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On the Nature of Consciousness

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Abstract

The “Holy Grail” of neuroscience is to figure out how the human brain makes itself consciously aware of the feelings, ideas, intentions, decisions and plans that are being generated in its circuits. This has historically been treated as a kind of metaphysical, philosophical, or religious question, and dozens of books have been written about it. One of the philosopher giants in this area, Daniel Dennett (2005) says he has 78 books in his own personal library on consciousness published before February 2004. I have a couple of shelves of such books myself.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Much of the material in this section was taken, with permission, from the author’s article, “Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple”(Klemm 2010).

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Correspondence to W. R. Klemm .

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Klemm, W.R. (2011). On the Nature of Consciousness. In: Atoms of Mind. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1097-9_7

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