What do you discover when you look into your own mind? William James was confident: ‘Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness’, he said. But a hundred or so years later we might be inclined to raise a few awkward questions.What does ‘looking’ mean? Who is looking into what? Does the looking itself change what is seen? Is there value in looking without reporting? Does reporting destroy what we are trying to describe? Can everything be reported when some experiences are supposed to be ineffable? How reliable are our judgements about our states of consciousness? Are states of consciousness even the kind of thing that reliable judgements can be made about? Do these questions ever end? God I hope so. The study of consciousness is sometimes divided into two fundamentally different approaches: the objective third-person approach and the subjective first-person approach. Between these two there is sometimes added another: the second-person, or inter-subjective, approach. This approach is concerned with, but limited to, the development of empathy between people, the roles of mirror neurons, imitation, and joint attention in the relations between two people, and theories of intersubjectivity and how self is constructed through relationships with others and it will not be necessary for you to know this in order to understand the chapter.Going back to the first two, there are two ways to discuss them; One concerns first-person versus third-person science; the other concerns first-person versus third-person methods.There are at least three problems with the notion of a first-person science. Although there are many variations on scientific practice and people who call themselves scientists, they all are...