Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes how human can paint the picture of human nature that seems to be emerging from a wide range of sources at present. It deals with a range of ideas about human nature, and suggests that mind can usefully be viewed as a type of dynamic landscape. The book describes a useful way of envisaging 'mind' that shows how it may relate to human societies, brains and bodies, before getting to mysteries surrounding the nature of consciousness. Questions about conscious experience and approaches to answering them are inevitably central to understanding human basic nature. The book describes a specific theory of the basis of consciousness or SoS theory mainly because it provides useful pointers to potentially valuable lines of research.