Published by Oxford University Press in July, 2025.
Highlights:
- Clear and empirically supported explanation of consciousness as resulting from four brain mechanisms.
- Application to a broad range of conscious experiences including smell, hunger, loneliness, self-awareness, religious experience, sports performance, and romantic chemistry.
- Use of these mechanisms to generate novel theories of dreaming, humor, and musical experience.
- Proposal of a new theory of time consciousness drawing on recent advances in neuroscience.
- Assessment of consciousness in non-human animals and machines, including the new generative AI models such as ChatGPT.
- Development of a new solution to the mind-body problem, called coherent materialism.
Blogs:
The NBC Theory of Consciousness
New Solution to the Mind-Body Problem
The New Panpsychism Is as Bad as the Old
Video:
Figure 8.1 (color version)
Web links
Functions of skin: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/10978-skin
Self-monitoring: Chris Eliasmith, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6P4jqn7dpM
Obesity in USA: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult-obesity-facts/index.html
Overweight: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight
Brain memory structures: https://qbi.uq.edu.au/memory/where-are-memories-stored
Dream banks: https://www.dreambank.net, https://morninglife.co.uk/most-common-dream-by-country/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dream_diaries
Waffley wedded wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3E9U3GDrmI
When Harry Met Sally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNEX0fbGePg
Money song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDWJzKYfdc
Phonetic punctuation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIf3IfHCoiE
Cognitive-affective maps: https://paulthagard.com/links/cognitive-affective-maps/
Parody “Like a Surgeon”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=notKtAgfwDA. “Like a Virgin”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s__rX_WL100
Taylor Swift singing “All Too Well”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJr_8l0AEWE. Lyrics: https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-all-too-well-10-minute-version-taylors-version-live-acoustic-lyrics.
Musical cultures: https://sites.google.com/site/musicalcultures/. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cultural_and_regional_genres_of_music.
Without God: Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, ch. 7, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/28054/pg28054-images.html
Einstein on common sense: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/29/common-sense/
Popular sports: https://sportsmonkie.com/most-popular-sports/
Yogi Berra: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/13/think-and-hit/
Applied Brain Research: https://www.appliedbrainresearch.com
Cambridge Declaration: https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com
Blake Lemoine: https://futurism.com/blake-lemoine-google-interview
This page updated October 7, 2025
Paul Thagard 