Subjective V/s Objective experience

“All Science is either Physics or stamp collecting.“

Ernest Rutherford, Physicist

“The Universe is made of stories, not atoms.“

Muriel Rukeyser, Poet

So who was right? The physicist or the poet?

What is more important; the study of objective phenomena or our subjective world?

We can all agree that it is indeed important to know the distance of the Earth from the Sun. That light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach the Earth.

But what about the unique property of the mind, rather than of light, which leads the eye to perceive the color red in that exact shade?

And do you see the same color red when you see a rose as I do?

The inner workings of the mind, our thoughts and feelings, are they important too?

Until now, science has had markedly more success studying the objective stuff.

By studying objective phenomena, humans have been able to harness nature, develop technology and invent useful things.

The study of subjective phenomena, on the other hand, has not fared that well. 

Yet, I would argue that in many ways, subjective phenomena are much more relevant to us.

For instance, from a personal standpoint, knowing why I think or feel like I do, is as important to me, if not more so, than knowing what makes the Earth go around the Sun.

And it goes beyond that.

The quality of our thoughts, feelings, sensations and movements determine the quality of our life on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis.

The opinions I have about my self-worth, financial security and status in society significantly influence my behavior at every moment.

While we have come to prize objectivity, we rely mostly on our senses, thoughts, feelings and other subjective skills in order to navigate through life.

As an example, take your ability of sensing and knowing that you have eaten enough. It is a subjective sensation, one that does not need a calorie-meter to know that we have had our fill. Its importance is realized only when we lose touch with it and keep eating beyond satiation, leading to obesity and other health problems.

Let’s also take a look at pain. Pain is very subjective, and can have both a physical as well as emotional component.  Trying to cure pain without understanding its subjective elements will inevitably lead to a less than satisfactory outcome.

So, if subjective phenomena are indeed important, why has science done such a bad job so far of studying them?

This needs a bit of background.

Subjective phenomena are experiential and involve personal interpretations, points of view, emotions and judgment.

And these are messy to observe, classify, measure, interpret and study.

Since the Renaissance, and especially through the industrial age, science has naturally gravitated towards the study of objective phenomena. They lend themselves to observation, concrete measurement and most importantly, to repeatability and hence predictability in the future.

We can measure the circumference of the earth, the duration of the day, the speed and even wavelength of light. Electrons may be difficult to see, but they do go around the nucleus of an atom with regular, measurable (if you have the right instruments) and hence predictable fashion.

The same applies to the heavenly bodies up in the sky. Planets revolve around the stars in measurable ways, as the stars themselves move within the galaxies which in turn, are moving away from each other at a measurable rate.

Once the human mind had grasped the basic relationships involved, it was possible to develop the means to observe, measure and create a theoretical framework which could then predict the future basis the past.

It is all very neat and tidy, and science excels at that.

As a result, progress in our understanding of these disciplines was inevitable and relatively rapid.

Subjective experiences, on the other hand, are not as amenable to measurement and discrete categorization. Hence Rutherford’s reference to stamp collection. Even economics, with all its graphs and charts, is still not considered a true science by some, as it involves an element of human behavior.

Where does that leave the study of the phenomenological qualities of experiences—the raw felt qualities of sensations, emotions, thoughts?

It gets even more complicated when we consider that the difference between the subjective and the objective is not as well-defined as one would think.

Scientists themselves mostly agree that “true” objectivity is impossible, as we sense the world through our senses and act on it through our behavior.

Both our senses and behavior are subjective in themselves.

Language itself is subjective, and when we communicate through it, we communicate meaning, which is subjective too.

Science is now beginning to tackle subjective phenomena but it has done so tentatively, and with limited success. Due to the complexity involved, the progress that has been made is not widely known.

The ancients and the philosophers have fared much better, as they gave the subjective its due importance. They treat all aspects of a person – physical, emotional as well as mental. And maybe that is why we are seeing a move towards yoga, mind/body oneness and other ancient practices.

In this article, however, I will focus on how Dr. Feldenkrais prioritized the subjective and incorporated it into his Method.

Judoka, warrior, nuclear scientist, a pioneer in the new world, an author of several well regarded scientific and other texts, he was a self-taught man who also sought and engaged with the finest minds of his generation.

He was a gifted teacher, able to seek out the elusive contradictions in the obvious, and whose extraordinary insights from the 1950’s are now being validated by the scientific developments of today.

Yet, by his own admission, his greatest skill was to make something abstract, concrete.

To begin with, he had a series of extraordinary insights related to humans and their nature.

He realized that there is a real connection between the intangible aspects of the mind and the physical world.

For instance, he proposed in his book, “Body and Mature Behavior”, that the fear of falling is one of the few instincts that humans are born with. This behavior is found even in newborn babies who exhibit a strong contraction of the flexor muscles in the front of the body when they are lowered suddenly in the air.

The fear of loud noises is the second one to develop in infants. All other fears are not inherent at birth, but are learned behaviors.

He also noticed that thoughts, feelings and thus emotions, need a certain configuration of the muscles in order to arise and express themselves.

He believed that the muscular configuration was an essential part of the whole pattern of thought as well as of emotion. That without the muscular component, these thoughts and feelings cannot sustain themselves.

Indeed, our own felt sense of ourselves, is informed by the way we hold ourselves in gravity, and how this sensation of the contractions in the musculoskeletal system is fed back to the brain through the proprioceptive sensors in the body.

He observed that there is a tangible connection between the physical world and abstract mental processes.

For example, when we count, we are actually counting the shifts in our attention as it moves from one object being counted to the next.

That the speed with which we can count in our heads is linked to, and restricted by, the speed with which we can enunciate numbers while talking.

And this relationship between the intangible and the tangible affects us in very profound ways.

For example, in order to act, we need to be oriented in space, or else we cannot act.

Dr. Feldenkrais had a very interesting take too, on the unity of the mind and the body.

In order to study them, science needs to categorize and name the objects it studies. A corollary of this is the breaking up of the whole into parts.

For instance, in order to study the muscles of the body, each must be separated and named. A person functions as a whole, yet this approach leads to the “un-wholing” of the self – a separation of the whole into its parts – and while it facilitates an understanding of the parts, it also keeps us from understanding the whole.

It is the same with the body and the mind.

The body and the mind function as one. Yet scientists initially compared the brain to a computer, with the aspiration to someday have the essence of the human mind in a machine, separate from the body.

Dr. Feldenkrais argued against this approach and maintained that without the body, the mind could not develop. He spoke of the four components of the waking state – thoughts, feelings, sensations and movement – and the unity and interconnectedness of all four.

The mind forms through its interactions with the physical world and that interaction is mediated through the body. Together, the mind, the body and the environment form a combined whole.

Without one, there cannot be the others.

The mind needs physical embodiment and the interaction with the environment for its initial development. The child’s nascent nervous system is rewired by being exposed to the environment through the senses and the processes of its own body.

This physical interaction of the mind with the environment through the body is the basis of all subsequent abstractions and thought.

Even abstract concepts arise from our being embodied.

“Left” and “right” have no meaning unless you are in a body. If you are a disembodied awareness, left and right lose the central importance they enjoy in our embodied world.  

So a consciousness which develops without a body, if it were possible, would be fundamentally different from what exists today in humans.

Subjective thoughts as well as emotions are such a part of ourselves that we do not think twice about them.

For instance, each time you fail to accomplish something important despite many attempts, you experience an internal state in the form of a particular feeling or sensation which is intimately familiar to you. You would recognize it in an instant if you felt it now.

You would also struggle to describe it to others as the language of this state is primarily sensory and kinesthetic. It is also very personal and almost impossible to accurately translate into words.

In using spoken language, we only have an inexact way of conveying our sensations, feeling and emotions. Or of comparing them with what others feel in similar situations. 

It is for this reason that we resort to symbols and metaphors in describing the subjective, using phrases like, “bursting with joy” or “deflated like a balloon.”

In “Chapter 2- Why Do You Have A Brain,” we covered some of the reasons why Dr. Feldenkrais chose movement as his preferred means to bring about awareness and change.

As Dr. Feldenkrais writes in “The Potent Self”, this is because “by acting on the body directly (as when asking a person to assume a given position or make a precise movement), it is possible to avoid the laborious, lengthy, and often faulty translation from personal language into words and vice-versa.

We no longer need to find out the rational interpretation of the body sensations; neither do we need to make sure the spoken words will be correctly translated by the person into his own subjective language.

This direct teaching of the person to understand subjectively the correct meaning of his sensations makes him see his motivation more than he is normally aware of.”

In this way the person learns a, “better mode of action and uses the body, from which the person can learn directly, in his own body language. The usual resistance is avoided, as the person is learning to feel resistance in himself in matters that do not intensely compromise his emotional security, and is thus given the means of dissolving it.”

Being a practical person, Dr. Feldenkrais was as interested in improving, as he was in understanding, ourselves.

The following is my favorite example which highlights his particular genius in discerning the “Elusive Obvious” and making a very abstract concept come alive for the rest of us. I first heard of it from David Zemach-Bersin, while training with him in Baltimore.

It will also serve as my closing argument in favor of the subjective over the objective.

Try the following set of 3 simple movements. Do not just visualize them, actually do them as described in order to follow the experiment.

It will take less than a minute and it will be worth it. I promise.

In a seated position, keep your right hand on your lap. With the palm facing up, move the index finger lightly in the air, as if to do a “come hither” motion. Make a mental note of the amount of effort it takes to move the right index finger.

Now bend and unbend your right elbow a few times, so that the entire forearm and hand move up in the air and then back down to your lap. Note the amount of effort you have to apply.

And finally, lift your entire right arm, up and then down for a few, easy movements. Notice the effort it takes.

When I ask my students while doing the same experiment, “how much more effort it took to move your forearm and hand as compared to moving your finger”, they usually respond that they found the effort to be mildly larger. 

Similarly their experience of extra effort to move the entire arm in comparison to moving the finger is  higher, maybe 2 to 3 times more than moving the finger.

In reality, the forearm and the hand combined weigh roughly thirty to forty times more than the finger.

And the entire arm is roughly a hundred times heavier as compared to the finger.

Yet, we do not feel we are using anything close to hundred times the effort in lifting the arm as compared to lifting the finger. 

We will re-visit why this is so in the article on “good” movement, but for now let’s stay with this astonishing fact:

Your subjective experience of effort in lifting your arm has very little to do with the actual weight of the arm.

In other words, your subjective experience is very different from objective reality.

And more importantly, this difference opens the possibility for us to move and live in the world with the same amount of ease as while lifting a finger!

Dr. Feldenkrais discerned that each person organizes their musculoskeletal system differently for movement. In a “well-organized” person, the musculoskeletal system works in accordance with its properties. He believed that for such a person, all routine actions, movements and functions are possible to do with the same ease as lifting a finger.

This is a promise implicit in every “Awareness Through Movement” (ATM) lesson.

Yet, many of us are racked with aches and pains as we move. Our movements are nowhere as easy and comfortable as we would like them to be.

Here too, it is our ability to sense and feel ourselves that can be the light that guides us back to comfort and ease.  If we find ourselves applying too much effort in doing something, we need to rethink how we are doing what we are doing.

For example, during Feldenkrais lessons, there are several options to do a movement. We actively seek the most comfortable and easy way among those options.

Movements are done using minimal effort and only to the extent where the quality of the effort remains the same as while lifting a finger.

In effect, we are training the brain to look for ways to move with comfort and ease.  

I hope you enjoyed the debate between the objective and the subjective.

I would love to hear your viewpoint on this subject in the comment section below.