Research Program / Claims / focus-of-consciousness-9

Science should use inner senses (the psyche) rather than relying solely on outer senses and material instruments, because existing instruments distort raw information.

科学应使用内感官（心灵）而非仅依赖外感官和物质工具，因为现有仪器会扭曲原始信息。

Concept focus of consciousness · Domain Consciousness States and Attentional Dynamics · methodological suggestion · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
  • dreams-projections §2
Adjudicating experiment
About 150 participants, stratified into trained and untrained groups, complete two types of pre-registered tasks: internal experience classification and masked target estimation with independent physical truth. Cross-compare introspection, calibrated instrument readings, and their combination, with targets and ratings blinded; artificially introduce instrument errors of known magnitude to test whether introspection can identify errors out-of-sample and improve accuracy, not just increase confidence. Four sessions per person, project about 9 months. The experience task assesses report consistency, the external target task assesses truth accuracy; the two cannot be merged into a single endpoint.
Suggested paper title
Incremental Validity of Trained Introspection Beyond Calibrated Measurements: A Pre-registered Blinded Study
What it would overturn
If introspection can stably acquire external information unavailable to instruments and known sensory channels, it would challenge cognitive and perceptual models holding that 'knowledge of external facts requires traceable information input.'
Candidate labs / funders
Antoine Lutz，里昂神经科学研究中心; Michael Lifshitz，麦吉尔大学精神病学系
Specificity of Seth's formulation
First-person methods are not a unique proposal; it is unspecified which instrument distorts which information, how inner senses are validated, and which tasks should outperform physical measurement.
Note
Instrument measurement error does not imply introspection is error-free; the most feasible direction is to test incremental validity of first-person data, not presuppose it can replace external validation.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim focus-of-consciousness-9, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/focus-of-consciousness-9