Can science deal with a one-shot experience? Do we need repeatability for all forms of science?

On Nov 4 20201, Hayato Saigo & Johanness Kleiner participated in our Consciousness Talks. It was the first Consciousness Talks from a mathematical angle. I greatly enjoyed it! (Next one is on Nov 16 by Matteo Grasso & Steve Phillips).

Towards the end, I argued that science has to deal with one-shot experiences. I didn’t have time to elaborate on this idea there, so here it is.

What did I mean by one-shot experiences?

This was in response to what Johannes brought up to his argument: “private language proper”. (I’m not 100% sure if I am correctly interpreting what he means. I’m also unsure about the usage in Austen Clark’s book. Or the usage by Wittgenstein.)

Johanness’s slide defines “private language proper” as “Terms that have a reference only a for a single individual”. And this was “<=>” with the following statements. “We cannot refer to individual elements of E in theories or experiments on consciousness”. “A fundamental limitation for consciousness science!”

I am not sure how representative this idea is in consciousness research. Potentially an interesting question to ask in a survey for researchers or philosophers in the future. Like these surveys.

I have a strong doubt about the assumptions underlying these statements. I argue that consciousness research has progressed largely because of case studies. Case studies of unique brain damages and its associated changes in phenomenology. Case studies of verbal reports and behaviors that revealed striking links between consciousness and the brain. My favorite book by Ramachandran is full of such examples. https://www.amazon.com/Phantoms-Brain-Probing-Mysteries-Human/dp/0688172172. I elaborated this point in my book (Japanese only). It’s not only historical. It’s also still the biggest and most important source of the evidence. More detailed clinical case studies will be even more critical. (Recent 7T fMRI studies show amazing level of columnar individual differences, a post for another day).

What about individual differences with those who do not share the experiences with others? Synaesthesia, aphantasia, and so on and on and on? (Aphantasia is only recently recognized!)

In fact, color sciences would not have evolved to the current status if there was no science of color blind people… I often wonder how we came to discover people with colorblindness in the first place!

Consciousness science has to deal with experiences that are unique to “a single individual”. And it gains much from such studies.

Statements like Johanness’s may be coming from some notions of what science should be. In some view, science has to deal with something that is repeatable and replicable. Perhaps, this may originate from a view by Galileo etc.

But I disagree with this broader notion as well. This also leads to an even more fundamental question, which I didn’t have time to elaborate on.

Is there any “replicable” and “repeatable” phenomenon? Including everything in the universe. Isn’t any state of the world slightly different always? Isn’t any conscious experience always different in some aspect? Aren’t we ignoring lots of differences to regard something as the same? Isn’t cosmology dealing with the one-shot experience of the universe?

A theory is great if it explains something that other theories can’t. A theory is even useful if it makes useful predictions. But all predictions that the theory makes do not have to be testable. On the last point, we have elaborated in this paper.