The non-eliminativist view of consciousness is the view that consciousness is real and that its existence cannot reasonably be doubted. All the beliefs we are aware of appear in consciousness, and hence to express disbelief in the existence of consciousness amounts to reading off and trusting at least some aspect of one’s conscious experience – the thing believed not to exist – which renders such disbelief nonsensical. To deny the existence of consciousness, the non-eliminativist position holds, is to deny one’s own existence. At most, one can utter the words.
What Does Consciousness Realism Entail? To be a realist about consciousness is to insist that whether someone is conscious, and what their conscious experience is like, is a fact of the world. If someone is experiencing torture, there is no amount of interpretation an outside observer can make that changes what it is like to undergo that experience. The experience is an inherent property of the world, like physical pressure, that is independent of external observers. It is an objective fact of the world that subjective, first-person facts are a feature of reality.