The threshold of wakefulness, the experience of control, and theory development

Abstract

2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. We are very grateful to Professor Wackermann for his constructive and insightful comments. We take it that one among his main concerns is the possibility of variation that might go undetected due to our choice of methodology. For example, when inquiring as to the logicality or coherence of thoughts, we seem to be presupposing a shared internal norm that can be accurately reflected, despite multiple, mediating steps of memory and evaluation. Professor Wackermann’s concern is by no means an idle one. But (1) we believe that queries of the sort employed here are necessary if we are to begin making progress in eliciting the structure of conscious experience. Were we to limit ourselves to questions that concern just raw, sensory experience, we would risk arbitrarily ignoring significant aspects of the subjects’ phenomenology. Further, (2) our statistical analysis is indeed intended to balance out individual differences. Although this strategy does risk obscuring important variation, it can still be helpful in identifying significant, albeit not universal, indicators. Finally, (3) while it is possible that the transition from wakefulness to sleep follows different paths, the issue is an empirical one. Just as it would be unwise to arbitrarily ignore individual variation, so too would it be unwise to arbitrarily inflate individual variation. We realize that Professor Wackermann’s concerns though are not mere methodological quibbles as regards how best to address a single psychological phenomenon. As Wackermann (2006) lucidly expresses elsewhere, he seeks to develop a strategy for discovering universal laws that is compatible with the study of entities that exhibit great variation, human beings. Indeed, we are in sympathy with his view that more attention should be given to what he terms the ‘‘idiomatic” regularities. On this view, research should proceed in a two-step fashion: first, one should attend to intra-individual regularities and render these in logical or mathematical form. Only after this step has been completed should one seek inter-individual comparisons. As regards the research that actuated Professor Wackermann’s critique, we are not able to present results in such a way that they would satisfy strict standards for ‘‘distributed nomothesis.” But, motivated by this strategy, we have re-evaluated the data, attending more carefully to individual variation. In so doing we found that, for most subjects, ratings on more than one item were associated with the perception of falling asleep. Moreover, for ten of the twenty subjects, ‘‘control over think. All rights reserved. , C.-M., Han, H.Y., Yang, M.H., Su, W.C., & Lane, T. (2010). What subjective experiences determine the d? Consciousness and Cognition 19, 1084–1092. Psychology, National Chengchi University, 64, Sec. 2, Chih-Nan Rd., Taipei 116, Taiwan.