Recently I’ve begun researching a few problems for which the emerging field of neurophenomenology might suggest solutions. In the context of neuroethics and law, I think neurophenomenology addresses a knowledge gap arising frequently when law looks to neuroscience for verification or falsification of subjective claims: reconciling first-person experience (and thus testimony) with third-person scientific data.
In the context of the law of torts, recent scholarship has focused on the interpretive and ethical problems raised by the uses of cognitive neuroscience evidence. As neurophenomenology comes into its own as a field of inquiry, it offers new methods for examining a person's claims about subjective mental states against objective assessents of brain activity, without according undue weight to the latter form of evidence. Phenomenal criteria can enrich existing psychological categories, particularly those used for a subject's self-reporting of mental states.
Phenomenological research applied to experimental (and clinical) psychology isn’t new in and of itself. Much of the field was mired in critical theory and scientifically vague methods. But recently, however, it became part of a research program that’s also informed by cognitive neuroscience in methods and priorities. It offers a vocabulary for expressing the emotional and cognitive aspects of phenomena in precise ways. Individual phenomenal descriptions can be mined for data. The resulting information may prove useful in scaling self-reporting of pain and or anguish against medical tests and reconciling such data with technologies such as brain imaging.
In this post, I’d like to outline some questions that could addressed by phenomenologically-informed experiments. I’m not a phenomenologist per se, but I have been struck by the relevance of neurophenomenology to many questions in neuroethics.
Psychological self-reporting and neuroscientific evidence can be very difficult to reconcile: such discrepancies often are the linchpin of civil verdicts and allocation of damages to plaintiffs. I think a promising test area for the uses of phenomenological methods comes from searching for better means to verifying someone's claims about and pain, suffering, and trauma. While (obviously) this isn’t going to change evidentiary standards or redefine emotional stress in the context of torts, neurophenomenology might better help us to assess the effects of traumatic events and injuries on an individual’s mental states. In the case of assessing pain and suffering, neurophenomenology offers the possibility of establishing more precise criteria for the “reality” of pain or suffering within a neural and psychological context. Additionally, if we have a set of phenomenological criteria for mental states of pain and suffering this might inform our choice of which – of several conflicting – interpretations we should apply to objective data like brain imaging and EEG studies.
The basic question is whether or not the methods of phenomenology can shed light on the neuroscience of pain and establish better standards for determining the reality and the extent of a subject's pain in a given situation. Neurophenomenology already has researchers looking into the location of pain sensations in the peripheral nervous system and the brain; the nature of fear and anguish as embodied, physiological experience; and the relationship between them. Secondary phenomenal characteristics of pain like stress and arousal responses can’t be viewed in isolation from a subject’s total experience of pain, which entails more than the reported persistent pain in a specific location in the body. So we might then ask if there is a way to use neurophenomenology to ask better questions about the evidence we get from neuroscience and about the characteristics of self-reported pain, suffering, and trauma.
Other questions in this line reasoning then follow:
(1) What criteria can describe pain in the absence of nerve damage or pain-pathway activation? Are there sufficient commonalities of pain to come to a consensus about "essential" attributes of first-person accounts of pain (beyond what is currently offered by forensic and clinical psychology)?
(2) Does neural activation (in fMRI for example) of pain-related regions or networks correspond with a person’s subjective descriptions of his or her pain?
(3) If yes, is this sufficient to establish pain or anguish in the absence of any corresponding physiological pathology?
(4) If not, is there a phenomenology of pain that has consistent psychological attributes which can objectively applied to self-reported pain?
(5) Can the phenomenology of anguish or fear, when present in the absence of “hard” scientific evidence, serve to demonstrate the reality of a person’s suffering?
I’m interested if any readers are working on these questions.
