ABSTRACT
Chapters 1 to 13 suggest a way to make sense of what consciousness is and what consciousness does that is consistent with common sense and with the findings of science. According to classical dualism, the universe is split into two separate realms, each composed of different kinds of stuff: physical stuff which has location and extension in space, and the ‘thinking’ stuff of soul, mind or consciousness which has neither location nor extension in space. In interactionist forms of dualism, these two realms interact with each other somewhere in the human brain. Currently popular forms of physicalism and functionalism attempt to heal this split by attempting to show that soul, mind and consciousness are nothing more than states or functions of the brain. However all these theories agree that the universe is split in a second way: conscious experiences are separate from the world that we can see around our bodies. This world that we can see has extension and location in space, but our experiences of that world are either ‘nowhere’ or they are ‘in the head or brain’.
