Introspection (and some "transformative practice")

Compared to the previous section on meditation, I'd say introspection is quite a bit more illegible, mysterious, inscrutable, and idiosyncratic. For this reason I'll start with a methodological and ontological discussion, which will also serve to broaden the aperture of what introspection does or ought to include, and and will run into discussions of specific mental motions, "techniques," etc.

Apparently, there is experience, agnostic of a "mind" (and I really am skeptical of a lot of the intution that "mind" draws in), what we experience changes over time, and there are patterns to the "contents." Some of this is variously attributed to the procession of an external world, and some is usually attributed to some persistent generators of experience "on this side" of experience, again agnostic of the metaphysics of self or mind that a person uses¹.

And so, presumably, there's something to the effect of "states of mind" and "contents of experience," and, really more confusingly, there's something about consciousness or attention, or something. In any case, people often have beliefs and models about their experience, and can "inspect" their mind, and will report on all of this.

Already we're in deep shit here. What's this consciousness thing? Is it about reflection? Why is reflection the thing that distinguishes experience? (Indeed, it seems like I can have experience without reflection... or wait, but how would I know? etc.) Qualia? Do we really have any idea what qualia are?

I'm not taking this angle as a pointless stoner-thoughts jerkoff, but because I think stories about introspection, and especially those about what sorts of introspection produce reliable knowledge or not, are profoundly laden with assumptions about its causal structure. Again, I'll discuss more about the variety of systems of metaphysics applied to phenomenology, and their problems, later.

However, I want to able to say really tightly, "ok, there is certainly a domain here, as best as I can be agnostic about its shape or inputs."

Various reports of introspection

The central, stereotypical notion of introspection in modern western culture involves something about "turning inwards" (often evoking closed eyes, with a stream of "mental imagery"), sometimes highlighting somatics in attention, and most often discursive thought which "inspects" or especially "analyzes" experience and memory.

Common reports otherwise, of introspection (and related) in secular western culture:

• Contemplation on one's memories, and especially coming up with explanations for the generators of one's emotions and behaviors
  • Often this is under a specific set of psychological theories, also often under direction of a therapist.
  • Often also, this is more like "trying to adjust or reframe perception and emotion, in order not to be disturbed by something."
• "Journaling," which I might gloss for many cases as something like "telling stories to oneself, in writing, in a personal and emotive way'
• Contemplation of emotions, whether active or elicited in response to memory

Often introspection is sort of inscrutable and idiosyncratic, such that people can't really describe what it is they're doing when they "introspect;" or at least the broader culture doesn't really have a vocabulary for it, and so people's descriptions end up bespoke and illegible.

Most often people's intuitions about cognition revolve around the common phenomenology of deliberate application of effort to a question, or at least almost always "thought" is associated with a sensation that one's self is "doing" the thinking, in each moment. I'll note here that there are also fairly common reports of these qualities of effort and doing ceasing at times, or even ceasing altogether as part of awakening, usually along with claims that this phenomenology itself is also constructed or "fabricated" by the mind, and doesn't really track the underlying causal structure of thought and insight.

This is a helpful place to start from to broaden the scope of "introspection." In particular, there's a fairly wide breadth of reports of experiences at least adjacent to, and pretty relevant to, introspection, which don't involve direct application of attention.

First as an intuition pump: most people are familiar with the experience of working on a problem, whether a math problem, creative project, or interpersonal issue, really working on it consciously, not coming to a solution, and then having the answer come to them suddenly during some other activity, or especially upon waking. So the claim here is, "something something, the """mind""" is able to perform computation on subjects outside of conscious attention."

There's fairly common reports here of variously spiritual, meditative, or introspective practices producing some kind of, uh, output, without application of attention to the subject, and often immediately preceded by something unrelated, or by eg. meditation on the breath. Often also, these reports describe phenomena which result in internal changes, and which are available to attention, but are undirected and spontaneous.

• Very commonly, spiritual insight occurring suddenly, spontaneously, and again without application of attention to the contents of the insight.
  • Sometimes meditation teachers will describe eg. concentration practices as "laying the ground for insight to occur spontaneously."
• "Dreamwork," ie. practices of both interpretation of dreams but more saliently here psychological transformation which occurs during dreams
• Energetic openings which settle and reconfigure the "body-mind," leading off powerful changes in behavior and perception, very often specifically described as not under conscious control or intervention
  • Sometimes these are even reported to require non-control to proceed.
  • These can be sometimes sudden and sometimes very gradual.

Furthermore, often these are regarded as being unavailable to or separate from the "part of the mind" which uses verbal thought, meanwhile these reports usually describe a rich flow of intuition and "knowing" within the "body-mind".

Introspection has a complicated relationship with movement, play, augmentation, self-modification, etc. Many practices aren't necessarily presented as "introspective" by that name, and include some messy combination of something like modification, and observation or investigation. We might want to restrict 'introspection' to "just observation," but boy golly, if ever there was a domain where observation muddied the objects being observed, this would be it.

Below is some evocative palette of other common features of introspection and introspective practices:

• Prompting and asking questions
  • Often "answering" these questions (so something like, "just answering as one would if asked directly"), but also often "waiting for an answer to come," very often reported as coming in feeling and images, rather than words
• Reframing, deliberately telling stories, and eliciting or cultivating specific perceptions
  • (This is one of the central clusters within "transformative practice, but adjacent to introspection.")
• Exploring personal resonances
  • Eg. of aesthetics, but also often imaginal, archetypal, maybe something like "relational-affective," etc. Stereotypically, many kinds of artistic practice are deeply introspective in this sense.
    • This will probably annoy someone here, but eg. dance is for many people intensely introspective, moving through patterns of somatic resonances etc.
• Prayer and communing with spirits, depending on how we conceive of them
  • So even for those who construe prayer as literally-communcating-with-a-literal-being, there's often a substantial quality of exploring relational-affective postures with various figures. For those who construe prayer in a ~materialist frame, which I mostly do, then even moreso this belongs here.
• Exploration of just about everything described in the previous section on somatic phenomenology

Introspection, thought, self-models, and "the unconscious"

Many of those examples are moreso of transformative practices, or at least the fruits of such practices, but they're very informative for making inferences about the structure of the mind, even if they're not quite centrally "introspection" per se. Along with this, it's helpful then to distinguish between, say, "internal exploration" and something like "propositional verbal modeling."

So, often the image we have of introspection is of a process of primarily deliberative verbal reflection and contemplation, which ostensibly directly (?) produces knowledge about oneself—I want to widen a lot from this.

A person, in general, has experiences throughout their life, and their internal and external reactions are a kind of elicitation of the structure and contents of the "mind." What's maybe unusal about these kinds of weirder introspective practices is more just that they're deliberately internally elicited.

Often, introspective practices will use language as a "handle" or "hook" into the mind, agnostic of, or playful with, the truthfulness of some utterance. Salient here would again be Gendlin's Focusing, which is a practice in which a person uses verbal prompts and verbal investigation to introspect, checked against their resonances. A friend of mine also describes what he calls "existential trolling," which uses deliberately provocative or contentious prompts, to check for internal resistance or objection.

Insofar as someone is concerned with producing accurate and truthful models, they can actually do that modeling in parallel, or even separately, from their main introspective practices, which can be much wackier². In general though, introspection (or whatever) is very often oriented towards change and catharsis, or a kind of "existential knowing," really agnostic of almost any epistemic claims about the structure of the mind. (There's still problems there, which I'll discuss later.)

In fact, robust introspective practices in the circles I run in very commonly will take many tacks at an individual question or issue, and triangulate what's going from the variety of conflicting or at least multifacted internal responses. So, these practices often have a flow of back and forth between the nominal "answers" which some technique elicits (whether explicitly in words, or otherwise), and one's sense of the underlying generators.

I'm harping on this point about introspection besides verbal "investigation" also to highlight what I think is confused in a variety of conceptions of "the unconscious," and how those relate to something like "introspective accessibility." So, saliently, often one person might have some emotional dynamic which they are aware of only in terms of its effects, but which they regard as "unconscious," where another person (or the same person, after some time) might say "no no, I recognize the same process in myself, and I have vivid introspective access, it's just not necessarily verbal." (And, for that matter, it's not always clear what "verbal introspective access" might have meant, anyway.)

Often in particular this is substantially about developing fine internal sensitivity; again for more on this see the whole page on somatic phenomenology for descriptions of a lot of the relevant kind of sensitivity.

Very relevant here also will be reports of awakening, which while not quite central to "introspection," are still clearly about insight into the structure of one's experience, though usually claimed as of experience in general.

Part of the question I'm weaving in and out of here, which I'll discuss more later, is about what kinds of introspection produce useful or reliable knowledge. Often cultures, personalities, or systems of metaphysics that prefer verbal contemplation over other kinds of introspection, hold views approximately to the effect of "correct knowledge comes from careful modeling, hypothesizing, and experimentation, and 'direct knowing' is suspect."

It's a bit hard to address this broad group of objections, and any specific argument I make would likely sound like a strawman to anyone individually. Anyway, if you are at least sympathetic to the above depiction, maybe take this as gesticulating, and try to infer what my version of this argument would be for your specific case.

Firstly, I'd say this creates a bizarre separation with oneself. The unfair depiction, which I think really is accurate to some people, is shaped like "I am the part of the mind which performs the investigation, whereas the rest of my mind is the part I do investigation upon, and which is separate from me."

More importantly, though, I'd say that introspection needs a kind of raw contact, and that verbal contemplation, especially upon memory, is really more like "theorizing," rather than properly investigating the domain. Again see more discussion of this later.

More on this point

I think that some people take introspection to be bunk, because most "introspection" they ever observe is basically confabulation. So while in principle I might buy something like, "verbal contemplation, hypothesizing, and experimentation" as a model for understanding the mind (at least at some level), in practice the "sit and think about it" kinds of "introspection" often come very quickly to some kind of explanation... and then just stop there. The introspection-skeptical I think are often tracking this dynamic, and conclude, "nah bro, that's bs."

One last point here: introspection again sterotypically is something basically private, quiet, and which usually happens in stillness. Perhaps this isn't centrally "introspection", but broadly speaking I'd say that enacting one's values, or self-image, or whatever, is just the same contiguous with just "touching into them." So the examples I gave above re say dance are decent ones here, but more generally embodying one's values in the world is often both an expression of and part of an investigation into one's values. There are many reports of people being engages in a process of transformation and self-exploration over many years, some of which happens privately and quiety, and some of which happens very much in public, and yet with many revisions and turnings-over.

(And also, not to reify "values" here, but this point is inclusive of identity, mystical-transcendant wisdom, wacky somatic content, and everything else.)

Footnotes

1. To be fair actually, maybe not fully agnostic, as some people report some even more unusual metaphysics or phenomenology of self-and-world, eg. in altered states or as a result of awakening. ↩

2. So the extreme here being the large cluster often called "magick," which I'd gloss, maybe unfairly, as something like "incantations using arbitrary systems of symbols, for resonance, personal transformation, and enacting agency" ↩