ABSTRACT
The contemporary philosophy of mind has identified, and continues to struggle with, as the 'hard problem' of consciousness. That is the modern, neuroscientifically literate version of the classic mind-body problem. Any living thing is constituted by a reciprocal process of interchange with its environment, through which it is always ongoingly establishing and maintaining itself. This is autopoiesis, the process whereby, from the cell upwards, living systems organise themselves as persisting bounded structures permanently interacting across those boundaries with a sustaining environment. Once, it is a perfectly natural progression to the infinitely more complex life-centredness of a human self. The autopoietic centredness of life develops into conscious awareness. Human consciousness adds awareness of the subject as thus stabilised and 'subjectified', and of that which is attended to as objectified. At the highest animal levels the primitive forms of self-consciousness are already apparent, but it is only with the much more complex brains and cognitive capacities of human beings.
