A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder

Towards a Non-Reductionist Cognitive Science

Shaun Gallagher, Bruce Janz, Lauren Reinerman, Jörg Trempler, Patricia Bockelman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137496058
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Mente e corpo in filosofia

This book presents a study of the various feelings of awe and wonder experienced by astronauts during space flight. It summarizes the results of two experimental, interdisciplinary studies that employ methods from neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology and simulation technology, and it argues for a non-reductionist approach to cognitive science.

1

Liftoff: Towards an Exploration of Subjective Experience

At one View ten thousand sparkling Orbs survey,

Innumerable Worlds and dazzling Springs of Light.

O the vast Prospect! O the charming Sight!

How full of Wonder, and Delight!

How mean, how little, does our Globe appear!

This object of our Envy, Toil and Care,

Is hardly seen amidst the Crowd above;

There, like some shining Point, does scarce distinguish’d move.

(Lady Mary Chudleigh, 1703)

10 By way of introduction ... a countdown

Near the ruins of the ancient city of Miletus, you can still walk out into an open field at night and gaze at an extremely rich array of stars. According to a famous legend, in the sixth century BCE, Thales of Miletus, one of the first philosophers to appeal to naturalistic explanations, walking across a field and gazing at the stars, found the heavens so wondrous, or was so lost in his astronomical calculations, that he walked directly into a well. Wonder has a double meaning nicely captured in the uncertainty of Thales’ mental state. Was he so awestruck by the starry vista that he was caught up in the reflective emotion of wonder, or was he so busy just wondering, intellectually, how the heavens worked? The two senses of the term meet in the claim that wonder is the beginning of philosophy. The first sense is closely tied to the feeling of awe; the second to the feeling of curiosity.

Aristotle, another Greek philosopher, argued that all humans desire to know – to pursue knowledge. Humans also desire experiences of awe and wonder. Some empirical evidence for this can be found every evening in desert places like Sedona, Arizona where small crowds gather on various hills and vortexes to witness sunsets that generate awe-inspiring and wondrous light effects on the nearby mesas and rock formations. Many people live near, or travel to the sea or mountains to have similar experiences.

Experiencing views of the stars from Earth, and views of various features of Earth from various places on the Earth’s surface can be sources of awe, wonder, curiosity and even humility. The central topic of this book involves experiencing views from a completely different perspective – looking at Earth and the surrounding universe from a position in outer space, that is, outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

9 To infinity and beyond

A significant number of astronauts, cosmonauts, and other space travelers¹ have reported experiences that are deeply aesthetic, spiritual, or sometimes religious as they have orbited the Earth in the Space Shuttle or on the International Space Station (ISS). Some of these space travelers have kept journals that describe these experiences during space flight. In many cases, they have reflected on these experiences after their return to Earth. The astronauts reporting such experiences come from different backgrounds – many are engineers and hard-nosed scientists; some are atheists; and some have religious backgrounds. Some have been led by these experiences to become more spiritually sensitive or more attuned ecologically or ethically after their return to Earth. For a few of the astronauts, these experiences have been life transforming.

On the face of it, awe and wonder are experiences that transcend religion, culture, politics, and just about every other “contextualizing” feature of human existence that one could imagine. Do we not think that almost everyone experiences such phenomena at various points in their lives under various circumstances? It seems that senses of awe and wonder come as close to human universals as could be imagined, and if we look at long-standing philosophical discussions of such things, the result of that universality has been that we have gone outside of ourselves to explain or understand our senses of awe and wonder. Such experiences must be gifts from a divine being, or from the universe itself, or from our evolutionary past as a reaction to the unknown (the “survival of primitive thought,” as William James called religion). It must, in short, be transcendental in some way.

And yet, that move has, until recently, taken us away from considering awe and wonder as phenomena worth understanding in their own right. In the nineteenth century, however, during the rise of the scientific study of religion, theorists did try to categorize “spiritual” experience (by which they meant any experience beyond a sensory awareness of the world). The goal of such categorization was to show that the spiritual was not, after all, transcendent, but immanent. The move to regard as immanent any sensibility other than the mundane rendered all human experience available to scientific investigation. However, this was followed by a backlash among those who felt that to study the awe or wonder experience fundamentally diminished it. From this perspective, it was a classic case of an observer effect in which studying something fundamentally compromises it. And yet, those who wanted to preserve awe qua awe and wonder qua wonder sometimes themselves fell into the same trap in which those experiences were explained by reference to a specific religious tradition or, later, psychotropic causes. The experiences of awe and wonder were still there, but they were rendered understandable through explanatory (quasi-causal) structures.

8 Scientific frontiers

This book is about the first scientific study of these experiences in the context of space travel.² The aim of this study was to explore what traditionally might be called the inner space of experience, while traveling in outer space. Using this vocabulary of inner versus outer, however, is not the best way to put it, even if it connects with considerations that go back centuries. The study of the experience of those who have travelled to space avoids the temptation to either reduce awe and wonder to mundane experience or explain it completely by reference to some internal processes caused by external stimuli. There are, of course, stimuli present – the sunrises that occur every 90 minutes while in orbit, the deep blackness of space, the land formations that can be viewed while 230 miles above the earth in the International Space Station. However, these are not causal in the sense that divine agency or LSD might be causal. They are contextual.

For our study, we were interested specifically in replicating the consciousness involved in the experiences of awe and wonder had by astronauts during space travel and in examining such experiences from the perspective of the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences. We gathered together a research team of psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. Also, to do this study without incurring the large cost of sending people into space, we were joined by engineers and experts in the art of simulation who were able to create virtual environments that we used as scientific test beds. For the majority of us, this was the most interdisciplinary study we have been involved in. The interdisciplinary organization of the study itself was a challenge that broadened our understanding of the nature of scientific investigation and motivated, in effect, a more intellectual and collectively shared type of wonder. This book, then, has two aims: (1) to explain the awe and wonder experienced during the adventure of space travel, and (2) to give an account of the scientific adventure of studying and wondering about such experiences.

7 Starlogs of experience

The subjective experiences of awe and wonder that we wanted to study have been well documented in journals written by astronauts during their time in space. After returning to Earth, they also wrote reflections and talked about their experiences in interviews. To initiate our scientific project, we gathered these various descriptions together and began to analyze them in two different ways. We first did a hermeneutical analysis. Hermeneutics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the interpretation of texts. It involves a careful, self-conscious analysis of the meaning of texts that keeps in mind the historical or biographical background of the authors, their intentions in writing the text, the audience they intended to reach, and the specific vocabulary they had available. Additionally, it takes into account the intentions and practical interests of the interpreter. Specifically, in this analysis, our focus was on descriptions of the experiences themselves, and we were concerned to define in very precise terms, the different forms that such experiences took. Second, we did a computer-based syntactical analysis. We looked at various patterns of syntactical structure in the language used by the astronauts to express their experiences. For example, by this method we found that the descriptions contained in the in-space journals were much more concrete (or less abstract) than the descriptions provided in later reflections and interviews.

Here are some sample descriptions that we analyzed (the details of these analyses are provided in Chapter 2).

There is a clarity, a brilliance to space that simply doesn’t exist on Earth. And nowhere else can you realize so fully the majesty of our Earth and be so awed at the thought that it’s only one of untold thousands of planets. (Gus Grissom, USA)

From these windows, the Earth is so obviously floating in an endless void, and the feeling that washes over you is the sense of scale of the universe. The feeling I got was one of recognition that “we are living on a such a tiny island in a vast ocean.” (Greg Chamitoff, Canada)

One thing is just the sheer wonder of looking down at the Earth. It is very, very beautiful ... particularly when you see it interface on the edge with space. There you suddenly get the feeling that, hey, this is just one small planet which is lost in the middle of space. ... a very important feeling about the fact that we’re just drifting through an immense universe. ... you become a little more conscious about the fact that we shouldn’t be doing silly things on Earth like fighting and killing each other. (Marc Garneau, Canada)

I frequently recalled what King David had written thousands of years ago in Psalm 19: “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” That order, that creation was very apparent to me as I looked back on this beautiful planet that looked so fragile at the same time. (Bill Nelson, USA)

The atmosphere is very small, very thin compared to the universe that surrounds the Earth. It made me feel that the Earth was very fragile and unprotected ... and it worried me. It worried me. (Alexey Leonov, Russia)

In the first glance as I looked at the Earth and saw the blue color of the Earth, I said “Suppana Allah” – something that in Arabic would mean “God is great.” (Prince Al Saud, Saudi Arabia)

Most of the descriptions are based on the astronauts’ views from windows in either the Space Shuttle or the ISS, or, less frequently, from what they could see during space walks. You can identify various themes in these expressions, ranging from aesthetic appreciation, to ecological and ethical concerns, to religious feelings. This is a small sample. We analyzed texts from 45 astronauts, including 17 in-flight journals, and 34 post-flight interviews and reflections – a total of 23,000 words. As we indicated, our focus was on the phenomenology, that is, the experiential aspects of these descriptions. For example, we frequently found what we came to call “scale effects” – changes in perspective concerning relative size – feelings of smallness in contrast to the vastness of the universe. Greg Chamitoff expresses this metaphorically: “we are living on a such a tiny island in a vast ocean.” Marc Garneau puts it in direct terms of his experience: “you suddenly get the feeling that, hey, this is just one small planet which is lost in the middle of space ... a very important feeling about the fact that we’re just drifting through an immense universe.” This is one of the very specific kinds of experiences that we came to consider as an instance in the broader category of awe.

6 Clearing our heads

In a hermeneutical analysis, the interpreter needs to become aware of his or her own biases. One may not be able to escape all such biases, but it is important to identify them and to lay them out on the table for all to see. One such bias is very basic: When we went looking for experiences of awe and wonder, we already had some conception of what we were looking for. We self-consciously decided on some working definitions. Although one of us (Bruce Janz) is well versed in the history of mysticism, we took a more pragmatic (less historical) route to defining awe and wonder, treating the definitions as tentative, preliminary, provisional, and open to revision. Still, these definitions guided our reading of the texts. However, we also found certain things of interest that did not fall into these categories, and so widened our scope as we did our analysis. Here are the working definitions with which we started.

•Awe: a direct and initial experience or feeling when faced with something amazing, incomprehensible, or sublime

•Wonder: a reflective experience motivated when one is unable to put things into a familiar conceptual framework – leading to open questions rather than conclusions

Awe hits you more immediately at the first-order level of experience; wonder is more reflective or second-order. One can think that perhaps an immediate experience of awe motivates a more reflective experience of wonder. We have more to say about these definitions, and about what we found in the astronauts’ texts in the next chapter.

5 Consulting the phenomenological map

Although we had some idea of what we were looking for, it was not at all clear how we would be able to study such things. We started by asking the following questions.

1.Can we characterize these experiences in their own terms as experiences?

2.Can we replicate them in a lab setting?

3.Can we measure the physiological and neurophysiological correlates of these experiences?

4.Can we say something about how a person’s background might play into the experiences?

The first question is about phenomenology. The term, “phenomenology” has two meanings in contemporary philosophy. In one sense (used primarily in philosophy of mind and cognitive science), it just means the consciousness that someone experiences – more specifically, the phenomenal aspect of consciousness, the qualitative feel, or what Thomas Nagel (1974) has called, the “what it is like” to experience a sensation or to perceive some object. For example, there is something it is like for you to experience a pain in your foot. This particular experience is different from what it is like to taste chocolate. Likewise, we can think that there is something it is like to experience awe – and what we want to know is precisely what that experience is like.

The second meaning of the term “phenomenology” refers to a particular philosophical approach to studying experience. This approach originated with the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and was further developed in the philosophical works of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, among others. T...