What is the best way to study the human mind? Asking the individual who carries that mind or relying on that individual’s external behaviour?
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Imagine a person born with a certain anomaly in their brain since birth: a red coloured object in the physical world always appeared “green" to them. They learned to call it red because everybody around them called it “red”. But, to them, it appeared the way “green” would appear to others. The only way they could become aware of this anomaly is if they could briefly get inside someone else’s brain and realise that when the other person talks of “red”, they are experiencing something different. But this is impossible because what they are feeling is within them and others have no access to it.
The main problem that this well-known thought experiment brings forth is this: How do you measure someone’s consciousness? It is a problem that has boggled many minds. Experimentally, there are two broad categories of methods - objective and subjective. This is a distinction not unique to consciousness research - it exists pretty much everywhere within psychological science. An objective measure is something that is extracted through the participant’s performance - a button press, an eye movement or electrical activity in the brain. For example, if a red triangle is presented on the screen with the instruction to press SPACE whenever you see the red triangle, then every time you press SPACE, it can be concluded that you are conscious of the red triangle. This method is called “objective” because it is independently verifiable. Your responses are recorded and the observations do not depend on who is the participant or the experimenter or in which country the experiment is being done. Anybody anywhere will similarly press SPACE when they are conscious of the red triangle (if that is the instruction and it is being followed correctly). In contrast, subjective measures entirely rely on the participants’ own reports. The redness of “red” might be different for different people. They way different people describe their experiences of seeing “red” might differ and is also intensely private. The researcher or anyone else for that matter can’t verify it. Because by definition, only you have access to the contents of your mind, nobody else does.
The issue gets even trickier when we are dealing with information that is at the boundary of consciousness. For example, let us say, the red triangle was presented on the screen for 17 ms which can be very difficult to detect especially if it is immediately followed by some other object on the screen. How do we tell if the participant was aware of the presence of this very brief red triangle? In the objective method, the participant is forced to guess about what is presented on their screen. If the participant can truly see nothing, then they should be correct 50% of the times because that would be the accuracy if they were purely guessing (chance-level). Instead, if they are found to be correct more than half the times, then it means they did actually see it at least sometimes.
The procedure for recording subjective reports is more intuitively obvious. The participants are directly asked about their experience. For instance, in one of the most widely used scales for measuring the extent of conscious awareness, the participant is presented with a stimulus like a red triangle for a brief duration, say, 17 ms. They are then asked to report the clarity of their experience on a 4-point scale: 1 - No experience, 2 - A weak experience, 3 - An almost clear experience, 4 - A clear experience. So, the researcher gets an assessment of how clearly something was visible to the subject through the subject’s own reports. There is no external measurement. If the participant claims that they saw it clearly, then that has to be believed because the researcher can’t peek inside their brain to confirm if they really saw it.
The subjective measures have some problems. If you are asked to report whether something is visible, then your threshold for confidently saying that you “see” something could be much higher than another person. So, while both individuals might be “seeing” the same physical object, their interpretation of it could be vastly different. It is like when someone eats a piece of dark chocolate and finds it “extremely bitter”. Another person, eating the same piece of chocolate, might not find it bitter at all. Because the two individuals’ definitions of bitterness are different. The second person might have to eat something many orders of magnitude bitter for them to call it “extremely bitter”.
You might be wondering is this just a language problem? What if we were to define the categories more thoroughly? Let us say, we agree to define “extremely bitter” as the taste that one gets while eating bitter guard without removing the seeds. Again, how bitter this feels to one person could be entirely different from another. The problem still doesn’t go away because there is no way to standardise subjective experiences. We can all agree to call a certain vegetable that looks a certain way “bitter guard”, but we can never know if we all feel the same level of bitterness while eating it because we have no access to each other’s experiences. There is no method to verify and agree on something.
If the subjective methods have so many flaws, why use them at all? Why not just stick with the objective, verifiable measures? Or use both? There are several problems. But, the chief among them can be understood by going back to the example at the beginning: the person with the anomalous brain. If we were to ask this person to press SPACE every time they see “red”, they would behave exactly as any other person would. Even though what they are experiencing as “red” is vastly different from another person. This aspect of the person’s consciousness is getting discarded if we solely rely on their external behaviour and this doesn’t seem right.
What is the solution then?
In essence, this conflict boils down to one question: What is the best way to study the human mind? Asking the individual who carries that mind or relying on that individual’s external behaviour? This tension between first-person approaches and finding “objective” ways to measure behaviour is not new and has existed for centuries. Some of the earliest psychologists like William James and Wilhelm Wundt regarding introspection as one of the primary methods of investigating the human mind. This attitude towards psychology was replaced later by what is known as behaviourism according to which individual human behaviour can be scientifically studied like any other natural phenomena without appealing to internal mental activity. The rise of behaviourism can be traced to the desire of people studying the mind wanting to make psychology more like the natural sciences and only study what is directly observable. Since subjective states can't be directly observed, it was considered unnecessary or unimportant to study them.
This also brings us to another crucial point: this conflict between objective and subjective methods has relevance only if you believe that subjective experiences are something to be taken seriously. Dan Dennett - a philosopher who opposes such first-person approaches to cognitive science - does not believe so. For over 50 years, Dennett has been tirelessly arguing that focusing too much on subjective aspects of consciousness - referred to as qualia (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/) by philosophers - is a waste of time. His point is that this deep sense that we humans have of being conscious and feeling things is pretty much an illusion. There is nothing magical about it and it is certainly within the bounds of empirical science to explain it. Thus, he terms first-person approaches as a fantasy that we need not indulge in - whatever we need to understand the mind can be known through objective methods.
So, to answer the question is one method better than the other? we don’t know yet. Understanding consciousness remains one of the hardest problems in science. There are no easy answers. But surely, we need all the data we can possibly gather to really know how the mind works. So, for now, the best bet might be not to try to make it more like physical sciences or philosophy, but accept that maybe it is a bit of many things.