| What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder that philosophers and scientists have struggled for millennia with the concept, and that scientists rejected the whole idea for long periods and refused even to study it. The good news is that, at the start of the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point when they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Could consciousness be an illusion? What is consciousness, anyway? |