Humans as Sensors: Phenomenology and the Lifeworld as the Grounds of All Knowledge

In a recent team meeting regarding an ongoing research project to systematically analyze experiencer testimony, the topic was brought up regarding how to make the data more scientific. Team member and neuroscientist Dr. Charles Yokoyama mentioned that while this was not a traditionally scientific study, we were essentially making the case for using “humans as sensors.” In other words, in our study, human observation is going to play the role that for the sciences is usually played by some kind of technological instrument. This is because instruments and other “objective” measurements are seen, for a variety of reasons, as reliable to remain “neutral”, reduce noise in the data set, and essentially grant us access to reality.

I appreciated Dr. Yokoyama’s suggestion very much, but as a philosopher, it prompted some deep reflection on how our modern culture has established a method of truth production in which we have to make a case that humans can be used as sensors. Individual conscious experience is fundamentally our only immediate access point to reality. And yet we have been told to distrust this immediate access point. Hence, we have introduced instruments, radar, sensors, etc. as giving us access to the “real world” rather than our lived experience of it.

The problem I’ve identified is a problem Edmund Husserl saw when he wrote The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in 1936 [published 1954. trans. in English 1970].  Husserl thought that the desire of modern humans to convert all of reality into something that was knowable through the mathematical sciences and cause and effect mechanisms had produced a culture that no longer knew how to deal with questions of human life and meaning. Husserl also argued that while the sciences do create a new and more precise way of understanding certain aspects of our experience of the lifeworld, (the lived world of shapes, colors, smells, textures, and sounds), they do not replace the lifeworld as the foundation of knowledge. Indeed it is only because we are embedded in the lifeworld and have access to objects as they appear to us, that we can enter into the scientific attitude and produce scientific knowledge. Husserl also saw it as a fundamental problem that science had established the world as known through instruments (the world of protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.) as more real than the world as it appears to us, considering that the world as scientifically conceived is never a world that we can directly experience.

The contrast between the subjectivity of the lifeworld and the ‘objective,’ the ‘true’ world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical-logical substruction, the substruction of something that is in principle not perceivable, in principle not experienceable in its own proper being, whereas the subjective, in the life-world, is distinguished in all respects precisely by its being actually experienceable (Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 127). 

Husserl does think that there is genuine knowledge being produced by the physical sciences, but it is a knowledge that is ultimately rooted in our lived experience of the world and practices of human beings. Husserlian scholar Robert Sokolowski comments,

Science has to be asserted by scientists, by human beings who carry out the special kind of thinking that intending proper to it. Science involves various kinds of intentionality…but it does not float free from the persons, the transcendental egos, who achieve the science (Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 148).

Husserl’s point is that science is one of our established institutions within the lifeworld—it does not replace the lifeworld. The idealized objects that science deals with (Sokolowski gives the examples of frictionless surfaces, rays of light, ideal voltage sources, test particles, ideal gases, etc.) are not directly experienceable, however they have their roots in things that we do directly experience. They emerge through a blend of perception and human thought or imagination. This is in itself is not a problem; it only becomes problematic when we assume that the world conceived in such a manner is superior to and more real than the world as it is lived.

Husserl’s concerns about scientific abstraction were shared by others during the first half of the 20th century. Alfred North Whitehead, for example, cautioned us against the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” which conceives of abstractions (the theory-laden data collected by science and its instruments) as somehow more concrete or real than the first-person experience of what science wants to study (Whitehead, Science and the Modern World). To argue that these abstract features are “more real” than what we encounter first-hand is to confuse the enabling conditions with that which they enable—first-person experience, or qualia (thank you to Michael E. Zimmerman for aiding in this clarification).

I’ve become a bit of a broken record, but the matter is of utmost importance to the UAP matter. I enjoy watching The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, and I am excited about some of the scientific research being conducted on UAP. I also think that this gives us insight into one way of knowing aspects of UAP in a more precise manner. But the full scope of the way that UAP appear and are experienced in the lifeworld, ranging from lights in the sky to sightings of entities, to abductions, to out of body experiences and a wide range of psychic phenomena are ultimately not fully knowable through the world as conceived in the sciences. We need to turn to phenomenology, which carefully examines and categorizes the lived experience of human beings, understanding that how objects appear in the lifeworld is how being discloses itself to us. We need to re-establish trust in our own experience of the world, our own perceptions, our only true access point to reality.

I am aware of the reasons we must be careful with relying only on eyewitness testimony. Mistakes in perception and identification occur, biases abound, judgments about what is appearing are not always sound, and we know that there are limitations in memory, both in the fact that inaccurate or false memories do exist, and that how an individual remembers an event will be shaped on how they organized their conscious experience at the time, as well as their motivation for recalling the event.

But this does not mean that we completely give up on the individual lived experiences as providing access to knowledge and truth. Thomas Bullard, for example, introduces criteria for judging some experiences as having more weight than others, especially multi-witness accounts, accounts that show similarities with existing accounts but also deviate from our culture expectations, and experiences in which a coherent account emerges from several points of view.

When the encounter is experiential rather than hearsay, the experience transpersonal rather than individualistic, the descriptions recurrent rather than devoid of pattern, and the  contents unexpected rather than true to cultural antecedents, then the accounts present   significant characteristics of objectivity (Bullard, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, 293).

Phenomenology as a research method begins with bracketing our assumptions (and the witness’s assumptions) about the experience and examining what appears to the individual subject, what they experience and how they formed judgments about it. We begin by bracketing out the appearances, and then carefully examine as many accounts as possible, aiming to identify patterns and commonalities. We then perform a process Husserl called eidetic reduction, where we identify key aspects of the appearance that without which it would not be the kind of object that it is. It is through this process that being and identity are disclosed—how things appear to us reflects something about how things are. To use humans as sensors we must be as precise as possible in our descriptions of what appears without forcing the experience into a pregiven framework of interpretation.

Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld is constituted by ordinary perceptions and dealings that we encounter throughout the day, which constitute our everyday sense of “reality.” This notion of reality is ruptured in the experience of UAP (and other anomalous happenings), because it not in line with our understandings of what can possibly occur within the lifeworld. However those expectations or understandings of what is possible are influenced by a modern worldview that tells us that what we have experienced is “impossible” because it does not conform to what we can verify scientifically. Other cultures before the modern scientific one have also confronted the anomalous and struggled to fit it into their own understanding of the lifeworld – some of which were better equipped to do so than others, because of ontologies that make room for other forms of advanced intelligent life.

Human experience and observations are the original sensors. It is only because we are embedded in a lifeworld that we are able to perform scientific experiments, read technological instruments, interpret the data, and form shared conclusions about the world in which we live. While Kant was correct that there is always a gap between the world as we process it through our senses and categories of understanding and the “thing in itself,” phenomenology reminds us that this need not mean that we give up on appearances as disclosing aspects of reality to us. In order for phenomenology to have a meaningful impact in UAP studies or in any other discipline for that matter, we must restore our faith in humans as sensors. We must, in my view, transcend the idea that the world as known through our instruments is more real or more true than the world as we experience it. Human observation and witness testimony must play a vital role in UAP studies and knowledge production, especially as we encounter “impossible” things.

(Thank you to Dr. Michael E. Zimmerman for his advice and feedback on earlier versions of this essay. I am deeply grateful to have him as a philosophical interlocutor for discussing UAP and other anomalous phenomena.)

Bibliography

Bullard, Thomas. The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016).

Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

Translated by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).