Chapter 30 - Consciousness: situated and social

Summary

This chapter discusses consciousness in the restricted sense of conscious sensory experience, such as the experiences of seeing a certain color, hearing a certain sound, smelling a rose, and the various other examples usually cited by those who want to make a convincing case for so-called qualia. The chapter proposes an account of conscious experience that, a priori, may seem rather counter-intuitive, perhaps even inconceivable. The idea that the mind is embodied and situated in the world has been developed in considerable detail recently and has been combined with findings in cognitive neuroscience. Like all cognition, social knowledge goes beyond the mere information present in the evidence on which it is based; it is inferential and creative in nature. There is considerable empirical evidence that humans obtain knowledge about other people's emotional states, for example, at least in part, via some kind of articulated emulation.