2. The Emergence of the Concept of Consciousness

In daily life we treat colour, sound and smell as objective properties of the world. Over the last three hundred years science has developed a series of interpretations of the world that have stripped objects of their sensory properties. Apples used to be red and tasty; now physical apples are colourless collections of jigging atoms, probability distributions of wave-particles. The physical world has become invisible. When science eliminated sensory properties from the physical world it was necessary to find a way of grouping, describing and explaining the colours, sounds and smells that we continued to encounter in daily life. We solved this problem by inventing the modern concept of consciousness. ‘Consciousness’ is a name for the sensory properties that were removed from the physical world by modern science.