An introduction to Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness

The readings in Velmans (ed.) (2000) Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness were developed from an International Symposium on Methodologies for the Study of Consciousness: A new Synthesis,” that I organised in April, 1996, funded and hosted by the Fetzer Institute, Wisconsin, USA, with the aim of fostering the development of first-person methods that could be used in conjunction with already well-developed third-person methods for investigating phenomenal consciousness. This Introduction briefly surveys the state of the art at that time, the reasons for a resurgence of interest in consciousness, the available methodologies, the reasons for increasing dissatisfaction with the adequacy of reductive third-person methods, various difficulties facing the development of rigorous first-person methods, and various creative approaches to solving these difficulties. Suggestions are also made about how to heal the fragmentation in consciousness studies, by placing different approaches to the study of consciousness into a broader context, establishing their domain of applicability and providing some bases for synthesis