ABSTRACT
Consciousness is perhaps the most intriguing topic in philosophy and science — central to our understanding of human existence. Yet, for most of the history of modern science, consciousness has been considered to be outside the arena of phenomena which can be examined by scientific tools. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that the discipline of psychology turned its attention on to consciousness and made it its primary subject of inquiry (Titchener 1912). In these early conceptions, consciousness was equated with the awareness of our sensations, feelings, perceptions and thoughts. This approach focused on the subjective, experiential aspect of consciousness. The main research method used in investigation of consciousness was introspection based on observations of mental processes in our own mind. For example, research participants could be asked to look at differently colored shapes and rate the intensity and quality of their experience. But despite careful considerations about potential shortcomings of this method (Titchener 1912), the introspection-based research on consciousness did not prove very fruitful. This was mainly because results of experiments which used introspection differed vastly across research laboratories — components of perception and thinking discovered through introspection varied from one school to another, depending on their assumptions and schemas applied to the classification and interpretation of conscious experience.
