This is Mind Bites, a series for philosophy bites with me David Edmonds.

And me Nigel Woberton.

philosophers have long tried to make sense of consciousness.

How can our subjective experience be accounted for in an objective

physical world? But there's another puzzle about consciousness. Why do we have it? What purpose

does it serve? A question for the neuroscientist Chris Friff?

Chris Friff, welcome to MindBites.

Hi. The topic we're going to focus on is what's the point of consciousness?

Let's just begin by getting clear what you mean by consciousness.

I mean our subjective experience, what we're aware of from moment to moment.

So I'm not talking about whether we're awake or asleep.

I'm talking about what we're aware of when we're awake.

And I think the critical thing to bear in mind from lots of recent research is how much

inferences our behavior which we never become aware of, both in terms of the things in front of us and what we're actually doing.

So I can see the trees outside the window.

I'm aware of seeing the trees.

I'm somehow representing those trees, I guess, to myself, and I can talk to you about that.

Yes that's exactly the point. I mean there's a strange paradox about consciousness.

On the one hand we tend to believe that it's a completely private space so I can never somehow get access to your

consciousness and you can never get access to mine. On the other hand it's the only part of

our mental life that we can actually talk to each other about.

I was intrigued by what you were saying about how much of our mental life is unconscious or

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