ABSTRACT
The previous chapters show that there are systematic correlations between conscious processes, events, states and properties and neural events, states, processes and properties and that these correlations are to varying degrees localized to particular cortical regions. The ever-growing mountains of evidence for such localized systematic covariations are grist for the reductionist’s mill, suggesting that conscious properties do not just covary with activity in localized neural assemblies but that the latter are neural substrates of the former. It is a relatively quick, albeit contentious, argument from the claim that neural properties and events are substrates of conscious properties and events to the claim that the latter are realized by, and hence reduce to, the former. Consciousness neuroscience thus fulfils its role as the harbinger of reductive physicalism.
