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Editorial

Can Science Explain Consciousness?

by Philip Goff

It is sometimes said that consciousness is a mystery in the sense that we have no idea what it is. This is clearly not true. What could be better known to us than our own feelings and experiences? The mystery of consciousness is not what consciousness is, but why it is.

Neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding the physical mechanisms in the brain underlying human mental functioning and associated behaviour. Modern brain imaging techniques have provided us with a rich body of correlations between physical processes in the brain and the experiences had by the person whose brain it is.

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