FFF Seminar: In the Blind Spot: From World-Depicting to World-Making in Experience Research

Abstract: While conventional science has historically relegated experience to its blind spot, emerging fields—from meditation research and psychedelic studies to psychopathology and user experience research among other fields—increasingly recognize experience as a central object of inquiry. Yet investigating experience presents unique epistemological challenges that mirror the crisis Husserl identified in European sciences: the compulsion to objectify phenomena while losing touch with how we ourselves bring forth worlds in each moment.

This talk explores these challenges through an enactive lens, examining micro-phenomenological approaches to experience investigation while critically analyzing the interview situation itself. Drawing on recent work by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson on the blind spot of experience, I argue that rigorous investigation of experience reveals not the positive, publishable results we seek, but rather our systematic concealment of our own world-making processes.

This recognition demands a fundamental shift from depicting worlds to acknowledging how we enact them. Rather than pursuing objective measurement and systematic manipulation of the "objectively measured," honest experience research calls for humility about our contingency and limitations. The power lies not in proving our capacity to see truth, but in reflexively revealing how we enact worlds and intentionally directing this process differently through what I term "intentional intelligence."

The implications extend beyond methodology to challenge the very foundations of academic culture, which rewards claims to objective knowledge over authentic acknowledgment of not-knowing. Yet this apparent limitation opens unexpected wisdom: experience research's greatest contribution may be teaching us to work together in world-making rather than competing to control world-depicting. This represents not a failure of scientific rigor, but an invitation to a deeper form of knowing that our current moment urgently requires.

Join us in welcoming our wonderful speaker (joining online):

Daniel Meling has a PhD in Human Sciences, an MSc in Cognitive Science, and a BA in Educational Science and Education Management. In his previous work, he has focused on applying enactive cognitive science to meditation, non-dual awareness, and psychedelic experiences. In his empirical research, he conducted more than a hundred phenomenological interviews around psychedelic experiences, including the study of interaction effects between DMT-harmine and meditative practices in experienced meditators during an RCT conducted at a meditation group retreat.