When last seen, William James was asserting:
“The universal conscious fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think’ and ‘I feel.’ No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves.”
However, James’ focus on the stream of consciousness was all too effective. James Watson, considered the founder of behaviorism, lamented that there was no way to objectively examine consciousness:
“The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness; when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation. We have become so enmeshed in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content… that I, as an experimental student, feel that something is wrong with our premises and the types of problems which develop from them.”

So Watson, who worked with rats, made the challenge:
“The enormous number of experiments which we have carried out upon [animal] learning have … contributed little to human psychology. It seems reasonably clear that some kind of compromise must be effected: either psychology must change its viewpoint so as to take in facts of behavior, whether or not they have bearings upon the problems of ‘consciousness’; or else behavior must stand alone as a wholly separate and independent science. Should human psychologists fail to look with favor upon our overtures and refuse to modify their position, the behaviorists will be driven to using human beings as subjects and to employ methods of investigation which are exactly comparable to those now employed in the animal work.”

We know how that worked out.
Behaviorist did indeed reject talk of inner mental states as unverifiable. They came to adopt the more radical view that inner states were unnecessary for the study of psychology: there was no need to postulate the mediation of a mind to explain behavior. There were no mental states.
Even though the period of behaviorism (1920-1960) was perhaps a bit long, it demanded better methodology from those who would study consciousness. Contemporary explorations of consciousness remained chastened and careful, and I consider this good.
So let us bid a sad farewell to behaviorism.
May it rest in peace.

In contemporary academic culture there has been a “rediscovery of the mind.” In America at least, this is a relatively recent trend:
John Searles’ book of that name, in which he argued that “mind” and “consciousness” should be central to psychology and cognitive science, was published in 1992.
Let’s review the current situation.
There are two aspects to recent approaches.
The first part is to describe the general problem of the mind in relation to the brain.
The second part is to account for consciousness as a very distinctive feature of the mind.

Ontological Dualism:
Mind and Brain are both entities but at different levels of being
1. Plato: psyche (soul that partakes of world of ideas) body (the material world)
2. Christian thought after Augustine: soul <> body
3. Descartes: res cogitans (the “thinking thing”)
res extensa (“things extended [in time & space]”)
Central question here is how the two levels of being relate to one another.

Ontological Monism:
Mind and Brain are both of the same, single “stuff.:”
Idealism: Both mind and body are part of the world of ideas
(but we just do not know this and take this as “real.”)
Materialism: Both mind and body are part of the material world, and that is all there is.
Physicalism: Not only are mind and body material, but they follow the laws of physics more or less as we know them.
Fundamental Property Dualism: Mind and body are both material, but the minds come about because some (all?) material has the property of mental awareness.

Emergent Property Dualism: The mind is made of brain stuff, but in its organization, it acquires properties not found in the brain-stuff.
One strand of mysterianism argues that we lack both the concepts and the mental features needed to understand how the emergent properties properties arise.
While Blackmore may believe that most scientists are materialists of one sort or another, I suspect they are in fact agnostic. A principled agnostic materialism derives from two strands.

The first is Kantian Critical philosophy.
In this view, we do not have sure access to either a self or to objects in the world. We assume both exist and get on with the task of exploring the “manifold of experience” on the assumption that it has a large-scale order.
A second strand is that of Phenomenology.
This tradition studies the logic of our first-person experience of phenomena, that which “appears before us.”
The ontological status of the self and of phenomena need not be resolved beforehand as one explores the conditions shaping our experience of the phenomenal realm.

Most scientists I know are circumspect about the claims they make. Whether one is a materialist or agnostic, the challenge remains the same: how to explain the experience of first-person consciousness in terms of the structure and dynamics of the brain.
When we turn to consciousness and the brain, there are several major approaches.
The first major model is epiphenomenalism:
The brain does whatever it needs to do, and our consciousness trails along behind it as an interesting, colorful by-product.
In this view, consciousness is simply an effect of brain function with no causal role to play. (It is an epiphenomenon.)

The second group of approaches can be called functionalist:
In general, the “mind is what the brain does.”
It is unfortunate that “functionalism” tends to refer very specifically to what I would like to call “Good Old-fashioned
Functionalism,” because it is very closely related to what has come to be known as “Good Old-fashioned Artificial
Intelligence” (GOFAI).
Both view intelligence as a collection of modules operating according to explicit rules to process internal representations.
Neuroscience largely has discarded this model as a general approach to how the brain works. It is not a good account of the mind either.

If we commit ourselves to the general idea that somehow consciousness is a brain function, then we can start to ask particular questions.
The first is crucial: what do we mean by consciousness?
Do we mean Locke’s sort of “consciousness of…?”
Do we mean Hume’s theater of perceptions?
The contemporary philosopher Ned Block proposed two types of consciousness that define a somewhat different approach:
1. Access Consciousness: the sort of awareness of thoughts and sensations that we can report.

2. Phenomenal Consciousness: the qualitative experience.
When we are running, we are aware that we are running, but the phenomenal consciousness is all that is involved in what if feels like to be running.
We encountered “phenomena” earlier as “that which appears before us” as possible objects of experience.
Phenomenal consciousness is how we take in experience.
Philosophers usually think in terms of the qualia of experience: the private, subjectively experienced qualities of a cloudless blue sky on a summer afternoon or drinking coffee on a cool overcast morning: what was that coffee like?

Qualia are very hard to convey because they go to the heart of the private, subjective character of consciousness that Locke discussed long ago.
They therefore will be very hard for neuroscience to explore. So, instead, for the moment, let us return to the general idea of phenomenal consciousness being “what it is like to be…”
The phrase became famous when Thomas Nagel posed the question of whether we could understand “What it is like to be a bat?”
This is not the metaphysical question of what it would be like to have the soul of a bat. It is about what sort of consciousness a creature that inhabited a bat-body with a bat-brain would have .

If we think of the question of “bat consciousness” as the subjectively engaged world (which includes the self) as experienced by a bat with its particular body, senses, and brain, then we can begin to explore human phenomenal consciousness by asking questions about what it is like to inhabit a particular body with a particular mind. These will not get at qualia directly, but the manner in which we inhabit our bodies provides a subjective substratum of an unnoticed, ever-flowing “stream of consciousness” that surely inform the particularity of qualia.
It is this quality of unnoticed consciousness that I would like to explore for moment.

In the textbook, Blackmore proposes that you ask yourself “Am I conscious?” What this means is “Am I being aware of what it is to be me?”
But what does “being aware of what it means to be me” mean in more concrete detail?
Let me propose an exercise I’ll call “Hello, right arm.”
By the way, there is no point trying to take notes during this.

You carry with you a complex personal space defined by having the particular arms and hands that you have. Your experience of the world every waking moment is shaped by this.
You can repeat this exercise with all sorts of variations. Consider your feet and legs, consider your mouth. Consider what it feels like to favor one arm and hand over the other, how space is slightly asymmetrical.
And finally consider how you ordinarily don’t consider any of this.

Now on the next aspect of phenomenal consciousness:

Luke can see without seeing. His vision is blank and yet his mind knows position and movement.
Suppose the Force is very powerful indeed in him. Suppose now his mind is aware of all sounds without him actually hearing anything. Suppose his mind can know what his fingers feel without his actually consciously feeling anything. Suppose his mind used the force to control his bodily movements without any conscious sensation of a body. In a word, suppose his mind processed all sensory information without the by-pass of conscious display.

Luke would be a so-called philosophical zombie.
If you asked him (his mind would know what you said) what it was like to use a light-saber, he would be able to tell you (the
Force controls his speech without internal vocalization) what it was like, and he would be right.
I suggest, against popular wisdom, that one can separate “what it is like” from what we consider consciousness.
So, at last we raise the “hard question” of consciousness: why do we experience it at all? Can neuroscience explain what this firstperson experience is?