Is Consciousness Real?

There are a wide number of views on consciousness held by highly educated and intelligent people, including: neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, anesthesiologists, physicists and philosophers of mind. Many are materialists or physicalists and believe that consciousness is an emergent epiphenomenon resulting from activity of the brain, i.e. "consciousness is what the brain does." Others makes sense of reality in terms of monistic idealism, claiming that consciousness is fundamental to all of reality and that matter is merely a perception within consciousness (more on this in future posts). Finally, even some physicalist scientists and philsophers like Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, Christof Koch, Guilio Tononi  and more hold to a view known as panpsychism which postulates that there may be consciousness (or something like consciousness; perhaps a proto-consciousnesss) that runs throughout all of the universe, as a property of matter together with mass, spin and charge, down to the smallest sub-atomic particle (more on this too in future posts).

However, it may seem surprising that, among these experts that anyone would deny the reality of consciousness. However, there actually are some notable experts who do. This is a well-written article by a physicalist philosopher of mind, Galen Strawson talking about what he terms, The Consciousness Deniers:

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/StrawsonDennettNYRBExchangeConsciousness2018.pdf