The word 'consciousness' is ambiguous because it is used in many everyday contexts rather than as a precise technical term. To address this, the author introduces a specific technical concept: intransitive self-consciousness, a form of self-awareness. The paper then discusses this particular sense of consciousness, distinguishing it from other meanings.
Consciousness may have value, but researchers in different fields—epistemology, well-being, animal and medical ethics, philosophy of consciousness, and philosophy of science—have been discussing this question in isolation. This paper reviews those disconnected discussions and proposes a unified theoretical framework to make the contributions from each area more visible to the others, arguing that they all address a single underlying question: what is the value of consciousness?
A chapter from a scientific and philosophical work examines the search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). It argues that science aims not just to find correlations but to explain them. The first half presents a menu of possible explanations for why consciousness correlates with neural activity. The second half suggests that, under reasonable assumptions, the choice among these explanations may be in principle underdetermined by scientific evidence alone.