While obviously intelligent design is an inherently defective proposition, the one issue that science has more than failed to answer is the simple question of consciousness. Here is where the supposed marriage of science and philosophy has failed to emerge from its own naïve honeymoon. It is a dimension of speculative philosophy, and not science, that defines ‘science’ in terms of ‘concrete’ sensory experience. Now, of course, there is nothing ‘concrete’ or ‘sensory’ about gravity, which in itself is a non-experiential inference. Experience may point to the inference and apparently substantiate it, but gravity is an inferential principle, and therefore remains indirect with respect to the actualities of experience. The experience of ‘weight’ for example is not explicitly an experience of gravity. But, assuming the truth of gravity as a principle, weight is an effect of gravity, not gravity itself.
            But when it comes to consciousness, ‘science’ continues to deny both the inference and the empirical evidence, because, as soon as we isolate consciousness itself, we have no substantive sensory experience by which to define it. Therefore, according to this ‘science’, consciousness itself cannot exist. It is necessarily the subsidiary of something that has concrete sensory content, the fact that consciousness is quite obviously the container of all sensuous content notwithstanding. So we have the tacit definition of consciousness as thought or intelligence, or even as feeling or emotion. In terms of physiology, ‘consciousness’ is treated as interchangeable with brain function. And the fact that we can now locate emotion and thought in terms of brain region stimulation is treated as somehow developmental toward a theory of consciousness. But, of course, it does not even begin to establish the nature or ground of consciousness. In our own experience, the fact that thought and emotion are things we experience, that they are functions entirely within the frame of consciousness or awareness, means that they are necessarily and categorically other than consciousness.
            What the ‘scientists’ take for granted is the individuation of consciousness and its association with an individual body. But even here, much of the imputation is purely subjective and without the ‘empirical content’ of sensation. I do not observe consciousness directly in others, but only the consequences of consciousness. And the subjective association of my consciousness with this body also has no sensory content apart from my experience of my body in terms of its presentation entirely within the frame of my own consciousness, whether I’m experiencing it directly as sensation itself or externally in terms of experience itself as a mirror for my own awareness. All of this is essentially beyond sensation itself.
            But, of course, the basic problem is the original speculative association between science and sensation. Sense data is an analytical category derived from experience. But when we trace it to its sources – that is, when we actually analyze what ‘sense data’ is – we will find that nothing ‘in experience’ can be derived from it. A sense datum is a single report of a single nerve, a yes / no response concerning a single ‘bit’ of information within a spectrum of possible information. The spectrum cannot be determined from the sense datum. Therefore nothing beyond the spectrum – such as its elemental function in the perception of an object, much less the perception of the object itself or an assessment of the object in terms of a value – can be derived from the datum itself. In other words, a sense datum cannot escape from its confines as a sense datum. Nothing whatsoever in experience can be derived from a sense datum, not even the formal isolation of the datum itself. Sense data, as such, is essentially irrelevant to experience, except insofar as the ‘experiential field’ largely consists in sense data.
            But, we say, how can we define consciousness and the values of experience scientifically, if we cannot use the sense datum as an analytic determinant? Good enough. How can we define gravity without sense data as an analytic determinant? ‘Mass’ is not a sensory category. And ‘attraction between masses’ is therefore not a statement involving sensory content. ‘Mass’ is as much an inferential principle, in terms of sense data, as is gravity itself. What I’m pointing to is the fact that physics itself began with the assumption of an inferential principle, a principle that to this day has acquired no greater ‘sensory content’ than it had at the outset. That we now understand gravity as a function of the corollary relationship between space and mass - as a consequence of Einsteinian physics - still does not bring it into any greater proximity with ‘sensory fact’.

             If we want to propose or develop a ‘science of consciousness’, we simply begin with the assumption of consciousness as an essential principle and see whether we can say something about consciousness itself, once we have isolated it.

             The other side of the issue has fallen to the purview of philosophy itself, although the ‘philosophers’ have used much the same argument to pointedly avoid dealing with it. And this, of course, is the problem of value. Thought is not value. If value were not a prior principle, thought could not exist. But since ‘philosophers’ for the last two centuries, give or take, have insisted that they are ‘scientific’ – and have used the same ersatz definition of ‘science’ that the ‘scientists’ use in denying consciousness – value has become the unspoken monster in academic nightmares. We are barraged with questions about the vehicles, about how we ‘signify’ or the functions of ‘units of meaning’, but meaning itself is the unspeakable. In other words, meaning cannot be presented in terms of ‘substantive content’ itself, that is, content that can be analyzed strictly in terms of sense data’. Therefore, somehow, it must not actually exist. Hence, we can have the vector of meaning, but we cannot isolate meaning or value itself, apart from the particularity of content, the fact that value and meaning are ultimately determinative of particularity and content, notwithstanding.
            Again, if we start from the assumption of value or meaning, in principle, and see if there is something explicit that can be said of them, we are ultimately operating on a legitimately scientific basis. The fact that we may never be able to make formulaic equations with quantifiable terms is neither here nor there. The issue is whether categorical statements are possible.

             And, of course, the two issues are fully correlated. Consciousness and value are necessarily distinct, since value also appears within consciousness, although, finally, we cannot limit it to consciousness. And consciousness itself is essentially without value, in the sense that awareness per se is neutral.
            The reason we cannot limit value to consciousness is because of the experience of objectivity. The very nature of the experience of objectivity involves the necessary independence of value, since objectivity ultimately involves value ‘pre-empting’ consciousness. Consciousness, when we take it for granted as a principle, yields its own definition in terms of general awareness and focus. The fact that focus arises within the frame of general awareness while isolating a point within the frame shows that consciousness is both a functional principle and global. And the functional principle pivots on value, since focus originates in value.
            Once we have these elemental keys to the principles of value and consciousness, we can begin the articulate a science of awareness as clear and defining, in its way, as the fundamentals of physics.