The Three Divides in Consciousness Research | Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Naotsugu Tsuchiya suggests that many disagreements in consciousness science can be understood through three major conceptual divides, especially the tension between intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives. Do you think consciousness is best understood from an objective third-person perspective, or must science begin with subjective first-person experience?

Thank you very much. The brain stores information about the outside world. As a computer engineer, it took me five years to understand how memory without addresses was possible. Consciousness then acts intrinsically in memory. It took me five days to find the answer to the obvious question: Who am I? It is an unknown known. This was 20 years ago. Good luck.

He says early on "consciousness = experience" with an "of course, everyone knows and accepts that..." tone. Really? To me that evidences a fundamental misunderstanding of what consciousness is. It's equivalent to saying things like "your facility of sight is all of the objects in your visual field", or that "gravity is the set of all things falling": it misses the fundamental nature of the facility or phenomenon, instead looking at what it enables us to experience.

It stays divided because there is no collaboration and there is nobody in science with a first person experience.

The i-fool tower is one of Babel.

3:24 someone has to test for similar experience patterns in different cultural, social, and age groups in attempt to having a unique value corresponding to each experience...

5:54 I am not sure I get this. So a section, 1/3 of consciousness studies is from either an intrinsic or extrinsic point of view: which means half are doing phenomenology to explain consciousness - they start from first person perspective like Husserl - and the other half tries to explain consciousness via the objective sciences such as neuroscience and biology and psychology perhaps? _[1st June 2026, __22:50__pm, Monday]_

Consciousness can be used as a predicate for the Absolute or the most negative fundamental, but i prefer the term used signifying sentient state. Concerning predicates call That! primeval power as you please, to further grasp this it would profit the seeker to consider samadhi or theurgy. I don't hear it from anybody Robert interviews discerning the two, i.e., brain or sentient consciousness and the predicate Consciousness representing the negative primeval power or source.

Really interesting framing. The intrinsic/extrinsic divide seems especially important because it gets at the deeper source of the hard problem: consciousness is usually approached either from third-person structure/function or from first-person experience, but the relation between the two remains under-theorized. One way I’ve been thinking about this is that consciousness may not be a “thing” to locate, but a temporally structured process of integration: the ongoing coordination of past experience, present evaluation, and anticipated future into a meaningful world. From that perspective, first-person experience is not an extra mystery added onto information-processing; it is how temporally extended meaning is organized for a living system. I also really like the attempt to quantify first-person reports without reducing them too quickly. Maybe the key is not to eliminate subjectivity, but to treat intersubjective structure as data: how different subjects organize experience under shared conditions. The challenge, then, may be less “structure or function?” and more: what structure allows experience to become functionally meaningful across time?

Nao, may I suggest to consult Ancient Tribes, like the Australian Aborígene, Amazon, Native American, Innuit Eskimo, etc.and Religious Orders, like Tibetan, Hindu, etc to what they think and what their myths say? they may give pertinent insights on the matter...