---
date: '2025-12-24'
description: to be or what to be?
id: Consciousness
modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:06 GMT-04:00
tags:
  - pattern
title: Consciousness
created: '2025-12-24'
published: '2025-12-24'
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slug: thoughts/Consciousness
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---
Searle’s useful split is epistemic objectivity versus ontological subjectivity. A claim is epistemically objective when different observers can settle it by public standards. A thing is ontologically subjective when it exists only as someone having it, e.g. pain or seeing red.

Keep the axes separate. We can study consciousness with public evidence, including neural activity, reports, and behaviour. The experience itself has first-person existence, because pain is pain only for the subject who feels it.

That blocks a sloppy [[thoughts/reductionism|reduction]]. We can causally reduce a conscious state to neural mechanisms when we explain how the brain produces it. That does not ontologically reduce the experience into a third-person object. The first-person occurrence is still the thing explained.

re [Searle on consciousness and subjectivity](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1692422/) and [materialist views of consciousness](https://aeon.co/essays/the-question-is-what-are-we-a-conversation-on-consciousness), I need a separate note for free will. The question is what kind of control remains when experience is both real and caused by a brain.