What is Conscious?

Why should brain events bring about the experience of sight, hearing, smell, taste, sensation, emotion, and thought? How does the third person brain become the first person mind, how does an it become an I?

If one is unwilling to accept this transformation, one has to throw in one’s lot with the cognitivists who believe that subjective states are not essential but nominal. These cognitivists are as concerned with dismantling the “folk psychology” of subjectivity as they are devoted to an explanation of brain functions. We only think we’re conscious, they seem to be saying, and we should give up that illusion, just as our ancestors gave up the idea that the sun rises and sets.