Understanding Consciousness: An Interview

This interview with Richard Bright of Interalia Magazine provides a brief summary of how I define consciousness, whether consciousness is incidental or fundamental, and whether, in the light of recent discoveries in neuroscience, the concept of consciousness need revising. I then give a brief introduction to Reflexive Monism, and we go on to discuss whether there is a “hard problem”, the viability of panpsychism and my distinction between continuity and discontinuity theories about the distribution of consciousness. We then turn to the potential benefits of a more collaborative combination of third-person science with first-person methods of the kind used in contemplative practice and review some of the most important questions facing consciousness studies at this time