Applying Bernard Lonergan's (1957/1992, 1972) analysis of intentional consciousness and its concomitant epistemology, this paper highlights epistemological confusion in contemporary consciousness studies as exemplified mostly in David Chalmers's (1996) position. In ideal types, a first section outlines two epistemologies-sensate-modeled and intelligence-based-whose difference significantly explains the different positions. In subsequent sections, this paper documents the sensate-modeled epistemology in Chalmers's position and consciousness studies in general. Tellingly, this model of knowing is at odds with the formal-operational theorizing in twentieth-century science. This paper (...) then links this epistemology with functionalism and its focus on descriptive efficient causality in external behaviors and its oversight of explanatory formal causality; highlights the theoretical incoherence of the understanding of science in the functionalist approach; connects it with the construal of consciousness as primarily intentional (i.e., directed toward an object) to the neglect of consciousness as conscious (i.e., constituted by a non-objectified self-presence); and relates this outcome to the reduction of human consciousness to animal-like perception and mechanistic interactions. A brief conclusion summarizes these multiple, subtle, and interconnected considerations and suggests how only an intellectual epistemology would be adequate to the intellectual nature of human consciousness and the world of meaning, not of mere bodies, in which humans exist. (shrink)

Confusion concerning the scientific study of consciousness is metanalysed by considering definitions of consciousness and the diversity of beliefs about consciousness and reality particularly as they are affected by information from anomalous experiences. This archival and theoretical examination reveals that the purported subjective nature of consciousness continues to create problems for its scientific study resulting in diversity in the academic community concerning the nature of consciousness. After a brief discussion in the first section of the confusion found in the literature (...) concerning consciousness, some of the referents of the term consciousness are defined in the second section. The third section consists of a summary of die results of a study by Baruss and Moore in which the disparity of versions of consciousness is related to differences in personal beliefs and purported experiences. In particular, purported anomalous experiences such as mystical experiences or out‐of‐body experiences are correlated with rejection of a physicalist interpretation of reality and a scientific mode of inquiry. Such experiences are discussed in the fourth section. It is indicated in the fifth section that the requirement for mterchangeability of observers in science has not been respected in some previous discussions of consciousness and that continued introspection of subjective experience and personal self‐exploration may be informative for a given investigator if not for everyone in the scientific community. (shrink)