Inhabiting Conscious Experience: Participatory Science

[Balder]

On the old forum, I posted an essay by Jack Petranker entitled Participatory Knowing, which some of you may recall.  The paper linked below is another essay in the same vein.  I'm sharing it in part because I just had a retreat with Jack, dealing with some of these topics, and so I'd like to engage with them here.

 

Abstract

 

First-person methodologies have been criticized for their inability to

arrive at reliable and verifiable knowledge of the contents of

conscious experience. Consciousness, however, is not its contents, but

the cognitive capacity that makes those contents available. That

capacity is directly and uniquely accessible to first-person inquiry,

provided a suitable methodology can be developed.

 

As a framework for such inquiry, this paper distinguishes two

structures that give rise to conscious contents: narrative and story.

While narratives are told, stories are inhabited. Stories are

fundamental to conscious experience: an event is conscious only if it

fits the presently unfolding story.

 

While third-person inquiry relies on withdrawing from story into

narrative, first-person inquiry can take place within the story. In place

of the reductive objectivity of third-person science, first-person

inquiry can cultivate an engaged objectivity, immersed in the story but

not bound to it, that makes the phenomenon of consciousness

available to be known. Communities of inquiry practicing such a firstperson

style of inquiry could develop criteria for assessing advances

in knowledge and for research programs appropriate to furthering

such advances.

 

~*~

 

The full paper is available here.