Consciousness and the First-Person

Abstract

Personal ReflectionsSince my first years as a mature person, the puzzles relating to subjective experience perplexed me.The attempts to describe what subjectivity means and to distinguish it from an objective realm often use the (meta phorical) distinction between an inner sphere and an outer sphere.According to this view, the subjective content of consciousness constitutes an inner sphere that only the conscious subject can access.However, what fascinated me already at a very early stage of my intellectual development, was precisely the reverse feature of conscious experience.My early intuition was that I have special access to my conscious experiences.Nevertheless, this insight was coupled with the awareness that my conscious experiences involve having the whole world in view, the objective world that includes myself as being "out there," in the world, together with other experiencing subjects that share it.To be sure, I am the conscious individual, and I am conscious of the world as being my world.But I realized quite soon that although I have special access to my conscious experiences, the content of all my conscious thoughts, intentions, and activities could be grasped only by attending to the shared world that includes me, the experiencing subject, as one of the things in it.How can the world that I consciously experience be grasped from my subjective viewpoint, although as an experiencing subject I am only one of the things included in it?What does it mean to consciously have the objective world in view?These questions refer, I believe, to the essence of subjectivity.They constitute the main motivational ground that underlies my philosophical research activities.The methods that I use are similar to the contemplative methods used by phenomenologists and philosophers of mind.They combine phenomenological reflection and conceptual analy sis.Reflection on my stream of conscious experience and on the variety of ways of being involved in the world is always my starting point.The meditation sessions in our workshop were particularly helpful for me in this re spect.Meditating is similar to phenomenological reflection.It nevertheless differs from it.Since I am not a meditation practitioner, the experience of meditating was novel to me although it was partly familiar.This experience helped me to grasp the differences between the contemplative approaches that I used in the past and the one used by the meditator.I believe that each may reveal differ ent aspects of consciousness.I intend to carry out this activity in the future.