How can we be certain, he was suggesting, that our experience of consciousness is “authentic”? The answer is we can’t; it is beyond the reach of our science, and yet who doubts its reality? In fact, the evidence for the existence of consciousness is much like the evidence for the reality of the mystical experience: we believe it exists not because science can independently verify it but because a great many people have been convinced of its reality; here, too, all we have to go on is the phenomenology.
