ABSTRACT
After a long period of taboo, it is once again permissible, and even fashionable, to discuss consciousness. Having the long-suppressed C-word come out of the closet is both good news and bad. It is good news because our intellectual freedom must benefit from our ability to talk about a human attribute that we all hold dear, especially one like consciousness that we privately never doubted even at the height of our public intimidation by the positivists and the behaviorists. It is bad news in that we may not have made sufficient scientific progress during the censorship era to avoid the many egregious and embarrassing faux pas that have so consistently tripped up the free thinkers of earlier eras (Descartes, 1978; Eccles, 1964; Sherrington, 1955; and, for a review, see Dennett, 1991).
