[n4r9]

How do you mean?

I can conceive of scientific experiments involving consciousness. For example:

Hypothesis: Consuming LSD gives me a hallucinatory experience.

Method: Randomized, blind trial. Every Saturday morning I consume one tab of either LSD or water, sit in a blank white room with a sitter (who does nothing), and record my experience.

Results: Every time after consuming water, I have no visual hallucinations and get bored. Every time after consuming LSD, I see shifting colour patterns, imagine music playing on the walls, and feel at one with the world.

Conclusion: Results strongly support hypothesis.

[falcor84]

If I recall correctly, a true hallucination is one that the person cannot distinguish from reality, so at best you'd measure "pseudohallucinations". But even then, your approach would suffer from all the limitations of phenomenology.

[n4r9]

I see what you mean about "hallucination"; I guess I was using the looser definition as per Wikipedia of a perception that "has the compelling sense of reality".

I'd be keen to understand those limitations of phenomenonology and how they apply to this specific experiment, if you have an opportunity to expand.

[falcor84]

I'm not that knowledgeable about this particular area. My familiarity in this area is mostly around confabulations[0] and false memories[1] such as those studied by Elizabeth Loftus[2].

I'm not sure if that would apply directly to your proposed experiment, but my concern is that what we experience as memories can sometimes apparently be generated on the fly rather than accessing something that was there before.

In general, these kind of phenomenological studies suffer from subjectivity, and are very difficult to connect to explanatory mechanisms, without additional objective evidence. One relevant approach to deal with this is Dennett's Heterophenomenology[3], which seeks to combine the subject's own impressions with other external evidence - so in your case, instead of having the sitter do nothing, you may want to pay them to gather additional objective evidence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology

[n4r9]

Hmm, I almost see why it might be an issue. Although I guess that you could see the hypothesis as predicting what someone reports their subjective experience to be. Or perhaps that makes behavioural assumptions about consciousness?

I suppose if the sitter confirms that they and I stayed inside the cell, and that nothing else came in or out for the duration, that should address that issue? There could be cameras and microphones set up to record the lack of weird trippy phenomena. And I could record my own perceptions in the moment, either by writing it down or speaking into a dictaphone.