Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience

In the book by professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, Michael Graziano—author of the already well-known attention schema theory—a new theory of consciousness is presented. According to it, what we call consciousness is actually a model of our own mind. Graziano argues that it’s natural for humans to create such models—even for inanimate objects. The author proposes the evolutionary origin of consciousness, describes, alongside real experiments, several intellectual ones, dwells in detail on the phenomenon of social consciousness, and offers a scenario of transferring one’s personality to artificial carriers during one’s lifetime for existence after death.