ABSTRACT
Our conscious lives are the sea in which we swim. So it is not surprising that consciousness is difficult to understand. We consciously experience many different things, and we can think about the things that we experience. But it is not so easy to experience or think about consciousness itself. Given this, it is common within philosophy and science to identify consciousness with something smaller than itself, for example with some thing that we can observe, such as a state of the brain, or with some aspect of what we experience, such as ‘thought’ or ‘language’. One of the themes of this book is that one can understand consciousness without reducing it in this way.
