The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

A thought-provoking argument that consciousness—more widespread than previously assumed—is the feeling of being alive, not a type of computation or a clever hack In The Feeling of Life Itself, Christof Koch offers a straightforward definition of consciousness as any subjective experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted—the feeling of being alive.

Psychologists study which cognitive operations underpin a given conscious perception.

Neuroscientists track the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the organ of the mind.

But why the brain and not, say, the liver? How can the brain—three pounds of highly excitable matter, a piece of furniture in the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as any other piece—give rise to subjective experience?