Weili discussed the difficulties in the studies of consciousness. She suggested to divide the conscious experiences to the ones that directly or indirectly interacting with the external environment such as consciousness associated with our senses and that with processing the information from our senses and the one that is pure subjective. Then she further divides the subjective experience in the one relying on language, thought, and concepts and the one that is completely independent of those.
“Two proposals were made for the pure subject experience: 1) There exists an intrinsic awareness (IA) that does not depend on the external environment nor our sense organs and our mental activities. 2) This IA is the ground state of the consciousness, meaning that all our conscious experiences are the manifestations of this IA. Weili introduced the properties of IA and argues that because IA is irreducible to components the reductionist approach is not applicable for the studies of IA. This work provides an answer to the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ proposed by Chalmers.