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Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
1
Consciousness: An Introduction
3rd Edition
Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko
To all the students who took Sue’s consciousness course.
Table of Contents
Boxes
Acknowledgements
Prefaces
Introduction
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
2
Section One. The problem
1. What’s the problem?
2. What is it like to be…?
3. The grand illusion
Section Two. The brain
4. Neuroscience and the correlates of consciousness
5. The theatre of the mind
6. The unity of consciousness
Section Three. Body and world
7. Attention
8. Conscious and unconscious
9. Agency and free will
Section Four. Evolution
10. Evolution and animal minds
11. The function of consciousness
12. The evolution of machines
Section Five. Borderlands
13. Altered states of consciousness
14. Reality and imagination
15. Dreaming and beyond
Section Six. Self and other
16. Egos, bundles, and theories of self
17. The view from within?
18. Waking up
References
Index
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
3
Boxes
Chapter
Profile
Concept
Practice
Activity
Introduction
1. Blackmore
2. Troscianko
1. What’s the
problem?
1.1 Descartes
2.2 James
1.1 The hard
problem
1.1 Am I conscious
now?
1.1 Defining
consciousness
2. What is it like
to be…?
2.1 Chalmers
2.2 Churchland
2.1 The
philosopher’s
zombie
2.1 What is it like
to be me now?
2.1 Mary the
colour scientist
3.1 The grand
illusion
3.1
Ramachandran
3. 1 Magic
3. 2 Seeing or
blind?
3.1 How much am
I seeing now?
3.1 Filling-in
4. Neuroscience
and the neural
correlates of
consciousness
4.1 Koch
4.1 Mapping the
brain
4.2 Phantom
phenomena
4.1 Where is this
pain?
4.1 The rubber
hand illusion
5. Theatre of the
mind
5. 1 Dennett
5. 2 Baars
5.1 Seeing blue
5.1 What is it that
is conscious?
5.1 Cartesian
materialism
6. The unity of
consciousness
6.1 Tononi
6.1 Synaesthesia
6.2 Orwellian and
Stalinesque
6.1 Is this
experience
unified?
6.1 Are you a
synaesthete?
6.2 Split brain
twins.
6.3 The
cutaneous
rabbit
7. Attention
7.1 Graziano
7.1 Did I direct my
attention?
7.1 Meditation
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
4
8. Conscious and
unconscious
8.1 Goodale
8.2 Clark
8.1 Sensory
substitution
8.1 Did I do this
consciously?
8.2 Was this
decision
conscious?
8.1 Incubation
9. Agency and
free will
9.1 Wegner
9.1 Volition and
timing
9.1 Am I doing
this?
9.1 Getting out
of bed
9.2 Libet’s
voluntary action
10. Evolution and
animal minds
10.1 Dawkins
10.2 Grandin
10.1 Deception
10.1 What is it like
to be that animal?
10.1 Lab choice
11. The function
of consciousness
11.1
Humphrey
11.1 Four ways of
thinking about the
evolution of
consciousness
11.2 Memes
11.1. Am I
conscious now?
Does this have a
function?
11.2 Is this a
meme?
11.1 The
sentience line
12. The evolution
of machines
12.1 Turing
12.2 Searle
12.3 Holland
12.1 Brains and
computers
compared
12.2 Humanoid
robots and
simulations
12.1 Am I a
machine?
12.2 Is this
machine
conscious?
12.1 A Turing
test for
creativity
12.2 The
Seventh Sally
13. Drugs and
altered states
13.1 Metzinger
13.2 State-specific
sciences
13.3 Is hypnosis an
ASC?
13.1 Is this my
normal state?
13.1 Discussing
ASCs
14. Reality and
imagination
14.1 Siegel
14.1 The ganzfeld
controversy
14.1 Living without
psi
14.1 Telepathy
tests
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
5
15. Dreaming and
beyond
15.1 Hobson
15.2 Revonsuo
15.1 The evolution
of dreaming
15.2 Sleep paralysis
15.1 Staying
awake while falling
asleep
15.2 Becoming
lucid
15.3 What
survives?
15.1 Discussing
hypnagogia
15.2 Inducing
lucid dreams
16. Egos, bundles,
and theories of
self
16.1 Hume
16.1 Ego and
bundle theories
16.2 Selves, clubs,
and universities
16.1 Who is
conscious now?
16.2 Am I the
same ‘me’ as a
moment ago?
16.1 The
teletransporter
17. The view from
within?
17.1 Varela
17.1 Do we need a
new kind of
science?
17.1 Is there more
in my P-
consciousness
than I can access?
17.2 Solitude
17.1 Positioning
the theories
18. Waking up
18.1 Harris
18.1 Koans
18.2 Pure
consciousness
18.1 What is this?
18.2 Mindfulness
18.1 The
headless way
Acknowledgements
First Edition:
I would like to thank the following people who have helped me with
arguments and discussion, who advised me on how to set about writing a textbook
or who have read and commented on parts of the manuscript. The very thorough
reviewing process of Oxford University Press meant that I was able to improve the
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
6
text in many ways as it went along. My thanks, for help with the first edition, to
David Chalmers at Australian National University, John Crook, Dan Dennett at Tufts
University, Stan Franklin at University of Memphis, David Goodworth, Nicky Hayes,
Philip Merikle at University of Waterloo, Alva Noë at University of California,
Berkeley, and Susan Schneider at the University of Pennsylvania.
Second Edition:
I would like to thank everyone who helped me with comments and
suggestions for the second edition, including Paula Droege at Pennsylvania State
University, Jay Gould at the University of West Florida, William Lycan at the
University of North Carolina, Andrew Pessin at Connecticut College, Lisa Portmess at
Gettysburg College and Thomas Smythe at Carolina Central State. I would also like to
thank the many referees as well as my colleagues, Guy Saunders and Jackie Andrade,
and my agent Mandy Little.
Third Edition:
We are grateful to all those who helped shape this new edition, especially the
anonymous readers who dedicated so much time and effort to reading the entire
manuscript and commenting on it in detail. We were unable to act on all the
excellent suggestions, but the final version is significantly stronger for this rich input.
The inevitable mistakes and omissions that remain are our own. We thank Jackie
Andrade at Plymouth University for helpful comments early on, and our editorial
team at Routledge, including Liz Burton, Ceri Griffiths, Holly Omand, and Sadé Lee, as
well as Sue’s agent Donald Winchester. Finally, we appreciate everything our
partners have done – through patience, encouragement, cooking, and tea-making –
to help keep us sane(ish).
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
7
Prefaces
Preface to the First Edition
I have loved writing this book. For many years, working as a lecturer, I never
seemed to have enough time to read or think or do the work I really wanted to do.
So in September 2000 I left my job, and threw myself into the vast and ever-
expanding literature of consciousness studies. Writing the book meant spending
over two years mostly at home completely by myself, reading, thinking and writing,
which was a real pleasure.
I could never have worked this way without three things. First, there are all
the conferences at which I have met other scientists and philosophers and been able
to share ideas and arguments. Second there is the Internet and email which makes it
possible to keep in touch with colleagues all over the world instantly without moving
from my own desk. Third, there is the WWW which has expanded beyond all
recognition in the few years since I first thought of writing this book. I am constantly
amazed at the generosity of so many people who give their time and effort to make
their own work, and the work of others, freely available to us all.
I could never have enjoyed working at home so much were it not for my
wonderful family; my partner Adam Hart-Davis, and my two children Emily and
Jolyon Troscianko. Having Joly drawing the cartoons meant many happy battles over
whether self is more like a candle, a raindrop, or bladderwrack seaweed, and what
the Cartesian Theatre would look like if it existed. My thanks go to them all.
Preface to the Second Edition
So much has happened in the past seven or eight years of consciousness
studies! So updating this book has been a real challenge. Although there have been
new philosophical ideas and some theoretical developments, the real impetus for
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
8
change has come from neuroscience. Questions that, even a few years ago, seemed
beyond empirical reach are now routinely being addressed by experiments.
One example especially dear to my heart is the out-of-body experience.
Traditionally rejected by experimental psychologists as an oddity, or even make-
believe, OBEs seemed to evade any theoretical grip. Back in the 1980s, when I was
researching these strange experiences, most scientists agreed that nothing actually
left the body but, beyond vague speculation, could offer no convincing alternative. In
the first edition of this book I described hints that an area of the temporal lobe might
be implicated; now, in the second edition, I can describe repeatable experiments
inducing OBEs, both by brain stimulation and by virtual-reality methods. Theory has
gone forward in leaps and bounds and we can now understand how OBEs arise
through failures of the brain mechanisms involved in constructing and updating the
body image. As so often happens, learning about how something fails can lead to
new insights into how it normally functions – in this case our sense of bodily self.
There have been other new developments in the understanding of self. Not
only are more philosophers learning about neuroscience and bringing these two
disciplines closer together, but research in another previously fringe area –
meditation – has provided surprising insights. From brain scans of long-term
meditators we can see how attentional mechanisms change after long training and
how possibly the claim that self drops out may be grounded in visible brain changes.
In more down-to-earth ways, developments in machine consciousness have
provided new constraints on how brains must work. Software and robot engineers
struggle to make their systems do tasks that humans find easy and in the process are
discovering what kinds of internal models and what kinds of embodiment and
interactions with the outside world are, and are not, needed. It seems that we, like
machines, build up ways of understanding our worlds that are completely
impenetrable to anyone else – and this may give us clues to the nature of
subjectivity and the apparent privacy and ineffability of qualia. All these discoveries
feed into the various theories and increasingly mean they can be tested.
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
9
Then there is the great hunt for the neural correlates of consciousness.
Personally I think this highly active and popular approach is doomed to failure: it
depends on the idea that some neural processes are conscious while others are not,
and I believe this is a nonsense. But I’m in a tiny minority here. The important thing
is that this work will inevitably reveal which approach is right. The rapid pace of
change over these past few years suggests that we may soon find out and makes the
prospect of the next few years very exciting indeed.
I have changed too. Since the first edition I have written a Very Short
Introduction to Consciousness which, unlike this textbook, was explicitly meant to
include my own ideas about consciousness. I enjoyed being made to explain so
clearly why I think consciousness is an illusion. I then interviewed twenty top
scientists and philosophers for my book Conversations on Consciousness and learnt
that when Kevin O’Regan was a tiny boy he already thought of himself as a machine;
that Ned Block thinks that O’Regan and Dennett don’t even appreciate
phenomenality; that Dan Dennett goes out of his way, every now and then, to give
himself a good dose of the Zombic Hunch just so that he can practise abandoning it;
and that Christof Koch, having thought so much about consciousness, doesn’t squish
bugs anymore. Having accepted that conscious will is an illusion, Dan Wegner said he
gained a sense of peace in his life. Yet by contrast most of my conversationalists,
when asked ‘Do you have free will?’ said they did, or if not that they lived their lives
as though they did, which is not something I feel I can do anymore.
Consciousness is an exciting subject – perhaps the most exciting mystery we
can delve into now that neuroscience is giving us so many new tools. I have no idea
whether I will ever be able to update this book again. Even after so few years the
task was daunting, and in a few more years the areas that seem important may have
shifted completely. But we shall have to wait and see. Meanwhile I hope you will
enjoy battling with the great mystery.
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
10
Preface to the Third Edition
Sue:
As soon as I was invited to write a third edition I knew that the whole
structure of this book would have to change. Indeed I knew this back in 2009 when
embarking, with both trepidation and enthusiasm, on the second. By then
neuroscience was really beginning to take off but I did manage to squeeze
everything into the old scheme. By 2016 this was no longer feasible; there was just
too much exciting new research to introduce, so what could I do? I am a lone
worker. I rarely collaborate with others and I love to work at home in silence and
solitude. And even if I’d wanted to find a collaborator, who and where could they be,
and how would we work together on such a complex book?
I was with my daughter in Oxford one day, sharing this huge problem with
her, when we both spoke at once: – ‘You wouldn’t consider…?’ – ‘I could do it’. We
laughed, and so our new collaboration was begun. I say ‘collaboration’ but in reality
Emily has done almost all the massive amount of work involved in bringing our book
up to date. I gave advice, read and edited what she had done, and wrote some small
pieces myself, but mostly what is new is her work. Her interest in language added
new dimensions to the overview of consciousness studies; her deep understanding
of eating disorders brought her knowledge of psychotherapy to bear; and her
background in literary studies led to our including literary quotations in every
chapter. I would never have thought of this and have found some of these excerpts
quite moving – as well as thought-provoking.
Working within the family might have proved traumatic but did not. My
husband, Adam Hart-Davis, supported us throughout. Vast differences in our
academic background might have been a hindrance but instead seemed to be a help,
and despite coming at the study of consciousness from such different directions we
seem to share the same general outlook: the hard problem is a distraction;
consciousness is not an added extra to everything else we do; and our false
intuitions are the major stumbling block to escaping from dualism.
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
11
I can only thank Emily for making this third edition not only possible but, I
think, the best yet.
Emily:
Sue had mentioned several times that she’d been asked to do a third edition
but wasn’t sure she could face it. I don’t know quite why it was that on the third or
fourth occasion, sometime in the summer of 2014, it occurred to me to offer to help.
My academic background is in neither psychology nor neuroscience, nor even in
philosophy, but in literary studies. But despite my predictable teenage rebellion
against my psychologist parents, during my doctorate I’d found myself returning to
the scientific fold by investigating the experience of reading Kafka, and turning to
lots of the same ideas Sue worked with – and even citing her quite often. And since
then I’ve thought of myself as poised on the edges of many disciplines – quite a few
of them the ones that make up this book.
I’d always thought this a wonderful, and surreally ambitious, book, and I
hated the idea of it becoming gradually obsolete. Had I known quite how much time
and energy the third edition would ask of me, or how hopeless the task would feel at
times, I’m not completely sure I’d have made the offer. The process of co-authoring
a book at all, let alone with my mother, let alone when living some of the time in her
house, let alone when trying to do justice to the past six years of developments
across all the fields that consciousness studies encompasses without adding many
more words, has been something of an existential learning curve. Yet we’ve had lots
of fun, too, and Sue has been very brave in letting me rip her baby to shreds and put
it back together again – and now, three years later, it’s nearly over and I’m proud of
what we’ve done: make an already great book, I think, even better.
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
12
Introduction
Welcome perplexity
If you think you have a solution to the problem of consciousness you haven’t
understood the problem. That’s not strictly true, of course. You may either be a
genius and have found a real solution, or be sufficiently clear-sighted to understand
why there was no problem in the first place. More likely, however, is that you are
falling into a number of tempting traps that help you evade the real issues.
The American philosopher Thomas Nagel once observed that ‘Certain forms
of perplexity – for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life –
seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those
problems’ (1986, p. 4). This may be equally true of the problem of consciousness.
Indeed the puzzlement can be part of the pleasure, as philosopher Colin McGinn
points out: ‘the more we struggle the more tightly we feel trapped in perplexity. I am
grateful for all that thrashing and wriggling’ (1999, p. xiii).
If you want to think about consciousness, confusion is necessary: mind-
boggling, brain-hurting, I can’t bear to think about this stupid problem any more
confusion. For this reason a great deal of this book is aimed at increasing your
perplexity rather than reducing it. So if you do not wish your brain to hurt (though of
course strictly speaking brains cannot hurt because they do not have any pain
receptors – and, come to think of it, if your toe, which does have pain receptors,
hurts, is it really your toe that is hurting?), stop reading now and choose a more
tractable problem to study.
Our motivation for wishing to stir up perplexity is not cruelty or cussedness,
nor the misplaced conviction that long words and difficult arguments are signs of
cleverness or academic worth. Indeed we think the reverse: that the more difficult a
problem is, the more important it becomes to use the simplest words and sentences
possible. So we will try to keep our arguments as clear and simple as we can while
tackling what is, intrinsically, a very tricky problem.
Part of the problem is that ‘consciousness’ has no generally accepted
definition in either science or philosophy despite many attempts to define it (Nunn,
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
13
2009). The word is common enough in everyday language, but is used in different
ways. For example, ‘conscious’ is often contrasted with ‘unconscious’, and is taken as
more or less equivalent to ‘responsive’ or ‘awake’. ‘Conscious’ is also used to mean
the equivalent of knowing something, or attending to or being aware of something,
as in ‘She wasn’t conscious of the embarrassment she’d caused’ or ‘He wasn’t
conscious of the rat creeping up quietly under his desk’. Different theories
emphasise different aspects of what we might mean by consciousness, but the term
is most broadly used to mean the equivalent of ‘subjectivity’ or personal experience,
and this is the sense in which it is used throughout this book.
Another problem is that consciousness studies is a relatively new and
profoundly multidisciplinary subject. This means we can draw on a rich variety of
ideas from neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, biology, and other fields, but it can
also make life difficult because people from these different disciplines sometimes
use the same words in completely different ways. Students of psychology are our
primary audience in this book, but we have tried to cover all of the major
approaches in consciousness studies, including psychology, philosophy, artificial
intelligence, neuroscience, first- and second-person methods, as well as ‘non-
traditional’ approaches centred on spirituality or ‘altered states’ of consciousness.
We have also included excerpts from novels, stories, poems, films, and TV
programmes to help you explore consciousness with the help of a wider range of
great writers and thinkers. Our emphasis is on a science of consciousness based on
empirical findings and testable theories, but there are many forms this science can
take. Throughout the book we will be confronted by questions about how the nature
of consciousness (its ontology) is related to the possibility of gaining knowledge
about it (the epistemology) and the methods we choose to do so (the methodology).
We have no easy answers, other than to keep reminding you (and ourselves) that
there is no such thing as a neutral question or method. Even the ordinary language
we use to think with pushes us in one direction or another from the very outset.
No single existing method of studying consciousness has all the answers.
Because the brain is the most complicated organ in the human body, it is easy to
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
14
think that it must hold the answer to the mystery of consciousness. But when people
have tried to fit consciousness neatly into the usual ways of doing brain science, they
find they cannot do it. This suggests that somewhere along the line we are making a
fundamental mistake or relying on some false assumptions. Rooting out one’s prior
assumptions is never easy and can be painful. But that is probably what we have to
do if we are to think clearly about consciousness.
Profile 0.1 – Susan Blackmore (b 1951)
As a student in Oxford, reading physiology and psychology, Sue
Blackmore had a dramatic out-of-body experience which convinced her that
consciousness could leave the body and made her determined, against much
sound advice, to study parapsychology. She learned to read Tarot cards, sat
with mediums, and trained as a witch, but her 1979 PhD thesis contained only
numerous failed experiments on extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis.
Becoming ever more sceptical of paranormal claims, she turned to studying the
experiences that foster paranormal belief, including near-death experiences,
sleep paralysis, and dreams, eventually concluding that parapsychology is a
red herring in any attempt to understand consciousness. Meditation proved far
more helpful, and she has been practising Zen since the early 1980s. She
carried out one of the first experiments on change blindness, and her books
include the controversial bestseller The Meme Machine as well as books on
OBEs, NDEs, meditation and consciousness. While at the University of the
West of England in Bristol, she taught the consciousness course on which this
book is based, but finally decided that the only way to learn more about
consciousness was to give up the job and write this book. Since then she has
been a freelance writer and lecturer and is now working (again) on out-of-body
experiences, tremes (technological memes), and (unsuccessful) children’s
books. She plays in a samba band, loves painting, kayaking, and her garden,
and is learning powerlifting. She is Visiting Professor in Psychology at the
University of Plymouth.
The organisation of the book
This book is divided into six relatively independent sections containing three
chapters each. Each section is designed to stand alone, for use as the topic for a
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
15
lecture, or several lectures, or to be read independently as an overview of the area.
However, all of them depend on the ideas outlined in Section One, so if you choose
to read only parts of the book, we would recommend starting with Section One, on
the nature of the problem.
There is an accompanying website here. This provides a complete list of
references with weblinks where possible, suggested questions for class or self-
assessment, and further information, demos, and audiovisual materials, as well as
updates to the printed book. It also provides some suggestions of different ways you
can navigate the book depending on your specific interests.
Each chapter contains not only a core text, but profiles of selected authors,
explanations of key concepts, exercises to do on your own, and suggestions for
activities and discussions that can be done in groups.
At the end of each chapter is a list of suggested readings with brief
descriptions. The readings are chosen to be short and readily accessible and to give a
quick way into each topic. They should also be suitable as set reading between
lectures for those whose courses are built around the book. For each chapter we
include at least one reading (highlighted in red) which offers multiple perspectives
on a topic, whether through peer commentaries on a target article, a range of views
on a question or concept, or case studies; these may be useful as the basis for
seminar discussions.
Each chapter includes a few quotations from literary works highlighted in
orange. Many of them come from famous writers, and you may know some of them
already. We hope they will do two things: on the one hand, enrich your
understanding of the often strange ideas about consciousness that we will be
encountering; and on the other, enhance your appreciation of the authors and works
we quote from by revealing the links between the ideas they have long been
exploring and the problems that contemporary psychology, philosophy, and
neuroscience are still battling with. Many originate in languages other than English,
and we have provided the most faithful translations we could. This may also help you
think about how different languages offer tools for thinking about consciousness.
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
16
We also provide shorter quotes in the margins, often repeated from the
main text. Our advice is to learn those that appeal to you by heart. Rote learning
seems hard if you are not in the habit, but it gets quickly easier with practice. Having
quotations at your mental fingertips looks most impressive in essays and exams but,
much more important, it provides a wonderful tool for thinking with. If you are
walking along the road or lying in bed at night, wondering whether there really is a
‘hard problem’ or not, your thinking will go much better if you can bring instantly to
mind Chalmers’s definition of the problem, or the exact words of his major critics.
Often a short sentence is all you need to get to the crux of an argument and criticise
it: what assumptions underlie it, and what exactly does it help you to understand
better?
Profile 0.2 – Emily Troscianko (b 1982)
Emily is Sue’s daughter, and has many (mostly fond) childhood memories of
Sue’s strange explorations of the paranormal, alien abductions, and memes, as well as
of morning meditation sessions together before school. Emily studied French and
German as an undergraduate at Oxford, and stayed there to do a doctorate on the
works of Franz Kafka. Asking the question ‘Why is Kafka’s writing so powerful?’ led her
to investigate theories of vision, imagination, and emotion, and to conduct her own
experiments on how readers respond to different kinds of fictional texts. Having
suffered from anorexia from age 16 to 26, she later began to connect her interest in
mental health with her understanding of literary reading, starting to explore how fiction-
reading might have effects on mental illness, and vice versa. Her current work is a
mixture of cognitive-literary and medical-humanities research and various kinds of
writing for audiences beyond academia. Like Sue, she seems to have had to give up
having a job to write this book. When not writing, she can often be found driving her
cow-spotted campervan around Britain, captaining her narrowboat along the Thames,
or lifting heavy things (sometimes with Sue) in a powerlifting gym.
Putting in the practice
Consciousness is a topic like no other. Right now, this very minute, you are
probably convinced that you are conscious – that you have your own private
experience of the world – that you are personally aware of things going on around
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
17
you and of your own inner states and thoughts – that you are inhabiting your own
private world of awareness – that there is something it is like to be you. This is what
is meant by being conscious. Consciousness is our first-person view on the world.
In most of our science and other academic studies, we are concerned with
third-person views – with things that can be verified by others and agreed upon (or
not) by everyone. But what makes consciousness so interesting is that it cannot be
agreed upon in this way. It seems private. It seems like something on the inside. I
cannot know what it is like to be you. And you cannot know what it is like to be me.
So what is it like to be you? What are you conscious of now?
Well...? Take a look. Go on. Really. Take a look and try to answer the question
‘What am I conscious of now?’
Is there an answer? If there is an answer, you should be able to look and see.
You should be able to tell someone else, or at least know for yourself, what you are
conscious of now, and now, and now – what is ‘in’ your stream of consciousness. If
there is no answer, then our confusion must be very deep indeed, for it certainly
seems as though there must be an answer – that I really am conscious right now, and
that I am conscious of some things and not others. If there is no answer then at the
very least we ought to be able to understand why it feels as though there is.
So take a look and first decide whether there is an answer or not. Can you do
this? You will probably decide that there is: that you really are conscious now, and
that you are conscious of some things and not others – only it is a bit tricky to see
exactly what this is like because it keeps on changing. Every time you look things
have moved on. The sound of the hammering outside that you were conscious of a
moment ago is still going on but has changed. A bird has just flitted past the window
casting a brief shadow across the window sill. Oh, but does that count? By the time
you asked the question ‘What am I conscious of now?’, the bird and its shadow had
gone and were only memories. But you were conscious of the memories, weren’t
you? So maybe this does count as ‘what I am conscious of now’ (or, rather, what I
was conscious of then).
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
18
The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and
expanding like the main-spring of a clock, and the small noises of midday, which one
can ascribe to no definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very
impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it
fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her
own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact
that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world.
Who were the people moving in the house--moving things from one place to another?
And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as
in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her
dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat
perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and
stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all… She forgot that
she had any fingers to raise… The things that existed were so immense and so
desolate… She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance for a
long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.
(Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, 1915)
You will probably find that if you try to answer the first question, many more
will pop up. You may find yourself asking ‘How long is “now”?’, ‘Was I conscious
before I asked the question?’, ‘Who is asking the question?’, ‘What does it mean to
“look” “inside”?’. Indeed, you may have been asking such questions for much of your
life. Teenagers commonly ask themselves difficult questions like these and don’t find
easy answers. Some go on to become scientists or philosophers or meditators, and
pursue the questions in their own ways. Many just give up because they receive no
encouragement, or because the task is too difficult. Nevertheless, these are precisely
the kinds of questions that matter for studying consciousness. That is why each
chapter includes a ‘practice’ task with a question to work on in between your
reading.
Every question and every practice takes only one angle on the problem of
consciousness. Some – including the one we started with here – may not be helpful
for you. But we hope that cumulatively, day by day, they will help you. One of us,
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
19
Sue, has been asking questions like these many times a day for about thirty years,
often for hours at a stretch. She has also taught courses on the psychology of
consciousness for more than ten years, and encouraged her students to practise
asking these questions. Over the years she has learned which ones work best, which
are too difficult, in which order they can most easily be tackled, and how to help
students who get into a muddle with them. And Emily has come to puzzle over
consciousness from different starting points – from questions about how we
experience fictional worlds to questions about what it means to be mentally healthy
or ill. We encourage you to work hard, not just at the science but at your own
personal practice, alone and together with others who are questioning too.
Getting the balance right
A lot of this book is about third-person views. You will learn about
neuroscientific experiments, philosophical inquiries, and psychological theories. You
will learn to be critical of theories of consciousness, and of the many ways of testing
one against another. But underlying all of this is the first-person view which is what
it’s all about. Some scientists and philosophers try to connect the two; some create
bridges between the first and the third person by thinking about the ‘second
person’, or how ‘my’ experience is already shaped by other people. Still, the
distinction between more theoretical and more personal ways of studying
consciousness remains, and you must strike a balance between them.
That balance will be different for each of you. Some will enjoy the self-
examination and find the science and philosophy hard. Others will lap up the science
and find the personal inquiry troubling or trivial. However it is for you, remember
that both are needed, and you must find your own balance between them. To those
who object that self-questioning is a waste of time or even ‘childish’, we can only say
this: since we are studying subjective experience we must have the courage to
become familiar with subjective experience.
As you become acquainted with the growing literature of consciousness
studies, and if you have managed to strike a balance between the work of observing
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
20
your own experience and the work of explaining it, you will begin to recognise those
writers who have not. At one extreme are theorists who say they are talking about
consciousness when they are not. They may sound terribly clever but you will soon
recognise that they have never attended to their own experience. What they say
simply misses the point. At the other extreme are those who waffle on about the
meaning of inner worlds or the ineffable power of consciousness while falling into
the most obvious of logical traps – traps that you will instantly identify and be able
to avoid. Once you can spot these two types you will save a lot of time by not
struggling with their writings. There is so much to read on the topic of consciousness
that finding the right things to struggle with is quite an art. We hope this book will
help you to find reading that is worthwhile for you, and to avoid the time-wasting
junk. We cannot claim to have been completely impartial, but we have tried to be
your sceptical guides through this difficult field, to help you find your own way
through it.
Warning
Studying consciousness will change your life. At least, if you study it deeply
and thoroughly it will. As the American philosopher Daniel Dennett says, ‘When we
understand consciousness – when there is no more mystery – consciousness will be
different’ (1991, p. 25). None of us can expect to thoroughly ‘understand
consciousness’. It is still not even clear what that would mean. Nonetheless, we do
know that when people really struggle with the topic, they find that their own
experience, and their sense of self, change in the process.
‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It
is the source of all true art and science.’ (Einstein, 1930)
These changes can be uncomfortable. For example, you may find that once-
solid boundaries between the real and unreal, or the self and other, or humans and
other animals or robots, or you right now and someone in a coma, begin to look less
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
21
solid. You may find that your own certainties – about the world out there, or ways of
knowing about it – seem less certain. You may even find yourself beginning to doubt
your own existence. Perhaps it helps to know that many people have had these
doubts and confusions before you, and have survived.
The difficulties I have in talking to people, which others must find incredible, come
from the fact that my thinking, or rather the content of my consciousness, is quite
foggy, that as far as it concerns only myself I rest in it untroubled, sometimes even
self-satisfied, but that human conversation requires pointedness, stability, and
sustained coherence, things that do not exist in me. No one will want to lie in clouds
of fog with me, and even if someone did, I cannot drive the fog out of my head;
between two people it melts away and is nothing.
(Franz Kafka (1990), diary entry, 24 January 1915, our translation)
Indeed, many would say that life is easier and happier once you get rid of
some of the false assumptions we so easily tend to pick up along the way. But that is
for you to decide for yourself. If you get into difficulties we hope you will be able to
find appropriate help and support, from peers, teachers, or other professionals. If
you are teaching a course using this book, you should be prepared to offer – and
seek out – that support yourself, or be able to advise students on how to find help
when they need it.
Some of Sue’s classes included a few students who held religious convictions
or believed in God. They usually found that these beliefs were seriously challenged
by the course. Some found this difficult, for example because of the role of faith in
family ties and friendships, or because their beliefs gave them comfort in the face of
suffering and death, or because religion provided a framework for thinking about
self, consciousness, and morality in terms of a spirit or soul. So if you do have such
beliefs you should expect to find yourself questioning them. It is not possible to
study the nature of self and consciousness, while labelling God, the soul, the spirit,
or life after death ‘off limits’.
Author accepted manuscript version of front matter and introduction, Consciousness: An
Introduction (3rd edition), Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Routledge 2018.
Please cite from the published version.
22
Every year she taught courses on consciousness Sue gave this same warning
to students – both in person and in writing. Every year, sooner or later, one of them
came to her saying ‘You never told me that...’. Happily most of the changes are, in
the end, positive, and the students are glad to have been through them. Even so, we
can only repeat our warning and hope that you will take it seriously. Studying
consciousness will change your life. Have fun.
‘Warning – studying consciousness will change your life.’
References
Einstein, A. (1930). ‘What I believe’. Forum and Century (1930–1940), October,
LXXXIV(4), 192.
Kafka, F. (1990). Tagebcher. Ed. H.-G. Koch, M. Mller, and M. Pasley. New York:
Schocken.
Woolf, V. (1915). The voyage out. London: Duckworth.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/144
McGinn, C. (1999). The mysterious flame: Conscious minds in a material world. New
York: Basic Books.
Nagel, T. (1986). The view from nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nunn, C. (Ed.) (2009). Defining consciousness. Special issue, Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 16(5).
