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What Experience Doesn’t Teach What Experience Doesn’t Teach

What Experience Doesn’t Teach - PowerPoint Presentation

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What Experience Doesn’t Teach - PPT Presentation

What Experience Doesnt Teach PACIFIC APA PreConference on Transformative Experience Seattle 2017 Barbara Gail Montero Experience it is often said is the best teacher As David Lewis 1988 tells us ID: 769298

pain experience paul memory experience pain memory paul learn component physical memories 2004 experience

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What Experience Doesn’t Teach PACIFIC APA Pre-Conference on Transformative Experience Seattle 2017 Barbara Gail Montero

Experience, it is often said, is the best teacher. As David Lewis (1988) tells us: “If you want to know what some new and different experience is like, you can learn it by going out and really having that experience.” But is this right?

Drawing from neuroscientific research on the memory of pain, examples from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , and a sprinkling of phenomenology, I want to bring to the fore two ways in which experience’s pedagogy is flawed: Some kinds of what would seem to be even highly significant experiences fail to leave much if any of a memory trace Certain experiences can be highly misleading. Beyond this, I am also going to try to say something about the decision theoretic relevance of experience’s shortcomings and about the degree to which we do value autonomy. Just in case it’s not abundantly clear, this is a work in progress.

I . Impoverished Conscious Memories Consider Mary. It seems that the only way Mary is going to learn what it is like to see colors is to have the experience of seeing colors. Or as L.A. Paul tells us, “what we learn from the case of Mary is that stories, testimony, and theories aren't enough to teach you what it is like to have truly new types of experiences—you learn what it is like by actually having an experience of that type.” Or as she puts it elsewhere, “we can discover the intrinsic nature of a sensory experience such as what it is like to see red merely by seeing red for the first time.”

Do individuals who are given color vision understand what it is like to see red or do they, like those who have been given sight after being blind, need to figure it out? Monkeys take a while ( Dolgin 2009) No matter; experience still taught her, even if it takes her some time to decipher its precepts. Aural experiences might be like this as well But other types of experiences are not such good teachers.

Thermosensation Gustation How do they rate?

Paul discusses the question of how one can decide to become a parent: How can you make this decision given you have no knowledge of what parenthood would be like for you. But there are some aspects of parenthood that even after you experience them, you don’t know what they are like. The sleepless nights might be like this, or at least they may impede the ability to recall much of what happened in those early months. (Interesting data on how different cycles of sleep loss affect declarative versus procedural memories) ( Gais and Born 2004).

Labor pain Can birth mothers recollect labor pain well enough to take this into account about whether they would want to go through it again? The majority of women paint a rosier picture of the birthing experience as time goes ( Waldenstrom and Schytt 2008). Moreover, phenomenology and neuroscience suggest that a component of the experience—the way it feels—is washed away from at least conscious memory.

You might say, “but mothers discover the joys of parenthood and decide based on the judgement that it was worth it.” This is, of course, we all interpreted it. However, the fact of the matter is we no longer have a basis for judgement. Findings shown that “women who remember childbirth as a negative experience have fewer subsequent children, and a longer gap between children, than women who have a positive overall experience”  Waldenstrom and Schytt (2008). Experience’s pedagogy seems to fail the birth-mother.

Do birth-mothers really forget the pain? As Rainville et al. ( 2004) point out, we have a limited understanding of the neurological basis of the encoding and intentional retrieval of pain. Nonetheless, some data suggests that our memory of what in this literature is referred to as the “affective” component of physical pain (which underlies judgements about its unpleasantness) is impoverished relative to its “sensory” component (which underlies judgements about where it is and its intensity) (Meyer et al. 2005, Rainveill et al. 2004). This is significant since it is the affective component that motivates us to avoid it.

The Ability Hypothesis It may be, as Lewis says, after an experience, you gain an ability to recognize the same experience if it comes again. (Though, note that even with color experience we sometimes fail at this) Rainveill et al. (2004) suggests that when we try to reidentify pain, sensory but not affective nueral circuitries are activated. But such ability to re-identify pain is not going to help you to decide whether to have it again.

In his seven-volume magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time , Proust suggests that “social pains,” such as the pain of a broken heart, are similarly poor pedagogues. Speaking of Gilberte, his first love, the narrator tells us: She was for me like a dead person for whom one has long mourned, and then forgetfulness has come. . . I no longer had any desire to see her, not even that desire to show her that I did not wish to see her which, every day, when I was in love with her, I vowed to myself that I would flaunt before her when I loved her no longer. In fact, your past self, the self that felt those sentiments, might appear as a stranger to you: I was not one man only, but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men—jealous men no two of whom were jealous of the same woman (101).

The empirical literature doesn’t back this up. Although social and physical pain have some commonalities—acetaminophen has been shown to help both ( Dewall et al. 2010)—there are indications that they encoded in memory in different ways (Meyer et al. 2015). Bad news for those with a broken heart. One possibility: romantic rejection is an exception (the study does not break down the different kinds of social pains)

Incidentally, we seem to become habituated to random physical pains delivered electronically, though not to those same physical stimuli delivered intentionally (Gray and Wegner 2008). One hypothesis about why this is so connects to the idea that the affective component of social pain is remembered and in the intentional delivery there is a social component.

But what about unconscious memories? Can they be brought to bear in transformative decisions? In The Fugitive (vol. 6, ISLT), Proust tells us, “Each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library in which there are older books, a volume which, doubtless, nobody will ever ask to see.” Such memories may not be locked away forever. As Proust suggest, they may arise spontaneously in response to a sensory stimulus—such as the the tea-soaked madeline —which brings a flood of pleasant memories.

And Proust suggested that some of these memories are stored in the body: “There seems to be an instinctive memory in the limbs, a pale and sterile imitation of the other memory, but one that lives longer.” Patra Jongjitirat  in, As it Grows Fainter

Spontaneous recollections of unpleasant events Post traumatic shock can encompass reliving a painful episode ( Salomons 2004). The power of music to bring back memories and bodily sensations

Where we are so far: The affective experience of physical pains, at least, may not leave a conscious memory trace. Thus, putting aside spontaneous memory, you may not learn what the affective component of physical pain is like by having it. In particular, there are some aspects of becoming a parent—perhaps even decision-guiding aspects—that you don’t learn by experiencing them.

Of course, for their respective purposes, neither Lewis nor Paul need to maintain that experience alone is sufficient for coming to understand what a brand-new experience is like. As Kant said, and Proust put better: “It is reason that uncovers the eyes.” Nor must they maintain that it is logically necessary to have an experience to know what that experience is like: In Lewis’s words, “[that] experience is the best teacher about what a new experience is like . . . [is] a contingent truth. But we have good reason to think it’s true.” Although I have not shown that any other means of instruction would be superior (nor even at least as good), I hope to have illustrated that experience would be a much better teacher, if, to put it in Proust’s terms, it didn’t “fade to oblivion.”

Experience’s Misguidance Its transience is not the only way in which experience fails us as a mentor, for, arguably, experience is sometimes misguided. That some of our visual perceptions are illusory is a fact well known and loved by rationalist philosophers and cognitive scientists alike. However, arguably, seeing the one line longer than the other in the Muller- Lyer illusion is still the best guide to what that experience is like.

Concepts, may, instead of uncovering the eyes, cloud them. Implicit biases. I remember I once overheard a philosopher say “I can spot philosophical talent when I see it.” He was trying to defend the use of interviews. He thought experience was necessary to learn what a candidate was like. However, some research shows that we tend to place too much weight on the scant information garnered from first-impressions ( Olivola and Todorov 2009)

When experiencing another person through the lens of implicit bias, are you nonetheless learning what it is like for you to experience that person? Or are you mistaken about your experience? Are there cases of when first person experience is not the best guide to what first person experience is like?

In ISLT, the narrator comments how is it often the case that people are “discovered long afterwards to be the opposite of what was thought.” Not because they change, but because your perspective on them was an optional perspective. Could you discover that you did not even learn what it was like for you to experience a person?

Kripke : There is no appearance reality distinction for experience Paul Churchland disagrees, citing pain versus temperature mistakes. Also see Reuter (2011) who argues feeling pain is distinct from having pain based on a web-based statistical analysis of the contexts in which people use the phrase “feel a pain” as opposed to “have a pain.” The Chomsky/undergrad view might be right.

III. Might objective data sometimes be a better guide than subjective experience when caught up in a transformative choice?   Paul invites us to imagine a woman, Sally, who had wanted a child yet changes her mind because, as Paul explains, . . . the empirical evidence tells her she will maximize her expected subjective value by choosing to remain childless. For her to choose this way, ignoring her subjective preferences and relying solely on external reasons, seems bizarre. How could Sally's own preferences not matter to her decision? If Sally, in effect, turns her decision over to the experts and eliminates consideration of her first personal perspective, she seems to be giving up her autonomy for the sake of rationality.   But if you are choosing to base your decision on external reasons are you giving up autonomy?

Paul continues, In other words, in today's society, when making important personal choices, we want to consult our own, personal preferences and to reflect on what we want our future lives to be like as part of assigning values to outcomes. It is simply unacceptable to be expected to give up this sort of personal autonomy in order to make decisions about how one wants to live one's life. 90% of the people in India think otherwise.

And not just India: Recommendation Engines and Personalization Algorithms Books, music, movies, news Can Tinder decide better than you can? Filter bubble Ways Buying a house [Technology] lets you go off with like-minded people, so you're not mixing and sharing and understanding other points of view ... It's super important. It's turned out to be more of a problem than I, or many others, would have expected. --Bill Gates 2017, in Quartz Are we giving up on consulting our personal preferences?

THANK YOU Gais S, Born J. (2004) Declarative memory consolidation: Mechanisms acting during human sleep.  Learning & Memory ;11(6):679-685. doi:10.1101/lm.80504. Albanese MC, Duerden EG, Rainville P, Duncan GH. (2007) Memory traces of pain in human cortex. Journal of Neuroscience.; 27(17):4612–20. Fairhurst M, Fairhurst K, Berna C, Tracey I. (2012) An fMRI study exploring the overlap and differences between neural representations of physical and recalled pain. 7(10)Gray K, Wegner DM. (2008), The sting of intentional pain. Psychol Sci 19(12). Lewis, D. (1988 ) What experience Teaches, Proceedings of the Russellian , Society, University of Sydney, 13: 29-57. Olivola , C., Todorov A. (2010) Fooled by first impressions? Reexamining the diagnostic value of appearance-based inferences, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010) 315– 324. Paul, L. A. ( 2014) Transformative Experience, Oxford Univeristy Press Proust, M. (1913–1927), In Search of Lost Time, Public Domain. Salomons , Timothy; Osterman, Janet; Gagliese , Lucia; Katz, Joel (2004), Pain Flashbacks in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Clinical Journal o Pain:  March/April, Volume 20 - Issue 2: 83-87 Waldenstrom , U. and Schytt , E. (2008) A longitudinal study of women’s memory of labour pain: from 2 months to 5 years after the birth.  BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology .