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hey this is Leo for actualised org and today I wanted to talk about phenomenology and the importance of first-person experience in personal development and in your own growth and to maximize your own growth the importance of observing yourself from the inside and really paying a lot of heed to the experiences that you have going on inside your head day to day so what I think about is so interesting about phenomenology and phenomenology is is a branch of philosophy that deals with first-person experiences so phenomenology is all about describing and studying first-person experiences from the first person so this contrasts to most - most of the ways that science or psychology or even philosophy approaches sort of problems that deal with the mind is that usually what happens is that we look at them and we observe them from the outside in and then we try to to make connections so a psychologist might take a subject and run a bunch of experiments on them and then from that make deduction spell what what that person is thinking well phenomenology kind of turns that whole process inside out so instead of observing subjects or running experiments on them or cutting someone's brain open and studying it from that from that perspective what phenomenology does is it studies it from inside so what you're doing is you're actually going inside your own head and experiencing and then trying to study and actually figure out consistent properties within your own experiences within your own thoughts and then draw draw certain conclusions out of it so there's a whole whole history of it there's a rich history about 150 years of phenomenological work and that ties in with philosophy of mind so what's interesting there and I think this is so fascinating is is the idea that first-person experiences are actually a lot of times they're thought of as subjective and kind of flaky and not very important it's it it's like science is is objective science it deals with the with the external world and that that is that is the important stuff I think there's also a lot of importance in the inner world especially when it comes to self development work so one of the most fascinating questions and topics I think that I've ever come across from studying a lot of philosophy and psychology and self-development is the idea of qualia what are qualia well qualia are all the subjective properties that you experience in your day-to-day life so an example of quality would be colors it could also be sounds the actual perceptions of them so not the color as it is in the external world but the color as it is perceived by you in your consciousness so we're really talking about here is consciousness and various aspects of it so all the different qualities of consciousness those are what we would call qualia what's interesting about them is that they're completely personal and subjective so they only happen to you and there's no really good way to even talk about them with the standard scientific models so I think one of the most fascinating in fact problems left for science is figuring out a way to reconcile and to really explain what qualia are because on the one hand it seems like qualia are the things that are most real because they are what we commonly know from our experience there are the things that we know most intimately on the other hand there's really no way to even compare experiences of one person to the other person just to see if they even match up and how do you even start describing quality it's so personal just the very fact that that I have a certain color shirt on right now and that I'm experiencing it in my consciousness as red is is very particular to me and you might also experience it red but that feeling of redness that you're getting that you're sensing there's no good scientific way to talk about it or to describe it you can talk about the wavelengths of red you can say everything there is to know about the science of red but that whole description you can you can read a whole textbook on it but that description of red will never actually get you the feeling of red and the experience of red the quality of red so it's a very interesting topic I think that science is gonna have to come to grips with because it's on the one hand right now what kind of mainstream science does is it it almost discounts the importance of qualia or the fact that they exist saying that while all this mental phenomenon can be boiled down to neurological activity in the brain and while that's well that seems like to be likely to be the case from all the developments in neuroscience is it seems like it is in fact the case that the neurons in your brain and the activity that's going on there the electrical impulses that are firing off all of that stuff is ultimately giving rise to your consciousness and to your feelings and your experiences but the question still remains if we take the brain and let's say we just kind of magnify it up and then we walk around on the inside of it and to look around the analogy is like if we take an old sawmill and we go and we go inside the old sawmill we look around if the brain is the sawmill and we look around and we walk around it we can do a thorough inspection and we'll never ever find the quality of red inside the sawmill so no matter how good neuroscience gets you're never going to find the quality of red in the brain at least not in that same way that we're talking about you can try to reduce it and boil it down to some physical phenomenon but in the end it's very hard to deny because we all experience it firsthand that there's something to this consciousness thing so I think that's really interesting just like an interesting fascinating topic and it's a great lead-in in to what I want to really talk about which is the importance of observing yourself observing yourself from the first person as you as you try to grow yourself because I think that's a larger aspect of self-discovery and I think it's also the foundation of it a few more points on phenomenology and kind of some of the some of the quirkiness of experience and consciousness one interesting case that I'm going to bring to you is called the mala no problem and the mala no problem came about in nineteen in know in 1688 this was a long time ago in 1688 and Irish scientists and politician by the name of Peter Mullan Oh William Molyneux introduced this idea to John Locke he basically sent him a letter and he posed this little thought experiment it was a philosophical type of thought experiment what would happen if a man was born blind and grew up blind and then all of a sudden he gained his vision back now the question is would that man be able to distinguish by looking at a sphere right next to a cube so let's say you have a spherical object next to a cubical object just by sight alone would that man be able to distinguish which one of them is spherical in which one of them is cubical so this has to do with how our perception and vision connects with our sense of touch so presumably what would happen there is that the band would grow up blind but he would be touching objects so he'd have a good sense of sharpness and roundness of objects so if you felt spherical objects and he felt cubical objects he would presumably have a lot of experience with how that felt what roundness felt like and what what sharpness and sharp edges felt like so once he has that but then he never attached the sense of vision to it so he doesn't really know what a sphere looks like he doesn't really know what a cube would look like when he does have that ability all the sudden turned on let's say is he going to be aware of which one is the round thing and which one is the square thing so what do you think what how would you answer that question would you say that that he could or that he couldn't well this was a long-standing philosophical debate which Molineux introduced to lock and then lock talked about it and then really philosopher talked about it for four centuries and they try to do experiments on it but it's actually really hard to do this kind of experiment because it's it's very rare the cases where someone is born blind and then all of a sudden gains their vision back is very rare let alone after that at that precise moment when the vision is gained back to have some philosopher scientists then run that kind of experiment on them so the results were mixed and it was hard to figure that out now what's interesting to me is that I always I always assumed that the answer would be no that the blind man would not be able to automatically distinguish roundness from-from squareness because that's something that you have to build up through experience at least that was kind of my my intuition about it but it's kind of freaky to think that that it would actually be that way right if squareness and roundness are really quite distinct from our our feeling of them is very distinct from our seeing them because it tends to we tend to assume I think the common notion is to assume that the two go hand in hand and that if something feels round it looks round and the two are very very coupled so it's actually interesting is that in 2003 there was a study done in India where there were five patients that actually had this rare condition where they were born blind and then at around the age in adolescence like aged 15 to 18 they were treated for blindness using modern modern technologies and medicines and they suddenly got their their vision back and so this was a perfect opportunity to run the test and that would actually what happened is that they did run the tests and what they and what they discovered was that indeed the like the the ability of the subject who used to be blind and now could see to distinguish between a sphere and a cube was slightly above 50% so it was almost like they were guessing they did slightly better than guessing so what that basically says is that indeed the two are decoupled and that your sense of being able to distinguish roundness from squareness visually is different from your ability to distinguish it tactically so to me that kind of confirmed my own hypothesis but it's interesting that that it is that way right it's a little bit freaky I think the relevance of this thing beat of this experiment in this whole Molineux problem besides the fact that it's just kind of freaky and interesting and fascinating is the fact that what we think and what we really attribute to being very real or part of our construct of reality and the way that we experience it firsthand phenomenologically is really a lot of construct a lot of a lot of us a lot of stuff it's not like we're just passively picking up everything that's coming at us a lot of a lot of our understanding of reality and really our whole conception of reality is us projecting a lot of ourselves onto it so I think that's that has a lot of deep deep kind of roots and just guess you to start thinking about kind of what else in your life are you really just kind of projecting out there and what are you taking for granted in your perceptions what are you taking for granted in how you think the world works what are you taking you know what what parts of reality that you think are just really solid and really real are actually just habits habits that you have so interesting interesting example another interesting example I'm going to throw out to you is the reverse spectrum problem also classical philosophical problem kind of along the same lines as the Molineux problem and this basically just says that how do we know that two observers experience qualia in the same way specifically we're talking about color here so how do we know for example that like we all agree that this shirt right here that I have on is red the question is how do we know that my perception of this color red is exactly the same as your perception of it well this is an interesting problem because even though we can take you know we can take a microscope and we can analyze the we can analyze the fabric and we can look at the the light waves bouncing off of it and we completely understand the whole mechanics of light and optics and how its picked up in the brain how it's picked up in the eye and all of that the fact is that that's not really what the question is is is concerning the question is more concerning the first person experience that qualia that we talked about right so the question is how do we know that my qualia are the same as your qualia it could very be the que very well be the case at least hypothetically speaking that what I'm perceiving as red and what I'm calling red is what you're actually perceiving as blue but calling red and we can still completely agree on everything and our language would work in the real world everything that we talked about we'd still be able to make sense of it but we would just have different experiences and because those experiences are completely first-person completely subjective and inner and never accessible to either one of us they're only accessible to the person that's experiencing them then we would never be able to really compare side-by-side and ever to be able to to say which which quality whether there is a difference or there's not even though we're calling it the same red so what happens is if all the Reds in your in your reality in your mind were actually the kind of what what I would see is Blues in your reality but I would see them as Blues in my reality but we just we'd agree on labels so this is an interesting example and it just demonstrates kind of the trickiness and the slipperiness of what qualia are and what and I think it lends some interesting weight to first-person experiences because really the defining property of them is that they can only be know on by by the observer so there they're always private we can only guess that other people know what we're talking about when we say red you can't ever be completely sure so that's also interesting in the sense that it also kind of uh pulls the blanket back right pulls the curtain back and lets us unless us think that if that is a possibility then again how much how much of reality are we really projecting out there ourselves what if the way that I experience the world is my world is completely colored differently than yours it's kind of freaky to think about that like I'm walking around and looking around and I'm seeing colors and you're walking around and you're seeing the exact inverse of those colors and yet we can still communicate and everything still works just fine and in fact maybe that is exactly the case yet we assume that everyone around us sees exactly what we see yet we have no real proof of that and the the even weirder thing is that it's not even clear how we get we would get proof of that the only way to do that would be to somehow be able to meld like meld my mind with your mind and do some sort of inner conscious comparing but there's no way we don't even know if that's possible or how that would be done if it were possible so very interesting very interesting examples that kind of start getting you to really think about some of the magical properties of consciousness and what it really is also demonstrates that a lot of the stuff is not as simple as reducing it down to two physical two physical things that we would normally consider physical in the real world and I'm not saying that your consciousness is some magical woooo thing or a ghost or whatever but it also is very clear that you can't just discount qualia completely because there's something that's but that's quite real and quite important to us especially when we're talking about first-person experiences so you know what does all this mean what does this always have to do with self-development well I think the bedrock of self development as I've discovered is really self observation is self understanding and it's easy to discount that because it seems so fundamental and so basic but on the other hand I think it's also critical to get it right I think the trick is that most of us deceive ourselves as to how well we really know ourselves how conscious we really are of ourselves we assume that we are but actually a lot of times where we're quite shocked when we discover that what we thought we knew was not actually what we really knew and I think in self-development this is really important is when you're starting to try to work on yourself and you're working through your own issues you're working through your own reactions and your own views and interpretations of the world and your own beliefs you start to see like you start to almost see these fissures in the matrix so you start to see that your world and how you construct it is really like living in a matrix and you start to see certain places where it kind of starts to break down it's like you start to see these little cracks you start to see the cracks and you start to see that really when I'm when I'm what I thought was out there is actually in here and I'm projecting a lot of the stuff out onto the world and when you start to realize that a lot of possibilities open up for you first of all Youth you start to take a lot more responsibility on yourself for managing how you feel for managing your own thoughts your own beliefs and then you also start to wonder and you start to really get that very freaky matrix like feeling like you constructus to get a control and a sense of a sense of agency over this stuff so stuff that you thought that was triggering you outside you start to see like hah that's actually what's actually happening there is that sure I'm getting provoked from the outside by a certain stimulus but then the reaction is happening within me and that reaction is something that you've actually learned to control and it you know if you like the reaction you can keep it if you don't like it you can certainly learn to to kind of override override it and change the mechanisms to the point where you're having the same the same sting relation but then the reaction that you're having is totally different or it doesn't affect you at all so it can give you almost those kind of matrix like properties where if you believe it enough then you start to be able to do crazy stuff like jump from buildings to buildings and fly and do this kind of crazy stuff the thing is that it's hard to even even see that this is possible unless you start to to really get a lot of inner awareness and inner development I think that's critical to do successful self development because you really need to start to develop a deep understanding of the forces that are driving you on the inside so that first person that that first person experience I think that's discounted a lot in in our society and also in in literature and books and that kind of stuff because everyone talked about the external stuff third-person the stuff that's kind of objective and few people talk about really the subjective experiences which are still very important you know what are the subjective experiences that you have of achieving any of the goals that you want so whether it's earning more money or getting getting fit eating healthier getting a better relationships you know what are like the pains and the struggles that you're experiencing and on also what are the good things and then getting a better understanding of that getting an understanding of what exactly you want in all those situations and what you don't want is is critical and I think it's very highly discounted in fact there's an interesting an interesting development here that I want to introduce which is that a man by the name of Peter Spence key back in the early nineteen in the early 1900s worked with another guy who was kind of a European mystic and his name was go Jeff so Girja finesse Penske they did some writings and they did a lot of study on how to how to do personal improvement and how to do kind of evolution and get personal evolution personal growth and they did some lecture they did some but they wrote they wrote some books on this and one of the books is called I have it here it's been skis the psychology of man's possible evolution and really this is a very interesting very interesting text to go to because it really talks about what it takes to to evolve yourself as human being and it talks about some of the nuances of it and some of the core fundamental problems so I want to what I want to do here is I really want to read you some excerpts from it because I think it's it's really powerful and starts to to frame to frame all self development because it's not just about going in there I think the problem with self development and hewed as just behavior change or going in there and trying to get you know a quick little fix like losing five pounds here or getting some more money in your bank account there I think that's not it can work sometimes I don't think it leads the best long-term results I think if you want to look at self development long term as something they can really transform your life you have to look at it on that long-term basis and you have to look at it as something that you do throughout your life is just you try to better understand yourself and you try to gain mastery over yourself which is something that I call self mastery and you know what is the process of self mastery how does it work if you're interested in it how do you go about it so these are all fascinating questions and then of course what are the challenges of self mastery so let me read you a little bit of who Spence Keats thoughts on this matter and if you're really interested in it you can pick this up and kind of take it off from there and I'll I'll show you some of my thoughts about it as well so here's we dispense key says in psychology of man's possible evolution in order to become different man must want it very much and for a very long time a passing desire or a vague desire based on dissatisfaction with external conditions will not create sufficient impulse the evolution of man depends on his understanding of what he may get and what he must give for it if man does not want it or if he does not want strongly enough and does not make the necessary efforts he will never develop in becoming a different being man acquires many new qualities and powers which he does not possess now but before acquiring any new faculties or powers which man does not now possess he must acquire faculties and powers he also does not possess but which he ascribes to himself now this is an important point he clarifies this that is man thinks that he knows that he has these powers and that he can use and control them but in fact he can't man must acquire qualities which he thinks he already possesses but about which he deceives himself so this is where it gets interesting the chief and then there are he starts going through and talking about some of the ways in which we deceive ourselves and so I'm not going to go through all of them because that would take quite a bit of time but here's here's probably the biggest point so there's a very important fact and the most important fact in which you deceive yourself as quote Ouspensky says man does not know himself he does not know his own limitations and his own possibilities he does not even know how great an extent - how great an extent he doesn't know himself I think this is a really good analogy right here man has invented many machines and he knows that a complicated machine needs sometimes years of careful study before man can use or control it the man does not apply this knowledge to himself although he himself is a much more complicated machine than any machine that has ever been invented so what does all that mean well I think goose Penske is brilliant Garifuna Spence key what I really took from them is the importance that if you're going to be doing self development is the importance of starting to really observe yourself and what you're doing and why what you're doing is causing problems for you and the problems of behavior changes that come about so how does this really apply to to our everyday lives well it really means that the powers that you think you have the willpower do you think you have the consciousness that you think you possess is actually quite deceptive in fact what he argues for is that most of us are walking around in a sleeping days and now we think that we are conscious but most of the times you are not actually conscious you are not self conscious as it might be said so you're going through your day you're doing routines you're rubbing you're running through habits and you're acting very robotic like you're acting almost like a machine even though you would never admit it but the fact of the matter is that next time you're running through your day stop just randomly stop throughout the day and observe the thoughts are going through your head observe what it is that you're doing kind of observe yourself and your start to see that oh my god I was just running through this whole spiel this whole routine and just now that I stopped I suddenly notice what I was doing so it starts to get you to see that your body and that your mind and you as an organism is really that you are a very complex machine with a lot of subroutines and a lot of components that run on autopilot right so you have an unconscious mind you have a conscious mind but a lot of times the stuff that you're doing throughout your day is very habitual very route very routine and so this this is important to understand when we start talking about wanting to change behaviors because if you're talking about losing some weight or you're talking about running your business differently or you're talking about leaving your job and starting your own business or you're talking about switching careers well that starts to involve behavior change and all the forces that come into play there I think the biggest problem is that when we start to want some of these things we don't realize and don't really understand from a first-person experience what these forces are we haven't identified them we haven't labeled them we have very little experiencing changing experiences changing them so then when we do because of that ignorant it's like a fog that that leads most people to just kind of grasp around in the dark try this or that randomly and then leads to failure just because we're not equipped with the challenges that are there just even appreciating the challenges is very important so you know next time you're doing something that you told yourself that you wouldn't do anymore like let's say you are on a diet and you're trying to lose some weight and you tell yourself that you going to be eating clean and then you run off to the pantry and you grab a bag of chips and you start stuffing your face with chips look at yourself doing that because chances are when you're doing that you're acting you're acting on autopilot and you're acting and you're driven by forces that you don't even realize are quite there that you haven't really inspected so inspect what's really going on there and you'll see something interesting is that if you're lucky to be conscious to catch yourself in that moment you're going to be grabbing that chip out of the bag and you're going to be putting it up to your mouth and then you can kind of pause and just kind of do a little self reflective activity and just see oh my god what's happening here I have this chip that's I'm about to put in my mouth I told myself I wouldn't do this but yet I'm doing it and I'm driven by by these forces and then just kind of observe yourself doing it right it's like the automatic part of you that that is still running on one of those routines is doing this stuff and then yet your conscious mind is looking at it it's seeing it in that case if you are lucky enough and you kind of summon the fortitude to be conscious there and yet a lot of times it's still powerless to do it to do anything about it it's still powerless to change it and so that's kind of how its arts is you have to start to see yourself engaging in these behaviors engaging in these activities and you have to start to and really appreciate the forces there because your willpower is limited and your consciousness is limited you're not always in a high conscious State a lot of times you're in low consciousness mode or you're completely unconscious and you're totally on autopilot and yet that's how most of our lives are lived so to do effective behavior change to do effective personal growth starting to see that starting to learn that and then you have to become clever and tricky with it and really outsmart your own self outsmart your own biology outsmart your own thinking patterns because to make an effective change in your life a lot of times what's required is thinking in a roundabout way how to achieve your results so instead of saying that well you know what I'm going to do I'm going to I'm going to force myself not to eat any chips ever again and then you're running on willpower do you think that's gonna that's gonna be great you think that's the strategy you're going to take to lose weight and then what happens is you last out one day you last out two days everything's good then three days four days five days and then ten days later on the tenth day well what happens you start focusing on something else you focus on the on the problems that you're having at work you focus on your relationship you focus on something else in your life and then all of a sudden you find yourself walking towards the pantry to grab a bag of chips right because your willpower is starting to is starting to to drain or you quite simply just start to lose focus and start to even forget about the original intentions that you set for yourself so starting to realize that these are real forces in your own head that you're dealing with that you're grappling with I think it's very important to do effective personal change and so the foundation of it all there's no easy answers here what does all this mean it just means that you have to become a lot more observant about your own patterns you have to start becoming more observant about what you're doing in your life and really putting a lot more importance in the kind of feelings that you have kind of beliefs that you have the kind of thoughts that you have like a good exercise for example is to just randomly a few times throughout the day stop and just monitor your own thoughts drop everything you're doing in your day and just stop and monitor your own thoughts and then see what am I thinking right now what have I been thinking for the last five minutes has it been a bunch of worry has it been a bunch of anxious nonsense was I thinking about the fight I had with my boss was I thinking about the vacation that's coming up two weeks from now and I was caught up in that was I having an imaginary argument with somebody in my head was I thinking a bunch of negative thoughts about how everything's gonna go horribly wrong tomorrow at this dinner party that I'm going to so those kinds of things usually happen to us automatically and a good chunk of your day if you really think about it a good chunk of your day is spent in those kinds of Unruh source phille states and that is where you want to do a lot of a lot of work because that's where you can get very big gains eliminating those kinds of thoughts working on them in finding ways and using techniques to work on that stuff you