Workshop ALIUS 2018 - Methodological issues in consciousness research

ALIUS Workshop - Methodological issues in consciousness research

October 26-27, 2018

ALIUS is an international and interdisciplinary research group dedicated to the investigation of all aspects of consciousness, with a specific focus on non-ordinary or understudied conscious states traditionally classified as altered states of consciousness. The group fosters a unique interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers, involving anthropologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers of mind and psychiatrists, towards the development of a systematic and scientific model of consciousness supported by both theoretical work and experimental studies. This interdisciplinarity also aims to facilitate the investigation of consciousness states at different scales, at different levels of analysis, and with different methodologies. Neuroscientific, philosophical and anthropological approaches to the study of hallucinations, for example, are likely to be mutually informative. However, this plurality of approaches has been a source of criticism between disciplines. While neuroscience is often deemed reductionist, anthropology is sometimes taken to be unduly relativist, and philosophy is routinely suspected of being disconnected from empirical research. Our position is conciliatory rather than antagonistic: we see disciplinary diversity as a resource in the collective effort to achieve a scientific understanding of consciousness. Nonetheless, this interdisciplinarity raises important questions: which methodological approaches allow for a fruitful dialogue between disciplines in the investigation of consciousness? This question is the starting point of this workshop, which will present recent developments on methodological issues in consciousness research across disciplines. This event is intended first and foremost as a collective reflection on the methods used by ALIUS researchers, in order to understand their strengths and limitations. The workshop revolves around three axes, each of which will be discussed over half a day. The first session, coordinated by Matthieu Koroma (ENS-IJN), will focus on how studying the diversity of conscious states questions dominant paradigms in neuroscience of consciousness. The second session, coordinated by David Dupuis (Durham University), will provide a reflection on the contribution of field survey methods as they are conducted in social anthropology in the study of consciousness. Finally, the third session, coordinated by Raphael Millière (University of Oxford), will discuss new methodological development bridging first-person and third-person approaches to the scientific study of consciousness.

Organizations: David Dupuis, Matthieu Koroma, Raphaël Millière
This event is financed by the New Ideas in the Philosophy of Mind and Language program and the New Ideas in Cognitive Development program.

PROGRAM

Friday 26 october 9h30, salle Dussane

Matthieu Koroma (LSCP, Ecole Normale Superieure)
"Constructed consciousness"

Taking inspiration from Barrett's work on emotions (Barrett, 2017), I will introduce how constructivism can be applied to consciousness. I first present some basic tenets of constructivism, then explain the framework of Lisa Barrett and discuss its application to consciousness. I will draw the implications for some relevant questions for our research group: is consciousness better cast as a unitary phenomenon or multiple constructs ? How is the conscious phenomenon shaped by our mental practice or lifetime experience ? how can the diversity of paradigms studying consciousness be integrated ?

Guillaume Dumas (Institut Pasteur) & Jean-arthur micoulaud-franchi (CHU/Universite de Bordeaux)
"Psychiatry: a Crash Test for Integrative Neuroscience" 

This presentation will address the role of integrative neuroscience in modern psychiatry from nosographic and semiological perspectives. It attempts to compare the need for multidimensional approach with a multi-scale understanding of the mechanisms involved in the emergence of mental disorders. The first part discusses the place of neuroscience in the classification of mental disorders, notably in the delimitation of the normal and the pathological, then the definition of the various psychiatric disorders. The second part focuses on the place of neuroscience in the semiology of mental disorders, more particularly on latent variable and multi-scale approaches.

Oussama Abdoun (INSERM, CRNL)
"New theoretical frameworks for meditation research"

The neurocognitive study of meditation states and practices is a nascent but booming field of research that has already yielded a wealth of experimental findings. However, their interpretation remains delicate and is often based on the presumed phenomenology and mechanisms underlying contemplative experience, revealing a deep theoretical gap. We propose two theoretical tools to guide the design and interpretation of empirical research on meditation: a phenomenological model as a heuristic to generate new hypotheses, and the theory of predictive coding as a unifying approach to the processes involved in the practice of meditation. I will discuss how these two conceptual frameworks can be articulated in the context of meditation research, and their relevance for other altered states of consciousness.

Friday 26 october 14h30, salle des Actes

Anthropological perspectives (chair: David Dupuis)

Arnaud Halloy (LAPCOS - Université Côte d'Azur)
"Ethnographic immersion: an added value in the study of the diversity of states of consciousness?"

It is generally accepted in anthropology that the objectivity of the ethnographic approach is based on the "right distance" or "distant look" established by the ethnographer towards his hosts. Such a posture, always in the name of the objectivity of scientific knowledge, also tends to reject any data resulting from an introspective attitude of the ethnographer on his own experience.

In this presentation, I will present a methodological alternative to these two epistemological assumptions. From my own immersion in an Afro-Brazilian cult of possession, I will question the conditions for the production of ethnographic knowledge "in the first person" as well as the potential heuristic and epistemic added value of such knowledge in the vast field of research on the diversity of states of consciousness.

Bio:

Arnaud Halloy is a Belgian anthropologist, assistant professor at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France) since 2007. He received his PhD in 2005 from the EHESS (Paris-France). After studying an Afro-Brazilian cult in Belgium during his graduation, he traveled to Brazil where he conducted extensive fieldwork in the Afro-Brazilian Xangô Possession Cult of Recife, in the North-East Region of Brazil. Arnaud Halloy’s main interest goes to the mutual influence between contextual and cognitive dimensions of religious transmission, exploring the tight links between cognition, emotion, perception and cultural environments. He is now focusing his research on emotions and the senses, and their specific role in possession learning process, oracular systems, “empowerment” of artifacts and “traditional” transmission. He emphasizes the necessity of a closer collaboration between cognitive and social sciences in order to elaborate a cognitive ethnography of cultural learning. He has been member of Alius Research Group since 2016.

David Dupuis (Durham University)
"Ethnographizing the hallucinated consciousness. Contribution of the ethnographic method to the phenomenology and the interactional etiology of hallucinations".

Participant observation is at the heart of the ethnographic method and contributes significantly to the identity of the discipline. Based on an ethnographic experience conducted in one of the main shamanic centres of the Peruvian Amazon, I would discuss the difficulties and interest of using this method in the study of social practices involving the use of hallucinogenic substances. I would thus seek to define the specific contribution of the ethnographic method to the understanding of the phenomenology and interactive etiology of hallucinations.

Bio :

Co-founder and president of ALIUS, David Dupuis holds a Phd in Social Anthropology (EHESS-Paris/LAS). He is now post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Durham, funded by the Fyssen Foundation. Since 2017, he collaborates with the Hearing the Voice team (Durham University), focusing his research on the modes of induction, socialization and control of acoustic-verbal hallucinations ("voices") in the context of Amazonian mestizo shamanism practices, as ritualized use of hallucinogens and retreats in the jungle. He is currently working on building an anthropological approach of the hallucinations and on comparative approach to what he has called the modes of "socialization of the hallucinations".


Samuel Veissière (Mc Gill University)
"Thinking through other minds: a variational approach to consciousness, cognition, and cultural affordances"

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are habits and norms learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in theacquisition of culture? Notions such as 'shared expectations', the 'selective patterning of attention and behaviour' and 'situated learning' are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this talk, I report on our current work that aimes to integrate these candidates using the variational (free energy) approach to human cognition and culture in cognitive neuroscience. We argue that human agents may learn shared expectations through the selective patterning of attention by the developmental construction of sociocultural niches that afford epistemic resources (i.e., cultural affordances). We call this process "Thinking through Other Minds" (TTOM) - in effect, the process of inferring other's expectations via ecologically specified, sensorimotor interactions. The integrative model has implications that may advance theories of enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology.

Bio:

An anthropologist and cognitive scientist by training, Dr. Samuel Veissière is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and co-director of the Culture, Mind, and Brain program at McGill University.  He specializes in social and cultural dimensions of cognition, attention, and mental health from evolutionary and ecological (niche construction) perspectives.  His current research spans various topics from cultural factors in hypnosis, suggestion, and placebo therapeutics, hyper-sociality in smartphone addiction, social polarization, gender and men’s mental health, variational (free-energy) approaches to the evolution of cognition and culture, and agent-based modeling of joint-intentionality and complex social processes.

Maddalena Canna (Northwestern University)
"How to integrate anthropology and neuroscience in a natural context? Proposals for a reflexive bio-social anthropology"

This talk explores the methodological and epistemological issues concerning the integration of biomedical technologies and natural context ethnography. My empirical focus will be a project in progress at Northwestern University. Its core hypothesis is that paradoxical injunctions induce specific alterations of consciousness fostering the transmission of counter-intuitive beliefs. By integrating methodologies and theoretical frameworks from anthropology and cultural neurosciences, I aim to give a bio-social account of the psychophysiological modifications induced by the use of different kinds of paradox across societies. Empirically, the project is based on two inquiries: 1) a doctoral fieldwork on pathogenic trance among the Miskitos of Nicaragua; 2) a postdoctoral fieldwork on meditative trance in US Ramakrishna Ashrams. By using portable field-friendly devices I will search for distinctive bio-markers of dissociative states associated to counter-intuitive beliefs. Also, this methodological option allows for exploring reflexively how neuroscientific practices and ideologies are appropriated in local contexts according to different conceptions of the Self. This research is part of a general sketch of a neurocognitive-informed, contextualized anthropology of consciousness.

Bio:

Maddalena Canna holds a Phd in Social Anthropology (EHESS-Paris/LAS) and has been appointed Postdoctoral Researcher at Northwestern University from 2019. She is affiliated researcher at the Social Anthropology Laboratory (LAS) and Laureate of the Martine Aublet Foundation, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.  She has been member of Alius Research Group since 2016.