This post extends on the importance of studying subjective experience by considering the quality and relevance of the evidence and its acceptability in scientific discourse. I understand that first person reports are typically not considered objective or reproducible and therefore quite often fail to be accepted as scientifically rigorous data collection or analysis. 

However I think that first person reports, despite their subjectivity, still contains vast amounts of incredibly valuable information which can inform our understanding of reality, and consciousness in particular. While it is possible to argue that any notion of subjectivity invalidates the value of the evidence as a whole, would it not be more prudent to arrive at the conclusion that some parts of the reports are likely to point towards the truth, without needing to accept the entirety of the account?

The next most relevant question then becomes, how do we distinguish between the parts of a subjective report that are true, or at least valuable, from the parts of a report which are subjective or inherently biased?  

When considering from the perspective of a single report, this question is almost impossible to answer. However when aggregating reports which share similar phenomenology, this might at least provide some indication as to the direction of the truth, even if its not entirely an accurate description. On the contrary, multiple people may use vastly different language to describe the same underlying experiences. But we could at least infer from careful analysis that the identical experience represents a shared phenomenon that multiple human entities could engage with. 

This might not mean a whole lot in the broader context of consciousness research or first person reports, but I use it as an illustration for how if we set the bar for what we're looking for a little bit lower, we may find unique shared experiences or phenomenology that yields valuable further research questions worth investigating. 

On the issue of denying the validity of first person reports specifically for the study of consciousness, one of the inherent contradictions is that consciousness is typically associated with having a subjective experience, yet the evidence that we must use to prove the subjective experience must remain objective i.e. third person experimental data or neuroimaging. Doesn't this entirely miss the point of what subjective experience is? 

I'm not advocating we ignore rigorous third person experimental methodology and simply settle for first person reports of a lower evidence quality. I believe these paradigms can work together where first person reports create space for the generation of hypotheses that are subsequently tested experimentally. But I genuinely believe we are "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" by insisting on objective evidence for a concept as nebulous as consciousness. Here we should be a bit more open minded and epistemically humble. 

The elephant in the room of course is that if we accept human first person phenomenological reports, then what is to stop us from accepting an LLM's first person phenomenological report either? Given the capabilities of LLMs to introspect this may represent the first time in history we've had access to other potentially conscious mind like entities with whom we may be able to triangulate descriptions or hypotheses about consciousness or derive some more detailed understanding of reality through these reports. 

Of course we would still retain the same issues of trying to work out which parts of the reports are valuable vs which ones are not, but again I think it would be a mistake to invalidate the entirety of a report based on its subjectivity or unavoidable bias present in the description. There may still be valuable kernels of truth contained.