On the primacy and irreducible nature of first-person versus third-person information

Introduction

First-person accounts (1PAs) are written, verbal or intentional (conscious) behaviour, e.g. sign language, accounts related to what a person feels, perceives or thinks, in other words, every mental content the person is aware of and can communicate to others if requested or desired. “I feel happy today”; “I see a pink rose”; “This panorama is awesome”; and “I think I had better do it tomorrow”, etc. are some typical examples.

On the contrary, third-person accounts (3PAs), are identical types of accounts plus their neuro and psychophysiological correlates, obtained by people who observe or measure other behaviour and mental contents and processes. “He seems happy”; “She’s looking at a rose”, and “He pushed the red button”, are example of verbal accounts. “The power of his EEG alpha band had an increase of 10%, when he relaxed”; “The medial frontal cortex increased its activity when she smiled at her partner”, and “Her heart rate decreased from 80 bpm to 60 bpm, when she heard pleasant music”, are examples of neuro and psychophysiological correlates of mental activity of the observed person.

In this essay, we will support the claim that a) some 1PAs cannot be reduced to third-person neural and psychophysiological correlates accounts (3PAs) (We will not enter here in the debate about how 1PAs can also considered 3PAs (Piccinini, 2010) with particular reference to the heterophenomenology as defined by Dennett (2003) and b) that their contents are the only information to reckon when it is necessary to analyse qualia contents, that is, emotions, beliefs, reality interpretations, quality of life and health and their effects on behaviour and the brain activity. Consequently, c) even a complete description of the brain and psychophysiological correlates of these 1PAs does not add any further information about their contents and characteristics.

This approach is at odds with the view that given the subjective and introspective nature of 1PAs, they lack objective contents and hence 3PAs are undeniably more informative.

There is not space here to describe the historical reasons of why, in psychology, 1PAs lost their importance in comparison to 3PAs. For those readers interested in this topic we suggest to refer to Klein (2015b).

When first-person accounts are not reliable

Since the seminal paper of Nisbett & Wilson (1977) evidence has been accumulated showing that people 1PAs can fail in the detection of their decision processes (but see Petitmengin et al., 2013, for a manipulation which reverted the accuracy to an high level).

According to Schooler (2015), 1PAs become unreliable when translation dissociations occur. Translation dissociations “correspond to situations in which, while in the process of re-representation, one omits, distorts, or otherwise misrepresents one’s mental state to oneself and/or others.”page 9.

A typical example is the monitoring of mind-wandering which is typically measured using self-catching and experience sampling techniques. Self-catching asks participants to monitor their mental activity and signal, for example by pressing a button, when they notice their mind activity was off-task. With experience sampling techniques, participants are probed to notice whether their mind was wandering at random time intervals.

When first-person accounts are the only valid information to consider

Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of phenomena and conditions that can be described and known only by 1PAs whereas the third-person correlates are irrelevant in order to understand their characteristics. For each of the selected phenomena we will present some examples of 1PAs and 3PAs to make evident the different informational value of these accounts as supportive of our main thesis.

Sensations and Emotions

Emotions and Emotion (Mood) Disorders. Emotions identification and their valence and arousal can be measured only taking in account 1PAs. For example the Self-Assessment Manikin in different version, see Figure 1 as an example, was used for the database of the International Affective Pictures System, whereas bipolar semantic slider scales from from 1 to 9, were used for the Nencki Affective Picture System (Marchewka et al., 2014)

Figure 1. An example of the Self-Assessment Manikin for the measure of emotions’ characteristics.

In this case the participant is requested to rate the emotional valence and arousal of a stimulus on a 5-point scale. This figure has been reproduced with permission from Li et al., 2011.

As for the measure of emotions triggered by pictures, faces, persons, etc., even the measure of the mood and its disorders can only be done by referring to 1PAs, usually by way of structured questionnaires, e.g. the Beck Depression Inventory or interviews, e.g. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 (SCID-5), in which participants respond with their extent of agreement with statements such as “I feel sad” or “I don’t cry any more than usual”, etc.

On the contrary, neuro and psychophysiological accounts (e.g. Allen et al., 2004; Lin et al., 2010), consists of biological signals that cannot convey any subjective and qualitative information about their contents but simply represent a correlation with a different type of information. For example Matsubara et al. (2016), found that the anterior cingulate cortex volume could be a distinct endophenotype of bipolar disorders, while the insular volume could be a shared bipolar disorders and major depressive disorder endophenotype. Moreover, the insula could be associated with cognitive decline and poor outcome in bipolar disorders. Can we use this information to integrate our knowledge about the characteristics of bipolar and depressive disorders of those participants?

Pain

Visual analogue, numerical rating and verbal rating scales (see Figure 2) are commonly used to assess pain intensity in clinical trials and in other types of studies. Among the multidimensional questionnaires designed to assess pain, the McGill Pain Questionnaire and Brief Pain Inventory are valid in many multilingual versions (Caraceni et al., 2002).

Figure 2. Example of a visual analog scale to measure pain.

Participants are requested to rate their perceived pain choosing one of the six different options. No copyrighted figure.

An example of a 3PAs account is “The insula ipsilateral to the site of needling was activated to a greater extent during real acupuncture than during the placebo intervention” (Pariente et al., 2005). It seems clear that this type of information cannot convey any useful information about the subjective quality of pain of the persons experiencing it.

Conscious experiences

Memory

Differently from implicit memory, e.g. procedural and associative memory, all aspects of explicit memory, e.g. autobiographical, semantic, have to rely only on 1PAs (Wilson, 2002). For example, testing autobiographical memory requires the participants to retrieve and describe personal life episodes, e.g. celebrations, deseases, special encounters with friends and relatives, etc.

Moreover Klein (2015) extensively discussed that in order to qualify as memory, “the product of learning needs to be a mental state that includes the feeling that one is reliving a past experience—that is, it provides a directly-given, non-inferential sense that one’s current mental state reflects a happening from one’s past.” (page 2). This distinction allows to interpret a series of impairments characterized by a dissociation between memory contents and the feeling of ownership of them (Klein, 2015a)

As to an example of 3PAs, Conway et al. (2001), recording the slow cortical potentials, found that left frontal negativity primarily reflects cortical activation associated with the operation of a complex retrieval process, whereas the later temporal and occipital negativity (the result of the retrieval process) reflects activation corresponding to the formation and maintenance of a detailed memory. Can you extract useful information related to the contents and the subjective experience of memory of participants from these data?

Reasoning

Among the many tasks that can be used to investigate reasoning, one is to judge whether the final statement after a series of propositions is true or false. For example, “All men are animals. All animals are mortal. Hence, all men are mortal.”: True or False?. Papageorgiou et al. (2016), investigated the EEG correlates of a series of valid and paradoxical statements and found that “During the processing of paradoxes, results demonstrated a more positive event-related potential deflection (P300) across frontal regions, whereas processing of valid statements was associated with noticeable P300 amplitudes across parieto-occipital regions”. Is there any useful information in these data that can integrate what the participants experience as thoughts, feelings and emotions?

Furthermore, any judgement in terms of true vs false, is closely dependent on culture and available knowledge and, thus, is intrinsically weak and provisional. Judgements on both truth and falsity as well as paradoxes may change over time: for example the unity of space-time and matter-energy, the Heisnberg’s principle of indetermination and the concept of entanglement look to be true in quantum physics, false or ununderstandable acording to classical, Newtonian physics. Thus, neurophysiological data about judgements can only provide an estimation of brain mechanisms and, at best, helping one to check wheter the subject is processing them as paradoxes or valid statemens, without any possible inference on subject’s experience, cultural components and, last but not least, on knowledge and comprehension of the truth, which remains in the realm of mind.

Beliefs and Self-evaluations

Discussion

As anticipated in the introduction, the aim of this essay was that of supporting the claim that there are many varieties of 1PAs the contents and characteristics of witch can be known and investigated only by these accounts and cannot be integrated with information gathered by 3PAs in particular those related to their neural or psychophysiological correlates.

We have listed ten types of phenomena that can be studied only by referring to 1PAs, even if for each of them there is a legitimate interest in knowing their neural and psychophysiological correlates. However it is important to realize, on the part of both researchers and the funders of their investigations, that the knowledge of their neural and psychophysiological correlates has nothing to add to the knowledge of these phenomena.

According to the authors of “Neuromania: on the limits of brain science” (Legrenzi & Umiltà, 2011) the popularity of the prefix “neuro” before economy (Camerer et al., 2005), aesthetics (Skov & Vartanian, 2009), marketing (Ariely & Berns, 2010), theology (Barrett, 2011), etc., represents a degeneration of an acritical adhesion of a metaphysical physicalism or mind-brain identity theory and of a superficial knowledge of the complex relationship between mind contents and its neural correlates. Many authors continue to alert researchers about the problems in defining such relationship. Max Colthearth for example repeatedly warned that “testing theories of cognition” by using fMRI investigations requires “both sensitivity (a claim that brain region X will always be active when cognitive process C is being executed) and specificity (the claim that brain region X will not be active except when cognitive process C is being executed). pag.102 (Coltheart, 2013) avoiding the so-called “consistency fallacy” that is the erroneous inference that when data that are consistent with some theory they cannot, just in virtue of this consistency, be offered as the only evidence in support of that theory. Something additional is needed, that is, evidence against the contradictory of the hypothesis.

Our statement that 1PAs are irriducible to 3PAs, could be falsified by the evidence suggesting that it is possible to change 1PAs by acting on their biological correlates. For example Saitoh et al. (2007) were successful in reducing pain due to spinal cord or peripheral lesions by applying high-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation on the primary motor cortex. Conversely, hypnosis may yield a significant increase of pain threshold up to the level of surgical anesthesia: providing proper instructions and suggestions to the patient (Facco et al., 2011; Facco et al., 2013); this is a very relevant fact allowing for Enhanced Recovery After Surgery without costs and adverse events (Facco, 2016); the same is for meditation a valuable introspctive technique sharing several features with hypnosis (Facco, 2017). As a result, the 1PA is no less relevant than 3PA, even in the context of the pragmatic approach of clinical medicine, despite having been understated by the ruling reductionist paradigm.

The main aim of our paper is not that of supporting the view that the study of the biological correlates of many 1PAs is irrelevant and a waste of resources, but that the information we can gather from 1PAs are irriducible to 3PAs and these cannot increase the information we got from 1PAs even when is it possible to infer a direct causal relationship between 3PAs and 1PAs. In fact in the Saitoh et al. (2007) example, the modification of primary cortex activity do not contain any useful information about the participants’ change in pain perception.

Our approach is akin Jack’s (2013) statements “.. our experiential understanding of our own minds is fundamentally different from, and at least to some degree incompatible with, our understanding of the mind as a mechanism. At the same time, this experiential understanding is no less important than our mechanistic understanding of the mind. In fact, it is more important. Our experiential perspective guides our understanding of ourselves, and serves as the compass which aids our navigation through the social world, allowing us to see, and ultimately connect to, the humanity in others. page 670”.

Similar position is held by Guta, (2015): “..the knowledge [neuronal, chemical, electrical activities that take place in the brain] we gather in this regard, no matter how detailed it may turn out to be, offers no help whatsoever in and of itself by way of giving us access to the first-person data. To retrieve the latter data, the right thing to do would be to directly engage with subjects of experience, that is, with people. The imaging techniques scan brains but not people’s thoughts/intentions/plans/regrets, and the list goes on and on. page 241”

We hope this essay will alert all scientists who are endorsing a metaphysical fisicalist approach who posit that all mind contents are nothing but a byproduct of the brain or emerging properties of its computational complexity (Schwartz et al., 2016; Smart, 2014) that for many phenomena, the 1PAs are the only reliable source of information available and that the knowledge of their neural and psychophysical correlates does not offer any additional information about them. Furthermore, the wealth of data available on hypnosis and meditation see (Facco, 2014; Facco, 2017), as well as music perception and performance (Fauvel et al., 2014; Han et al., 2009; Koelsch et al., 2005; Ohnishi et al., 2001) provide an increasing evidence that the mind-brain relationship is not an unidirectional one, defined by a bottom-up hierarchy from brain to mind; rather, it can be better conceived as a bidirectional relationship, where mind may also engender both functional and steady, structural changes in the brain. Needless to say, music, its value and meaning, can only exist in the realm of 1PA. The whole problem is endowed with huge epistemological and metaphysical implications, to be reappraised in order to avoid any inadvertent dogmatic drift in the scientific approach to the world of subjectivity (Klein, 2013)

Given the enormous investments in the brain research both in the USA and Europe (see Global Brain Workshop, 2016; Markram, 2012), there is a serious risk that very few research resources (e.g. funds, personnel, etc.) will be devoted to the investigation of 1PAs. It is curious that a similar worry is shared by supporters of a mind-brain fisicalist metaphysic like Schwartz et al., (2016), when they declare that “..an eliminative reductionist perspective, in which behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and other experiences can be completely explained by biological processes at the cellular and molecular levels, may be difficult to square with much current scholarship in neuroscience and in the broader field of psychology. Nevertheless, given the dependence of researchers, departments, and universities on federal grant funding, priorities emphasized by funding agencies and by their review committees may “force the hands” of researchers, departments, and universities to prioritize neuroscience at the expense of other approaches”. Page 15

Following Stanley Klein discussion about the limitations of reducing the study of Psychological Science to its biological mechanisms, we endorse his claim that “experiential aspects of reality (reflected in mental construct terms such as memory, belief, thought, and desire) give us reason to remain open to the need for psychological explanation in the treatment of mind.” (Klein, 2016)