ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies different kinds of consciousness and the difference between this and self-consciousness. It considers the relationship between consciousness and the brain. According to Chalmers, ‘consciousness’ is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena, some of which are easier to explain than others. The personal, subjective experiences, feelings, and sensations that accompany awareness that Chalmers describes are known as qualia. The distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness corresponds to that between consciousness and self-consciousness, respectively; it also corresponds to that between phenomenal consciousness and self-consciousness. While David Lodge emphasises the contrast between literature’s treatment of the uniqueness of personal experience with sciences attempt to identify universal laws, other novelists point out that great literature is great partly because it too deals with universal aspects of human experience. Autobiographical memory (AM) implies understanding that memories constitute a genuine ‘past’ – a history of the self leading up to the here and now.
