Here’s what I wrote to Jack a few weeks ago:
“I thought I should try to say in a few lines just why I’m interested as a scientist in first-person methods for investigating consciousness — or rather in the accounts and demonstrations that come to light when these methods are pursued (freely and fearlessly!).
It’s simply this: that the first-person experience we human beings have of consciousness, and all the ways in which this experience moves us intellectually and emotionally, can provide the third-person scientist with all the evidence he could ever need as to how consciousness changes people’s lives, how consciousness matters — and hence why human consciousness has evolved under natural selection. Natural selection, after all, like the scientist, sees only the results of consciousness – and these are the results precisely of individuals having the first-person experiences they do.
So everything people make of their first-person experience should count as data! .. art, philosophy, poetry, meditation, reverie, prayer, tillosophy (Dan Dennet’s thinking on a tractor), going fishing…”
Jack replied:
“I’ve never been as interested in the “natural selection” aspect of the study of consciousness; I suppose for the reason you state (it sees only the results of consciousness). That’s not to say it’s not important; it’s just not what speaks to me.”
To which I responded:
“The fact that there’s something about consciousness that “speaks to you” is of course one of those RESULTS (which you profess not to be interested in!). My larger point is that consciousness has been DESIGNED by the processes of evolution to speak to people in all the amazing ways it does. And why? Because people better lives as a result.”
I can see we’re going to have some lively discussion!