Consciousness

Chapter

Seventeen

The view from within?

A B Your answer

Introspection observes the

experiences themselves

no Yes

mary learns something new

when she sees red

no Yes

We must avoid the zombic

hunch

Yes no

the distinction between

first-, second-, and third-

person perspectives is a false

distinction

Yes no

First- and second-person

methods have an essential

role to play

no Yes

If you think that a science of consciousness must be
a fundamentally new kind of science, then you prob-
ably think that special first- and/or second-person
methods are what is needed, and that enough of
these together will constitute a suitably new science.
If you think that a science of consciousness must
be basically the same as any other science, then
first- and second-person methods may still be rele-
vant, but you must ask what role they can play, and
whether they have anything special to contribute.

Either way, it is worth learning more about these meth-
ods. They include training our powers of attention and
observation, developing our ethical and spiritual lives,
actively exploring altered states of consciousness, and
simply spending time thinking and questioning. All
these are forms of personal work which may, or may
not, contribute to the public process of coming to
understand the nature of consciousness.

In this chapter, we shall first consider the furious
debates that have raged over the role of first-person
methods, and then consider some of those methods
themselves.

THE BATTLE OF THE AS AND BS

‘I’m captain of the A team’, proclaims Dennett, ‘David Chalmers is captain of the B
team’, and so begins the battle over what Dennett calls ‘The fantasy of first-person
science’ and Chalmers calls ‘First-person methods in the science of consciousness’.

For Chalmers, the science of consciousness is different from all other sciences
because it relates third-person data to first-person data. Third-person data
include brain processes, behaviours, and what people say, while first-person
data concern conscious experience itself. He takes it for granted that there are
first-person data.

It’s a manifest fact about our minds that there is something it is like to

be us – that we have subjective experiences – and that these subjective

experiences are quite different at different times. Our direct knowledge

of subjective experiences stems from our first-person access to them.

And subjective experiences are arguably the central data that we want a

science of consciousness to explain.

(Chalmers, 1999)

At the moment we have excellent methods for collecting third-person data, says
Chalmers, but we badly need better methods for collecting first-person data. The
science of consciousness must hunt for broad connecting principles between first-
and third-person data, such as certain experiences going along with certain brain
processes or with certain kinds of information-processing. This is a hunt not for the