Consciousness and data
A number of neuroscientists and philosophers are now developing various tools for measuring the presence and type of consciousness—some of which I discussed in my last essay here.
All of these tests depend on reasonable inference. We can’t know any consciousness other than our own.
To conclude
We are now at a point where scientists and philosophers who study consciousness can roll up their sleeves and get busy testing the nature of consciousness in its many manifestations, and that data will, in turn, feed back into our theories of consciousness, and of physical reality more generally, in an ongoing dance of unfolding truth.
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