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In this conversation about investigating subjective experience, cognitive scientist Urban Kordeš considers what might happen when we deliberately direct it toward subtler layers of experience. Where does such exploration lead, and at what point does experience become undescribeable?
Kordes: I see this as an ocean. On the surface, there are all these little emotions, attention, visual stuff, and so on. But then I could go deeper and deeper, and there is this feeling of knowing something, or at least of knowing that I could know it.
Freimann: In this image of diving below the surface into the ocean of your experience, what would happen as you continue to go down to more and more subtle layers of experience? How far can you go and still be able to say something about experience?
Kordes: That’s a good question. I would say, and that’s my take on it, that we have a limited bandwidth of attention. So the question is: where do we put, or what do we do with, this precious thing which is our attention? How do we navigate it?
Normally, because of the natural attitude, we just think, “No, I’m thrown into this world. This is it. I see what is there, also what is inside, and that’s it.” But if you figure out that you actually have some agency here, you can move your attention.
For example, instead of concentrating on some part of my image of what is going on, I could concentrate on some deeper parts that are normally much more still. When I start concentrating on some deeper layers of this ocean metaphor, some other things go, “Hey, you know, I might not be so much interested in everyday colorful events.”
Freimann: So what happens if you go deeper?
Kordes: I think you know about that much better than I do. But at some point, you do get, I guess, to something that’s truly inexplicable, something that’s truly outside of the realm of everyday description.
It’s so subtle. When I’m talking about it now, I know I’m not doing it justice. But then there are even more subtle layers beyond there. So I really can’t answer whether it is possible to describe or not. Probably to some masters it is possible, masters of description, I mean, not necessarily spiritual masters.
But the first problem is how to get there: how to direct your attention to this instead of the colorful stuff of everyday experience.