asking myself the question, but
I don't know anything at all about what's what.
My normal everyday in your experience is when I'm not

(01:06:13):
asking myself that question. So I'm very critical of armchair
introspection, including by philosophers who who make their
career and I'm armchair introspection.
I don't think, I don't, I don't think I, I think it's, I think
it's very difficult to do, let'sput it that way.
I, I do think that it's possible.
So I think I think the adept meditators are armchair

(01:06:35):
introspectors who have learned how to do it after 10,000 hours
of trying and and and. And, and do you think, do you
think they successfully cracked that code?
Do you think that they reach a point where they're really good?
But but their but their inner experience is way different from
the from everybody else's. But I but I didn't get to the

(01:06:57):
answer to the to the question iswhy?
The second part of your questionis why is DES better?
And the answer is there's several, several reasons.
One is it uses a beep and peoplesay, oh, that's the magic beep.
Rover thinks he's got a magic beeper, which he doesn't.
But what it what the beep has characteristics which are

(01:07:18):
entirely useful. One is it has a fast rise time.
The beep goes from nothing to something in, you know, within
within a few milliseconds. Couple couple 7 hundredths of a
second few few milliseconds, it goes from something to nothing.

(01:07:39):
And so, so it, so it, it, it clearly defines the time.
Now, when you hear that, when you hear the beep, there's a lot
of processing that goes on. So that I'm, I'm not saying that
you hear the beep exactly the way the beep is.
I don't think that's true. Your brain, whatever has to
process that beep, but somewherewithin probably on the order of

(01:08:00):
1/4 of a second or something like that, we have gone from
nothing to something. And you, you said yet that
that's the beep. So that's one thing fast rise
time. The next thing is that the beep
means one and only one thing. It means pay attention to by
inner experience right now without having to ask the
question, pay attention to what am I thinking about right now?
It means what am I thinking about right now?

(01:08:22):
And, and we're going to have some practice because I didn't
say when back half an hour ago when I described the, the
process on, on the first thing, you're not going to be very good
at it. So then we're going to do it
again and you're still not goingto be very good at it.
And then we're going to do it again and on the third day of
it, then you might be pretty good at it.
That is a fundamentally important thing, which I call

(01:08:43):
the iterative process. I think you need that kind of
stuff. You need to learn whatever that
means. I don't know what that means,
but you need to acquire the skill of paying attention to
what that is in your experience right then and nothing else.
Got to know what experience is. You got to know when the what,
what the what the beat means. That takes time.
Skill you got, you got to acquire that skill.

(01:09:07):
So the beep means pay attention to my inner experience right now
and nothing and nothing else. And it and it happens
immediately. So that's two things that makes
my method, I think, more believable.
And the third is then you're going to tell me about it and
I'm a pretty good at it. Listen, I'm pretty good at
listening to what it is that you're that you're telling me.

(01:09:27):
I'm not perfect at it by any means.
And I generally do these expositional interviews with Co
interviewers so that there's somebody else and other than me
who's listening to the same thing, asking the same kind of
questions. And then we can disagree with
each other, disagree with each other, or you can say, well, you
got a blind spot there, Russ. And and I can say, well, you're

(01:09:48):
probably right about that. Why won't you ask that question
or whatever? So, so, so you, but what you got
to tell me about it. And the reason that that's
important is that you have whatever presuppositions that
you have about what your inner experience is.
And you're going to tell me about your presuppositions,
probably, rather than telling meabout your inner experience.

(01:10:10):
And I, my art, if you want to call it that, is to, is to be
sensitive to that and to, and tobe able to tell the difference
between when somebody is tellingme about their presuppositions
and tell them and when they're telling me about their
experience. And we can spend the whole
interview talking about how, the, how I do that, but it's,
there's nothing magic about it. It is I, I know what people are

(01:10:30):
sounding like when they're telling me about experience.
And I know what people sound like when they're telling me
about their presuppositions. And and I try to get them to
tell me when when it sounds to me like they're talking about
their. Experience.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's definitely a
skill that is nurtured and eventually becomes something you
can sort of master. And I remember writing a note
when when reading your work, andmy note said that one second,

(01:10:52):
let me just check. You've done a great way of, of
almost countering subjective biases.
You've put in these safeguards to assist to avoid things like
memory interpretation and framing because of this very
method you've just described. And I thought that was a
brilliant way to to bypass a lotof these issues that human

(01:11:14):
thought generates. I think, I think that's exactly
right. I would, I would see it, I would
see it the other way around. What I, what I would say is all
those things that you mentioned,those are total, total risks.
And so my method from my perspective is, well, what do
you do to try to keep those risks under control?
You use a beeper. You have interviews that
happened when that happened veryshortly after the the, so the my

(01:11:37):
expositional interviews have to be the same day or the next day,
24 hours turns out to be turns out to be sort of OK.
I require that you write down something, write immediately
after the beep to minimize the memory, whatever.
So all those things which which you see are challenges to
subjective reports, I see as challenges to subjective

(01:11:58):
reports. And DES is nothing more than and
nothing less than my attempt to try to keep those under control
as much as I can. And I think it's a great, it's
a, it's a great way to do that because you, you almost remove
the thinking and you replace it with acting or, or, or
experience rather than someone thinking about the outcome or,

(01:12:21):
or having this major cognitive thought process prior to it.
It's more about that subjective phenomenal experience in the
moment, which then begs the deepest question, which is
fundamentally what this podcast is about.
What? For decades your work on DAS has
explained so many different mindphenomena.

(01:12:43):
How and what do you think this could do?
Sorry, what could this tell us about the mind body problem or
this relationship between brain and experience?
Do you think there's a mind bodyproblem and and what do you
think DES could provide us toward a solution?
So there's two things that one, one is I want to, I want to push

(01:13:04):
back a little bit of on on your summary before because I don't,
I don't think of inner experience as being subjective.
I think inner experience is every bit as objective as
external experience. It's private, which makes it
problematic, but it's not subjective.
I don't think we can have a longconversation about that, but I

(01:13:26):
just don't want to. Sorry, before before you move
on, you move on from that. A question I had prior to that
was the role of statistics and capturing that exact subjective
experience, because I know you wrote a textbook about that.
Maybe you would. Maybe it's best that you
actually do explore that. I I have written a textbook
about that and that's a sort of the, the, the work that the work

(01:13:53):
that I do is fundamentally non statistical.
I do count things, but when I count things, I generally
explicitly say I don't really care about how many of these
things I get. I'm going to count them because
I want to be able to say, well, Tev's got sort of a lot of this
and not very much of that. And if you say things like that,
then you then you're obligated to count because a lot and not

(01:14:17):
very much is a is a county kind of a thing.
And so I count, but I'm also acutely aware that I'm when, if,
if we sample together and we do 10 days of sampling, which is a
lot from my point of view at sixsamples a day, that's only 60
samples. And so by the error bars around
any frequency that I get are going to are going to be fairly
high. And so I'm, I'm just, I'm not

(01:14:40):
interested in statistical significance and in the, in the
work that we're talking about here, I write a book, the whole
book is about statistical significance.
And I wrote that back in 1990 because I wanted to be taken
seriously. And I knew that if I just
eschewed statistics all together, that people would
think I was a soft headed guy like anybody else interested in

(01:15:02):
consciousness. So I said, well, I'll write a
statistics book and, and be known as a, as a statistics guy
and then they'll take me seriously and, and what I'm
really interested in. So probably not a wise decision
that I made, but that was a, a decision that that I made.
So I have written a statistic. That's it over there or over

(01:15:22):
there. And.
I think that's. 6th edition now.That's always a good approach
because you you want to be takenserious.
Studying this objective is nevereasy and many people tend to
disregarded in in various unreasonable ways.
But how do you think DES or, or could you explain how DES

(01:15:45):
bridges that gap between first person phenomenological
experience versus third person objective experience?
So I think all experience is fundamentally first person and
we can we can try to abstract away the first person, this of

(01:16:08):
it and call it third person, butit never really is third person.
So what? So my counsel would be, well,
let's get good at the first person, which I don't think very
many people are. And the and the And so I think
that the reason that I rankle atthe term subjective, I think is
that is that most people, most people think that something

(01:16:31):
that's done badly is done is subjective.
And I just don't think that's necessarily true.
I think you can, you can help somebody become a have a pretty
what I would call high fidelity observer of their own inner
experience. Or I prefer apprehender rather
than observer because of the Cartesian stuff.
But the I would, I would say I would, I think people can become

(01:16:54):
people start out as not knowing what's going on in their inner
experience. And after 5 or 8 days of, of
sampling, they can, they can come to be able to apprehend
their inner experience as it actually occurs.
And that makes it as as objective as anything else in,
in the world. It's private.
It's only them that is seeing itor hearing it or whatever.

(01:17:14):
But but it's not just a, an opinion.
It's so. Well, well, Russ, that sort of,
it sort of gives us an idea of where your mind's at regarding
the mind body problem. But I asked you about that
earlier. Do you mind defining?
Do you think there's a mind bodyproblem, this relationship

(01:17:35):
between brain and and experience?
And do you ever think that we could map inner experience onto
neural correlates? Or will some aspects always
resist reduction? Well, that's a good, that's a
good question. I, I have I with some colleagues

(01:18:01):
and, and, and Berlin and, and the UKI.
We have done a small study wherewe put people into the scanner,
into an FMR scanner and, and lethim do whatever it is that they
wanted to do and beat them everynow and then.
And then took him out of the scanner and interviewed them the
way I would generally interview him and put him back in the

(01:18:23):
scanner and took him back out and interviewed him and put him
back in the scanner, took him back in the scanner.
So we spent people in and out ofthe scanner over several,
several weeks, many, many times in the scanner to see whether we
can find something of the correlates of, of inner
experience. And I guess I before I said that

(01:18:44):
I what I one of the things that I didn't say when I, when I was
talking about inner speech back in the characteristics of inner
speech. One of the findings and not
surprising results, not surprising results to me of the
of the scanner. This scanner study which my
colleagues I have written about is that inner speech as it

(01:19:07):
naturally occurs, people going about their everyday life
sometimes engages inner speakingand sometimes they don't.
That is not the same thing as inner speech on demand.
So almost all studies, all psychological studies of inner
speech are, are on demand. So I say say elephant or say
pencil or recite this sentence or whatever.

(01:19:29):
All right, all right, I'm interested in reading.
And I show you one word and thenanother word.
And then it went 10 millisecondslater, another word or 100
milliseconds later, another wordand then another word.
That's just not you. You I'm, I'm highly skeptical
about whether you're going to learn anything about what is
naturally occurring inner speaking.
So if you want to find out aboutthe answer to your question, the
mind body question, you have to put somebody into the scanner or

(01:19:53):
wait around for until they happen to have inner speaking.
And then if they do, then you might be able to look at a
correlate between that and, and whatever was going on in their
oxygen production in their brains or whatever.
And I so I think that's possible.
And I think we did discover somethings, one of them being inner

(01:20:15):
speaking on demand is not the same thing as inner speech as
normal inner speaking. So I think it I think it is
possible to map something about.Inner experience into neural
correlates, whether I think that's going to be useful, I

(01:20:36):
don't think I know the answer tothat question.
The, the temporal resolution of fMRI is still pretty slow.
You know, we're measuring in terms of seconds and, and in,
in, in the world of inner experience, a lot of stuff can
go all over the place in a couple of seconds.

(01:20:57):
So can we speed up fMRI? You know, maybe, maybe we can.
I don't, I don't have a good prediction.
I don't have a good prediction about that.
And I'm not, I'm not a fan of neural correlates in the sense
that I think speaking is going to take place here and
visualization is going to be here or whatever.

(01:21:18):
I think the whole brain is involved all the time.
Sometimes some more, some some less, but the the, but I don't
really know. I don't really know the answer
to that. What.
But what I what I do think I know about that is if you cared
about the mind body problem, then you should be really

(01:21:40):
worried about things that are mentalisms, which is almost
everything in, in the way peoplethink about the mind body
problem. I'm afraid.
But but you should be you shouldbe scared of any theory that is
tries to link the a mentalism toanything.
And if you, if you advanced as Iwould so I'll call it advanced

(01:22:01):
beyond a mentalism to directly apprehended in your experience,
then you you got your work cut out for you because it's hard
work. The descriptive experience
sampling is not an easy thing todo.
You got to develop some skills, which is, you know, sort of like
developing skills of being a virtuoso violinist or whatever.

(01:22:23):
You, you, you need practice in the, in the practice room or
whatever construction and whatever.
And, and, and then you need enough of those people who to,
to be good at it, at finding outwhat's actually in, in your
experience, which is a challenge.
And then you can start to do some correlations.

(01:22:45):
So when the one of the correlations as as Herbert would
say in his textbook or something, you know, you need
hundreds of people to have a correlation where that you, that
you can start to occur because the error there are bars around
the size of correlations are really pretty big when you've
got just a few, a few subjects. And the problem with DES is it's

(01:23:07):
hard to get, you know, in my lifetime, I have sampled with
500 or 1000 people or something like that.
It's that's 10 or 100 a year, not a Goodyear, but.
Russ, if you there's something Ithought about when I already
work was I thought about Benjamin Libett and I thought
about his free will experience and I thought what if you

(01:23:29):
replace the beeper with a buzzerwhen a shock and and I'm talking
within microseconds, would this impact someone's experience
firstly? And what do you think about free
will? Well, I've I have toyed with

(01:23:52):
with reproducing some of Libet'sexperience and experience
experiments is what I meant to say there.
And I and I think that I think there is some some things to be
learned there. So so for example, I think.

(01:24:14):
Is the name Maskaline mean anything to you, though?
He's the astronomer's assistant back back back in the day when
when we were talking about the, the, the personal equation.
Does a personal equation mean anything to you?
The person, the, the, the personal equation came the, the,
the famous astronomer whose nameI forget.
Now that's sort of weird becauseI remember Maskaline's name, but

(01:24:34):
there's the astronomer. The, the, the task was to mark
transit times. So you got a clock and the clock
is ticking away and we want to know when Mars passes through
the Meridian or whatever. And I'm not an astronomer, but,
but basically you're looking through a telescope.
There's a, there's a hair down, down the crosshair and, and the

(01:24:56):
thing and, and you want to know what time it is that Mars
passes. And so masculine is dutifully
written it down. And the way you do is you look
at a clock and the clock is saying, you know, ten O 6 O
102-0304. And then when the, when the,
when the Mars passes the line, then you have counted those,
those things and you say that ithappened to ten O 4.3 or, or, or

(01:25:18):
or whatever. And it turns out that there are
huge individual differences on like on, on the order of seconds
about the, on the accuracy of those of those observations.
And masculine got himself fired because his, his aspirations
didn't, didn't match up with thewith the astronomer.

(01:25:40):
And the astronomer is really a famous, famous guy who's I can't
remember which one it is now, but but, but that became known
as the personal, personal equation.
And, and it, and it has to do with mental processing of clocks
and visual processing and how you get these things together
and those, those things they do not obey the laws of physics.

(01:26:03):
They're, you would think that the mind was processing this and
the visual processing this in the event and the same, but it,
but it's not true. And and so that's one of the
things that the that I was influenced by, which is sort of
the labet experiment, experimentthat, that I try to take that
stuff seriously. So I, I understand when I said a

(01:26:26):
minute ago, when I, when I said what the beep, the beep happened
in a couple of microseconds. Your experience doesn't happen
in a couple of microseconds. It takes a while to process
that. And so it could very well be
that you're processing that thatyou're processing of the beep
takes this amount of time and processing and a schizophrenic
individuals takes a different amount of time and a during a

(01:26:46):
kind of processing. And So what turns out to be your
reports of inner experience are really pretty much messed up by
the by the processing of the beep.
I think that's possible. I don't, I haven't one of the
many things that I have not explored much in depth, but I
but I recognize it as a as an absolute possibility.

(01:27:08):
I think it's a much smaller possibility than most other
people, but it's but it's something to be taken taken
seriously and in the and in the world of schizophrenia, I think
it might be a big deal. I think it might be, you know,
several seconds and, and, and that that can explain things
like how, how is it that a schizophrenic individual can,

(01:27:29):
can think that the light that, that I, I turned on the light
switch because the light came on.
You know, well, if, if you're, if you've got your timing circus
wacky so that the lighting, so the lighting coming on is
experienced as being before the switch switching.

(01:27:50):
If if your time processing is that wacky, well that that then
you then you're theorizing self theorizing about cause and
effect. It's wacky.
But all all of that is is to sayI don't I don't know most about
what I'm talking about other than I think it's possible to to

(01:28:12):
do this attending to whatever isapprehended carefully and it's
and it's worth doing. But I but it could be that when
people when people do it in the you know, and there's a lot of
people who are doing it and theygot better equipment than I have
when they're younger than I am. Whatever that they would that
they would discover that there that there are some limitations

(01:28:35):
and those limitations might be more important than the method
itself. More or less than in the same
way as the you know then leavinghook the microscope inventor
whatever believed in the animal cules and whatever else he
believed in which weren't weren't true in the long haul
long haul he he but the microscope has turned out to be
a pretty important deal in the in the philosophy of science or

(01:28:59):
the science of biology or even even though he was he was wrong
about what he was looking at. And I, and I think of DES as
sort of the same way DES is a tool.
I, I think, I believe that my career has demonstrated that
it's possible to do it. People don't, people don't use

(01:29:21):
it. Sort of disappointing to me,
but, but I think it's possible. And if and if we did it, it
would it would revolutionize what we thought about crazy
people and about mind body issues and but.
Russ, before we before we touch on those broad implications of

(01:29:42):
future directions, but I wanted to find out, you briefly touched
on this, but in philosophy, people often talk about whether
we can truly know someone else'sconsciousness.
And, and I believe that DES has a very intriguing approach
toward explaining this phenomenon.

(01:30:03):
Do you have a specific philosophical view on
consciousness? For example, do you consider
yourself to be someone who's more inclined to a version of
illusionism? A version of emergentism?
Do you have a certain view in philosophy or, or for you, is
this just sort of a spectrum of,of experience that you're open
to explore and and dissect over time?

(01:30:29):
I do not have a view of consciousness.
I don't know what people mean byconsciousness.
I don't try to explore understand other people's
consciousness. I don't try to understand my own
consciousness. What I am interested in is what

(01:30:49):
people direct apprehensions of their inner experiences.
And I think it is possible to describe, to apprehend For me,
if, if, if we, if I offered to do with a beeper and we took, we
did whatever we had to do to figure figure it out, I could, I
could find out something about with, with pretty good fidelity.

(01:31:09):
What is in Tevin's inner experience as he describes them
at particular beeps. And that would probably have
quite a bit to do with what is actually in his experience, but
it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be what I call high
fidelity. Probably we haven't done it.
So maybe, maybe it wouldn't workwith him.
But but that's I, I, that's as close as I can get to knowing

(01:31:36):
about what's in somebody else's mind.
Which is to say, I don't know what's in Tevin's mind, but I
think I could know about what's in his inner experience.
With that being said, Russ, how let's move on to that deeper
implication and future direction.
How would DES inform clinical practice or therapy and could it

(01:32:01):
change how we understand or treat mental illness?
Yes, I think so. Hang on, hang on just a minute.
OK, I'm good. I had another appointment, but
it's been cancelled. So I'm.
I'm even checked the time. Yeah.

(01:32:22):
So neither did I. So tell me again what your
question is. How?
How would? It change, I was saying, let's
move on to these broader implications and future
directions for DES and and for anyone watching or listening.
I think it's, it's, it's a greatway for potential researchers,
philosophers, scientists, if they want to jump on board and
maybe work on your, on your workand take it further.

(01:32:42):
How do you think DES informs clinical practice or therapy and
and could it change how we understand and treat mental
illness? So, so I think that I think
there are fundamentally there are, if you really take DES

(01:33:03):
seriously, there would be fundamental shifts in almost
everything that you do. So therapy, I, I, I'm a licensed
psychologist. I don't, I don't practice at it,
but I am, I am a licensed psychologist.
The therapy is, is basically if I'm the therapist and you're the

(01:33:25):
client, I'm I'm supposed to set out to change your change you in
some important way. That is not DESDES is not a
manipulative thing. DES is a let's discover Tevin
the way he is not let's try to make Tevin better or Devin
different or, or whatever. That's a that's a hugely

(01:33:48):
different deal from my point of view.
And, and my my guess is that forTevin, it would be better for
him. I don't really know because I'm
a ignorant mortal, but the my guess is it is of more value for
Tevin to know what his inner experience is than for someone

(01:34:12):
to try to change his inner experience.
That is, know thyself is probably a better maxim than
change thyself. And that of course is
fundamentally different from thewhole psychotherapy mindset,
hugely different. And then I think I touched as

(01:34:35):
far as psychopathology is concerned, I think it probably,
if you, I think, I think it's a psychopathology science based on
what, what on on the characteristics of inner
experience would but probably bedifferent from the science that

(01:34:56):
we've got. Now, how that how that would be
different, I don't know exactly,but I think, I think people with
psychological disturbances have messy inner experiences.
And by messy, there's some people who just, they, they
don't have their, their figure. The figure never gets to be
clear for them for whatever reason.
Either there's no figure at all or they've got a sort of a

(01:35:18):
cloudy figure and it's not, it'snot really clear.
And, and I think those things are difficult for people.
I think it's people are, it's generally easier for people to
be able to see clearly what they're looking at and to hear
clearly what they're hearing. And it's an environment,
whatever. And for people, for people to
recognize their own inner experience with skills so that

(01:35:42):
they don't find their anger coming at them like by surprise
out of the blue. They see the anger as it arises.
They feel the anger as it ariseswhen they're just a little bit
angry, when they're still capable of doing something about
it. But if they don't, if they
can't, can't apprehend that, then by the time their anger
really shows up, that's too latefor them.

(01:36:05):
Do do you see AI or machine learning helping us analyze DES
data or even simulate in experiences?
I don't know the answer to that.I am and right now actively
involved in an AI simulated learning project that is trying

(01:36:26):
to answer that question for DES.That's basically can we use the,
the can we use AI to make a, a computer version of Hurlburt
and, and we're trying to figure out the answer to that, for
better or for worse. I don't, I don't know whether
that was a it's a good thing to be doing that or a bad thing to
be doing that. It's, it seems like an
inevitable thing to be doing. So I'm doing it and.

(01:36:49):
How does one work? But one finds people who know
how to do it and then gives themall, all of your stuff and then
and then they, they, they reportback.
And so that's basically where weare.
There is a group of people who have I've given them.
So I've, I've got out on the web.
Your, your readers probably ought to know about this or your

(01:37:10):
listeners probably. I don't know about this, but I
have on the web a whole series. I think there's eleven of them
out now that are in DES investigations from beginning to
end, from the first time I met the guy to all the all the
interviews that I've had to whatI've written about him.
All that stuff is, is the videosare out on YouTube.

(01:37:31):
And so I have a YouTube channel basically that that puts all
these things out there, including transcripts and
commentary that I've written about the transcripts that I
think people like you would be might be interested in reading
about. All that stuff is there.
And so in answer to your AI question, I said, well, I've,
I've given all this stuff to theAI people, people who know

(01:37:53):
something about AI and and they say, you know, you want to know
something about what Herbert does.
Well, this is what Herbert does.You got 100 hours of it.
This is, you know, figured out and get back to me.
Yeah, I think, I think that's such a that's such a great way
to get to get stuff done becausethat amount of content is so
useful for any sort of algorithm.

(01:38:14):
They can put this together into a much more solid summary or
synopsis. Because with all that, by the
way, I'll put a link to that, Russ, to your channel and to all
this all to, to all these investigations and your papers.
But if you could design the nextgeneration of studies in this

(01:38:35):
area, what questions about innerexperience are you personally
most eager to answer? My guess is that the answer to
that question is that it's the wrong question.
And I don't, I, I don't presume to have a crystal ball that's
that's any good. And I, I have personal examples

(01:38:56):
of where my old crystal balls are terribly, terribly bad.
So I shouldn't take this anything more than Russ's
meanderings on whatever today is.
And but I, I think, I think science has to get over the, the
asking the answering questions model.

(01:39:20):
I don't think that's the right model.
I, I, I think there's limitations of that.
I think exploring phenomena is probably more useful than
answering questions. That is, that is a fundamentally

(01:39:41):
different way of almost science.Every everybody thinks of
science as you ask a question and then try to answer the
question. That is what I for for myself, I
call validity based thing. You have a theory and you try to
validate the theory or whatever.And I think validity based
science is doomed. I don't know whether I'm right

(01:40:02):
about that, but that's what I think and I think.
The alternative that is what I call fidelity based science,
where we're trying to find out about phenomena as they are.
And it could very well be that if if you had a mature fidelity
based science, then validity based science would be a really

(01:40:26):
good thing to do. But as it is, I think validity
based science is out over its skis and it's, it needs the, the
corrective it needs is to recognize that it's possibly,
quite possibly substantially misguided.
And so we, we just need to, we need to roll back the of the

(01:40:51):
interest in answering particularquestions and to try to just
describe phenomena and discover phenomena the way they are.
The problem is, the problem is the, the questions are always
backwards looking. You know, you got a question,
you're trying to validate something you that's a rear view
mirror question. Validating questions is always

(01:41:12):
looking in the rear view mirror.And until you got a really good
view of what's back there, untilyou really know what's back
there, then probably a good ideato look out the windshield.
Russ, when after all you years of research, what do you think
is the most common misconceptionpeople have about their own

(01:41:34):
experience? That they know what it is.
Could you elaborate on that eventhough you already have, but
just to round this up for peoplejust so they get a clear picture
of exactly what your work has done.
The, the Maybe this is my first answer was a little glib or

(01:41:56):
whatever, but the I think peoplehave presuppositions about their
own inner experience. And when you ask them about
their inner inner experience, they tell you what they
presuppositionally know about their inner experience.
And I think people's presuppositions are delusions.

(01:42:18):
And so they tell you about the results of their delusions.
And like all delusions, they believe they're telling you
about the truth. But it's not the case.
Do you think there's a way? That, that is, that's the,
that's the fundamental thing. The, the, the fundamental deal
is if, if, if everybody recognized that they were, they

(01:42:39):
were really delusional, sometimes big delusions,
sometimes little illusion. But, but the fundamental part of
the human condition is, is basically delusional.
The world would be a different place.
Republicans wouldn't be arguing with the Democrats.
And if they all recognize that they were really, both of them

(01:42:59):
fucked up and delusional, and asat the core, they pretend that
they know what they're talking about and they're the good guy
and that they know the right thing and everybody else does
the wrong thing, when it's probably true that they're both
delusional. Russ, it's such a pleasure and

(01:43:20):
honor for me to chat to you. Such a big fan of your work,
been following it for many yearsand hope you continue to succeed
and produce such quality work and research.
Is there anything about your work that you feel I haven't
touched on or that you would like to reiterate to make sure
people really take home? Yes, I would say one more thing

(01:43:42):
about it, and that is that it's,it's genuinely interesting.
I've been doing the same work for 50 years and it's at least
as interesting to me now as it was 50 years ago.
Everybody is different. Getting people to be able to
tell you about their own inner experience because you have to,
you have to wade through their own presuppositions and

(01:44:03):
distortions and, and whatever. It's totally challenging and
it's, it's a totally interestingand challenging thing for me
personally to do. It's and it's not a, it's not
going to work for me. It's it's the privilege of

(01:44:25):
trying to have somebody tell me about what's actually their
fundamental private experience, which is pretty cool.
I mean, that's, that's beautifulfor us.
The, the fact that you still enjoy it after all these years
and still so passionate about it.
You can see it by the way you talk about it.
And if, if anyone wants to reachout, I'll put links to your

(01:44:47):
website, put links to all the work you've done from my side.
Thank you so much for all the incredible work.
I appreciate it very much. Well, you're welcome.
And and I would say just in one,one last thing is that the
website that I put out there that is my version of, of, of,
of phenomenon oriented. I'm, I'm not trying to answer

(01:45:09):
any questions in that. I'm trying to tell you this is
what Ryan's inner experience wasand this is what Lena's
experience was. And this is what Mel's
experience was. And this is what Kerry's inner
experience was. And this is how I got there.
And this is the, you know, most of the time I've had I've had Co
investigators with me and this is what I thought about the Co

(01:45:30):
investigators questions and thisis what they thought about my
questions. And this is the it's the nuts
and bolts of it. Russ, before before we close,
something else I thought about when we before we chat was I
remember your book with Eric Schweitzkebel, the two of you,
because I've had Eric on the show.

(01:45:50):
I know you guys did that sort ofa back and forth discussion when
people look at your work, read through it, discuss a dissect
it. When viewers listen to this or
watch this, what do you think ofthe questions they will ask you
or or sort of debate with you and retaliate in terms of things
that you most commonly encounterwhen discussing these views?

(01:46:12):
So if you're to almost pre emptively defend yourself, what
did you say? Well, I, I would say I, I did a
pretty good job of answering that question in this interview.
So the questions that you asked are the pretty much the same
kind of questions that I get. And I answered them the way that
I would generally ask them. And my, and, and So what I

(01:46:34):
would, what I, the, the general thing is, I agree with all the,
all the criticisms, everybody's criticism from Eric Signup, all
those, all those criticisms are valid.
I have done my, I can, I can sleep easily at night saying
I've done the best that, that I can do to, to live in a world
where those, where I take those criticisms seriously.

(01:46:56):
That doesn't mean that I am goodat it even, or that I'm right
about it or anything. And I'm, I'm pretty comfortable
with that. But I've, but I have taken them,
I've taken them seriously. And I would say if you're going
to mention Schvitz Cable's book,I've got that.

(01:47:17):
That book, I think is sort of a model of good communication,
that of, of people taking each other, taking each other
seriously and not trying to talkpast each other, which I think
is sort of the fundamentaliest, interestingest thing to do.
That that I think that's just that's a that's that's a good

(01:47:42):
book from from the from the standpoint of modeling that I
think Eric and I I did a good book.
Yeah, I think that's that's something that's very incredible
to watch is 2 people actually discuss something very
engagingly intellectually and with so much respect, Russ, if
there's any, if there's a postdoc student, professor,

(01:48:03):
anyone, a scholar watching this,trying to enter this field,
assist with DS, propagate it, move it forward, What advice
would you give them? Is there any sort of direction
you'd like this to go in the future?
I don't, I don't know that I gota good answer to that.
What I what I would say is my book with Eric, I think is is

(01:48:24):
something about engagement. My book with Marco Caracciolo
is, is an extension of that, butin in some ways better than the
Eric book. The book, the book with Eric
basically is we had, we had conversations back and forth and
then as as a result of the conversations, we, we refined

(01:48:46):
for each other what it was we'rewe're trying to do.
And then eventually put those, put those out there about, about
each one. That was the book with Eric,
which I thought was a, a good, agood book.
The book with Marco is basicallyit's the whole conversation.
So there's no distillation involved.
It's the whole, it's the whole deal out there that so you can,
you can, it's basically he wroteme an e-mail some he's a guy

(01:49:09):
that I'd never met. He wrote me an e-mail, I
responded, he wrote me back another e-mail and I responded
and then we went back and forth.And so it's basically a
collection of, of emails betweenhim and me about, about these,
these topics with no, no filtering hard hardly at all.
So it's sort of like an epistolary novel, except it's in
a real life, the right life review.

(01:49:30):
And then the, the interviews that I've put out are sort of
the next step in, in that the, the, the interviews are just
the, the basic thing, the whole deal.
So the, so the Eric, the, the Eric is sort of the homogenized
whole deal. And the, and the Marco thing is
the, is the whole old deal from one perspective.

(01:49:52):
And, and then the, the, the interviews are the whole deal
really from the very, from, fromeverything with the video and
the word for word and all the whole deal.
So if you really want to know what I think about things,
that's, that's the transition ofit.
Well, and I, and, and I think rightly or wrongly, I think we

(01:50:14):
need to do more of the kinds of science that is in the, the kind
of interviews where we're just trying to discover phenomena,
trying to discover the, the difficulties and limitations and
blind spots and whatever you know, there, there are.
So for your, for your Philip, for your philosophical friends,

(01:50:36):
the people who might be watchingthis in the, in those
interviews, there are philosophical questions raised,
particularly in the last in the,in the, in the, yeah, I take it

(01:50:59):
back. I think they're all the way
through. But there are, there are, there
are philosophical debates in, I don't know, I'd have to look and
see what my chapters are here. I don't actually remember what,
but let me your readers might want to know.
Or you can filter this out or whatever.
Yeah, I think, I think they'll be excited to hear this.

(01:51:19):
So I think they'll want to know exactly which aspects they'd
found most intriguing. This is very much a
philosophical scientific podcast, so the audience are
probably waiting for something like this.
So let me so I'll give you a little bit of a guided thing.
Part 8X VI I8 Gabriel. Gabriel was a college senior

(01:51:44):
interested in philosophy and so there are discussions of
philosophical issues that go along with his his interest in
philosophical questions that arebut that, but that.
But the the advantage of that isthat they're asked in the
context of a particular sample. This is we this is a sample and

(01:52:05):
you know, what is this? What how should I take this?
How should I understand that or whatever That's part eight, part
X, part 10. IA guy came to me and said, I
think I know how to do DES, but then you can and better than you
do. And and so let me teach you some
stuff about that. And I said, OK.

(01:52:26):
And so we we enlisted a woman, Mel Mel May and we and we
interviewed, we Co inter Co interviewed her.
And in the context of that, there are decided backs and
forth between the, the person whose name is Julian Bass

(01:52:47):
Krueger. Julian and I debated each other
about what you really could and couldn't do and ask about inner
experience and whatever. So those, those debates are raw
and, and opinionated. And I guess you could, I guess
you could say but there but but,but all based on what we could

(01:53:08):
say about about Mel's experience.
So they're they're the, you know, the the 11 notch more or
rawer, I guess so. So the markup book is a little

(01:53:29):
bit raw. The Caricello book is pretty raw
and the Mel Melodeel is very raw.
And, and then and then the the next one I think they might find
interesting if they got that faris part 11, which is Carrie.
And Carrie turns out to be Mel'sfriend.
And the the back story there is Mel turns out to have almost no
inner experience by by chance note, nobody knew this going and

(01:53:53):
going in, but she ended up having relatively little inner
experience and thought that's the way everybody else was
because everybody thinks that everybody else is just like
them. But in the course of the
interviewing, she became convinced that maybe she's not
that similar because I would say, you know, well this isn't
what I usually see, but let's see.
So she recruited a friend of hers to be a subject.

(01:54:15):
And, and then the three of us, which would be Julian and me and
Mel were Co interviews with Carrie.
And Carrie, it turns out, was quite a bit different from Mel,
which isn't too surprising because everybody's different
from everybody and Mel is prettyunusual in the 1st place.
So Mel and Kerry are very, very different.
But then, but then you get a chance to see how that plays

(01:54:38):
out. And Russ, is that malleable?
Do you, do you find that once the realization is there that
let's say Mel doesn't have this experience, is this something
that is trainable or is that permanent?
Inner experience can change and,and can change dramatically and,

(01:55:00):
and I would say miraculously, I've, I've seen a few miracles
along the way. One of which I've told in a the
story of Fran, I've told fairly frequently is a inner experience
that I think changes dramatically over the course of,
of, of her sampling with me. And I, I don't have time, we

(01:55:22):
don't have time to tell that story again, but I've told it
recently on a podcast. I can give you the link to that
podcast. It's also in my several of my,
my books. My, I think my second book, my
1993 book, tells the story of Fran and I've told it in in
journal articles. Ross, Ross, it's it's such a
pleasure. Thank you so much for joining

(01:55:44):
me. Any final words, anything from
your side that you feel you haven't touched on?
You good? I think I'm good, I've enjoyed
the conversation, I've thought the questions were good, and
good luck.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Is Inner Speech Universal? Descriptive Experience Sampling & Myths of the Mind | Russell Hurlburt