Studying Mind from the Inside

person

The joy of meeting someone you love, the sadness of losing a close friend, the richness of a vivid dream, the serenity of a walk through a garden on a spring day, the total absorption of a deep meditative state—these things and others like them constitute the reality of our experience of consciousness.

Regardless of the content of any one of these experiences, no one in his or her right mind would doubt their reality. Any experience of consciousness—from the most mundane to the most elevated—has a certain coherence and, at the same time, a high degree of privacy, which means that it always exists from a particular point of view. The experience of consciousness is entirely subjective. The paradox, however, is that despite the indubitable reality of our subjectivity and thousands of years of philosophical examination, there is little consensus on what consciousness is. Science, with its characteristic third-person method—the objective perspective from the outside—has made strikingly little headway in this understanding.

The question of consciousness has attracted a good deal of attention in the long history of Buddhist philosophical thinking. For Buddhism, given its primary interest in questions of ethics, spirituality, and overcoming suffering, understanding consciousness, which is thought to be a defining characteristic of sentience, is of great importance. According to the earliest scriptures, the Buddha saw consciousness as playing a key role in determining the course of human happiness and suffering. For example, the famous discourse of the Buddha known as the Dhammapada opens with the statement that mind is primary and pervades all things.

The problem of describing the subjective experiences of consciousness is complex indeed. For we risk objectivizing what is essentially an internal set of experiences and excluding the necessary presence of the experiencer. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation. No scientific description of the neural mechanisms of color discrimination can make one understand what it feels like to perceive, say, the color red. We have a unique case of inquiry: the object of our study is mental, that which examines it is mental, and the very medium by which the study is undertaken is mental. The question is whether the problems posed by this situation for a scientific study of consciousness are insurmountable—are they so damaging as to throw serious doubt on the validity of the inquiry?


http://www.mindful.org/the-science/neuroscience/studying-mind-from-the-inside

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Thanks for posting this, @person.