Abstract

Abstract: The article considers how the relationship between consciousness and neural events in the brain should be viewed. The approach is that conscious experiences – perceptions, feelings and mental images – are the subjective versions of the neural events. It is the conscious experiences that are the essence of intentionality and meaning; the neural events do the causative work. From this viewpoint there are discussions of the neural representations that figure in thinking and their corresponding subjective experiences – in what way neural events can be the representations of things in the world and the body, and how the subjectivity of conscious experiences converts causation into intentionality. Finally the article seeks to explain how, if consciousness has no causative efficacy, we can think about it at all, including a discussion of “zombies”, and discusses whether machines can think or be conscious..