The psychology professor Richard Aslin once commented to me that he felt the idea of “consciousness” was a proxy for a whole host of variables correl… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

Do the lingering ideas of the past block us from seeing clearly how it comes about? Is consciousness just what brains do? Just as a pocket watch with all of its gears tells us the time, do brains with all their neurons just give us consciousness? The history of the topic is vast, swept by pendulum swings between the pure mechanists and the hopeful mentalists. Surprisingly, twenty-five hundred years of human history have not resolved the question or taught our species how to frame an understanding of our personal conscious experience. Indeed, our core ideas have not changed that much. While thinking explicitly about consciousness was ignited by Descartes three hundred years ago, two overarching and contradictory notions — that the mind either is part of the brain’s workings or works somehow independently of the brain — have been around seemingly forever. Indeed, these ideas are still with us.

The issue that captured the church was the issue of ensoulment and when it occurred during development. A church council decided to call it at conception, instead of the time frame St. Thomas Aquinas had argued in the thirteenth century, which was at around three months of gestation.

Libet has provided us with an intriguing possible mechanism for explaining why we think we are doing in real time things that we have in fact already done.