Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs. (p. 71)

fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical - that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.

Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.