Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they’re trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences.

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

To do two CDs worth of a very well known composer is a little different, but what isn’t different is that one of the things we established when we started recording was that we were...

You have a different kind of experience — a different quality of experience — when you see red, when you see green, when you hear middle C, when you taste chocolate. Whenever you’re conscious, whenever...

I argue that neuroscience alone isn’t enough to explain consciousness, but I think it will be a major part of an eventual theory.

Any sacred text comes alive in a unique way when it is sung, and composers from Gregorian chant to the present day have known that.

I never expected this to catch on in the way it did! Of course similar observations have been made by any number of people, and the distinction is obvious to anyone who thinks about the...

They are dedicating a large part of their lives to this choir. Any gift from God is meant to be shared.

I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected...

Those things in a way didn’t need to evolve. They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along.

It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists’ language.

Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what’s in the brain and consciousness,

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

Actually, I think most people accept the existence of qualia.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception – that one perceives the world by perceiving one’s sense-data, or something like that.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying...

There’s certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

Although I’m Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!

Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point...

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a “neural correlate of consciousness”?

Sacred texts are universal and their truths are eternal. There is not a thing that we sing that doesn’t have our personal conviction.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.