First-Person Experience and the Scientific Exploration of Consciousness

Abstract

What makes conscious experience a difficult or confusing subject for science to deal with is its personal or individualistic character (that is to say the fact that a given experience is an experience apparently tied to a particular individual). It is in this respect very different from the other phenomena studied by science, where while the phenomena may be observed by a particular individual they are considered to be in principle independent of that individual. To say that an individual’s experience is merely the functioning ofthat individual’s brain does not fully resolve the problem, since experiences are so very different in nature from brain processes.