ABSTRACT
The biological sciences, including psychology, make the assumption that the behaviour of animals, including human beings, can be explained entirely by physical processes. The claim is that consciousness is an emergent property of the nervous system. An emergent property is a property that is inherent in the lower-level description of some event but not readily derivable from it. The identification of some event by observation implies the identification of that event by means of its effects. It is a characteristic of any sensation that it is apprehended directly. One suggestion, often put forward, is that sensations might be correlated with some specific neural activity. There are three versions of this idea. Epiphenomenalism, epiphenomenon and Parallelism. In addition to the three possible relations between sensations and physical events, there is also another possibility, called interactionism. McGinn has argued that the problem concerning the relation between sensations and physical events will forever remain insoluble.
