Validating and Calibrating First- and Second-person Methods in the Science of Consciousness

After more than a century of neglect, the last two decades have seen a significant amount of progress in the science of consciousness (Seth, 2010). This resurgence of interest has been largely driven by the availability of increasingly sophisticated neuroscientific methods. However, as the field is maturing it is becoming evident that further scientific progress will not depend on improvements in brain measurement technology alone. Additionally, there are two major outstanding challenges that need to be addressed. We still need a better theory of consciousness that could inform the design and interpretation of experimental studies. And we also need a more systematic way of accessing and measuring the phenomenology of consciousness, i.e. our lived experience. The latter challenge takes a special place because a rigorous method of obtaining phenomenological data may turn out to be a powerful catalyst for the field as a whole. Only with increasingly refined verbal reports about what it is like to be conscious can we hope to better understand the detailed data that neuroscience is providing about the complex brain mechanisms underlying lived experience and delimit the phenomenological facts that a theory of consciousness must take into account. Accordingly there have been a growing number of attempts to go beyond standard questionnaires and informal post-experimental