Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

This concerns the following question: Is consciousness an extra ingredient added to our ability to perceive, think, and feel, or is it inseparable from being able to perceive, think and feel? To put it another way, are qualia or subjective experiences something in addition to being a living, thinking, feeling creature?

The major religions are almost all dualist, especially Christianity and Islam, which rely on the notion of an eternal, non-physical soul that can survive death and end up in heaven or hell. Many Hindus believe in the Atman or divine self, although the Advaita school advocates a non-dual philosophy that is becoming increasingly popular in the modern

Throughout history most people have been dualists, believing in two different realms or worlds. This is also true of most non-Western cultures today with surveys suggesting it is true of most educated Westerners as well. This dualist belief begins early in life with children of 4 or 5 years old happily dividing the world into mental and physical th

you are really talking about consciousness, then you must deal with subjectivity. Either you must actually solve the hard problem and explain how subjectivity arises from the material world or, if you claim that consciousness is an illusion or even that it does not exist at all, you must explain why it appears so strongly to exist.

The more we learn about the brain the less room there is for consciousness to play a role.

In the 17th century the French philosopher René Descartes proposed the most famous dualist theory (Figure 2). Known as Cartesian dualism, this is the idea that mind and brain consist of different substances: the mind is non-physical and non-extended (i.e. it takes up no space); the body and the rest of the physical world are made of physical, or ex