Abstract

The empirical exploration of the neural mechanisms of consciousness is undoubtedly going to be one of the most central lines of research in the scientific study of consciousness. Therefore, it is important for the researchers involved in these studies to have a clear idea of the phenomenon they are searching for and of the capabilities of the methods they are using to accomplish the task. The main point of my paper ‘Can functional brain imaging discover consciousness in the brain?’ was to explicate and clarify these issues that, although central metatheoretical problems for cognitive neuroscience, have not received much attention from either the experimental neuroscientists or the philosophers involved in the study of consciousness