Abstract

This chapter consists of a brief discussion of a limited range of questions about the nature of consciousness. It opens the discussion by noting the feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain‐processes. The sense of mystery afflicts us only in philosophical reflection, when language is idling. The chapter draws attention to one source of our confusion, viz. the idea that we can examine the nature of consciousness by introspection. It focuses on a pair of suppositions implicit in the illusion of a mysterious gulf between brain‐processes and consciousness. Typically pictures, both literal and verbal, can illuminate the use of an expression in as much as we find the application of the picture obvious and unproblematic. However, in the case of the pictures we have of the mental, things are quite different. The pictures are readily available; indeed, they force themselves upon us.