ABSTRACT
The huge contemporary literature on consciousness spans multiple disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. This tutorial will introduce participants to major proposals about consciousness, and their empirical and methodological implications. The goal is to prepare participants to explore the consciousness literature in greater depth. Philosophers approach the problem of consciousness from a variety of analytic perspectives, some focusing on contemporary formulations of the mind-body problem and others on analyses of subjective experience. Neuroscientists have made a wide variety of proposals concerning the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). A starting assumption is that a subset of neural activity is correlated with current conscious experience. The NCC might be limited to particular types of cells or anatomical structures, or comprise global patterns of synchronized neural activity.
