of consciousness. Varela implies that there is a real
difference between theories which take first-person
experience seriously and make it essential to their
understanding of consciousness, and those which
do not. But are they really so different?
Baars thinks not. ‘We already have a systematic
study of human conscious experience, and it is
called “psychology” ’ (1999, p. 216). He suggests that
if we look at what psychologists have been doing for
more than a century, we find that they have always
studied the things that people say about their expe-
rience. Yes we need phenomenology, in the broad
sense, but we do not need to start from scratch.
Varela claims that only theories within his cordon
make first-person accounts essential, but is this
really so? To consider examples from each quadrant,
Nagel surely takes the first-person view seriously in
developing his idea of what it’s like to be a bat, even
though he concludes that we can never know. Crick,
for all his extreme reductionism, talks about such
aspects of consciousness as pain and visual aware-
ness, and bases his theory on people’s descriptions
of what they see. And Dennett, even though he is
accused of denying consciousness or explaining it
away, begins by describing his own experience of
sitting in his rocking chair watching leaves rippling
in the sunshine, and tries to account for ‘the way the
sunset looks to me now’ (1991, p. 5). It turns out not to
be trivial to divide theories into those that take the
first-person view seriously and those that do not.
A REFLEXIVE MODEL
Some people reject the distinction between first-
and third-person methods altogether. Max Velmans
(2000, 2009) points out that all sciences rely on the
observations and experiences of scientists. Scientists
can discover objective facts in the sense of acquiring
knowledge that is validated intersubjectively, but there are no observations in
science that are truly objective in the sense of being observer-free. He proposes
a thought experiment in which the subject and observer in a psychology experi-
ment change places.
Imagine a participant looking at a light, and an experimenter studying her
responses and her brain activity. We might say that the subject is having private
first-person experiences of the light, while the experimenter is making third-per-
son observations. But all they have to do is to move their heads so that the par-
ticipant observes the experimenter and the experimenter observes the light. In
this swap, nothing has changed in the phenomenology of the light, yet the light
‘We already have a
systematic study of
human conscious
experience, and it is
called “psychology” ’(Baars, 1999, p. 216)ACtIVItY 17.1
Positioning the theoriesVarela has positioned some of the best-known theories
of consciousness on a simple two-dimensional diagram.
Before looking at where Varela himself places the
theories, try to use his diagram to do this task yourself.
For a class exercise, give each student a copy of the
empty diagram and ask them to place on it every
theory of consciousness they can think of, or do the
exercise together on the board. This is a useful revision
exercise and a good way of drawing together ideas
from the whole course. Point out that there are no right
answers. Although Varela devised the scheme, he is
not necessarily right about where each theory should
go. When everyone has filled in as many theories as
they can, show them Varela’s version.
How well do they agree? Every discrepancy can be
used to discuss the theories and to test students’
understanding of them. In addition, you might like
to criticise the scheme itself. For example, are there
really theories of consciousness for which first-person
accounts are not essential?
Can you come up with a better scheme? For instance,
you might try to position theories according to
their answer to one of the big questions: is there a
hard problem or not, is there a difference between
phenomenal and access consciousness, is studying
the brain the best way to study consciousness, is
consciousness an illusion, are some animals conscious
and not others, will machines ever be conscious (or are
they already), does consciousness have a function.. .?
What other candidates are there, and which are the
most helpful?