Four Subsects Of Report Skepticism

Report skepticism is exactly as it sounds; can we trust the data we are receiving for the experiment? We can gather all the data in the world and analyze it for years but if you cannot trust the data itself none of the information we have gathered matters. Two distinct subsects of report skepticism exist and they are known as under-determination and circularity. Under-determination is when the data you have collected does not have any significant evidence between two possibilities. With external world skepticism, under-determination causes a major problem because no matter how much evidence or information we gather in determining whether or not the world is real or if we are just heads in vats, none of the evidence will decisively point in
one direction. So we may never be able to determine if the world around us is real or if it is all fake sensory information being fed to us. The other subsect of Report skepticism is circularity and it has to do with whether or not we can trust the information presented to us. Keeping with external world skepticism, the only way we can make headway down either path of the possibilities in external world skepticism is if we blindly trust the information to be real sensory evidence or if we trust it to be fake sensory stimulation, which is circular reasoning which cannot accurately lead to any conclusion. When testing our consciousness and determining where our neural correlates of consciousness are located, report skepticism stands as a massive barrier from achieving any significant results.
When scientists tested people who had damage to their right inferior parietal lobe, the subjects were submitted to two houses that were exactly identical houses where one was on fire on the left hand side. The subjects all said they could not find any major difference between the houses but most said they would much rather live in the house that was not on fire. This leads us to believe that the subjects were not conscious of the left side of their vision due to their damaged right inferior parietal lobe, which leads us to believe that the right inferior parietal lobe is the neural correlates of consciousness, but we cannot fully trust this information. The reason we cannot trust this information is because of the possibility that the subjects were phenomenally conscious of the fire, but were not access conscious of the fire. This means the subjects were experiencing the information but were unable to access this information for the reports. The only way we could verify if the patients were phenomenally conscious or not would be to trust the patient and the results that have been gathered, which leads to the circularity portion of report
skepticism. With all of the possibilities of the data we are receiving being completely false, it is certainly difficult to make any headway with the experimentation on human consciousness. WE have no real way to determine if our analysis is comparing and contrasting the presence and lack of consciousness as we intend it to. Our only way to verify that the patients are consciously aware in one scenario and unconsciously aware in another scenario is the how we interpret the data. The main goal of the consciousness experiments is to create a scenario in which the subject is conscious in one situation and not conscious in another and to compare and contrast the differences in reports. This process is known as contrastive analysis, and it is the widely accepted process of testing human consciousness. The downside to contrastive analysis is that the data depends largely on the reports from the patients to be completely true, as well as verifying the subjects are not phenomenally conscious, neither of which are easily determined. These issues are predominately what is keeping human consciousness so mysterious, while we can easily gather tons of data it is not clear or easy to determine whether or not we can accept this data to be true, which leads to what causes our consciousness and where our consciousness to be stored to remain a mystery.