Third-person methods {third-person method} involve experimental phenomenology, heterophenomenology, and reports. People can gather objective knowledge about subjective experience. Animals, robots, and software can model consciousness [Dennett, 1997] [Dennett, 2001].
Time interval between sensations and verbal report is 100 milliseconds {span of apprehension, report} {apprehension span, report}.
Verbal reports describe stimuli, which are independent variables, and subjective impressions or responses, which are dependent variables. If stimulus spatiotemporal organization changes, responses and response categories change quantitatively and qualitatively. Phenomenological can equate with phenomenal. Subjective phenomena relate to stimuli and their objects {experimental phenomenology}, allowing theories of contents {eidology} and relations between contents {logology} [Stumpf, 1890].
Fundamentally, experiences report brain-activity output or results. Researchers can ask people to report their experiences, observe their behaviors, and scan their brains. Researchers can build stories about subject experiences {heterophenomenology}. Stories can be as close to experience truth as time and effort allow [Dennett, 1991] [Dennett, 2001].
A conscious report to oneself {higher-order thought method} can accompany conscious mental states, so brain can monitor itself. Such control system allows recursion, through self-representations [Hofstadter, 1979] [Hofstadter and Dennett, 1981].
Feeling has content {phrastic meaning}, which differs from mood and force {neustic meaning} [Hare, 1952] [Hare, 1981].
People can attend to, learn, perceive, or remember {reporting}| organisms, objects, features, times, and locations. People can make verbal or non-verbal objective reports about subjective experience, during or after experience. Reports are about perceptions, memories, imaginings, beliefs, cognitive states, higher-order thoughts, mental events, mental states, and phrastic meanings. Reporting requires former sensation, perception, memory, and awareness. People cannot report unconscious thoughts or perceptions. Reports about sensations indicate that most people's experiences are similar. Only humans can report using complete language, but all mammals can communicate.
types
People can report their feelings, and judge emotion reports, objectively [Hare, 1952] [Hare, 1981].
People have private stimuli and responses, only inside themselves and not observable by others. Private stimuli and responses are like reports to oneself {verbal report}. People learn to be self-aware by verbal reports [Skinner, 1938] [Skinner, 1953] [Skinner, 1957].
properties
People can report only some conscious thoughts and perceptions.
People do not express thoughts {unexpressed thought} about which they have no intention to report.
Reports are objective and verifiable, allowing scientific analysis and theories.
criticism
Methods similar to literary criticism can analyze reports about consciousness. Criticism can use only actual words, only actual work, emotional reactions, feelings, history, meaning, objective standards, other works, personal viewpoint, principles, relativity, true wording, and theory.
People can report their perceptions {testimony method}, which depend on object recognition.
1-Consciousness-Studies-Third-Person Methods
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Date Modified: 2022.0225