What is Conscious?

Why should brain events bring about the experience of sight, hearing, smell, taste, sensation, emotion, and thought? How does the third person brain become the first person mind, how does an it become an I?

If one is unwilling to accept this transformation, one has to throw in one's lot with the cognitivists who believe that subjective states are not essential but nominal. These cognitivists are as concerned with dismantling the "folk psychology" of subjectivity as they are devoted to an explanation of brain functions. We only think we're conscious, they seem to be saying, and we should give up that illusion, just as our ancestors gave up the idea that the sun rises and sets.

If one thinks that an it can become an I, then different questions arise. If this transformation occurs, is it only an illusion? And if it is an illusion, does that mean that consciousness is illusory and thus unreal or illusory and no less real for that? Is consciousness a real illusion?

But if there is consciousness, who or what is conscious? Since consciousness seems unthinkable except as a form of representation, how is one to grasp the ultimate subject of that representation? Those subjects keep receding in an endless series of Chinese boxes.

The basic dilemma is clear. One can endorse the cognitive theory and discard consciousness or one can endorse the emergent theories and run up against an insuperable paradox. If one discards consciousness, it can be explained (away); if one accepts consciousness it cannot be explained.

But must consciousness be understood as an internal state that resists scientific explanation as well as non-paradoxical philosophical description? Can it rather be understood as a worldly, transactional event not confined either to subjective or objective locations?

Does understanding consciousness, then, mean giving up on the idea of the "I"? If it does, which absence of the "I" would I prefer? The cognitive absence of the self? Or the Buddhist absence of the self?

And who decides?