There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.

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

The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.

Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

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.