Consciousness is, in one way, the easiest and most obvious thing in the world to understand, for anyone capable of thinking about it is intimately conscious of being conscious – we live with our noses pressed hard up against our own consciousness, which attends every moment of our aware experience and thought; and similarly, the consciousness of others is lambent in their faces and behaviour, and we each have a rich and highly nuanced knowledge of how to read and respond to those lambencies. Their presence and our understanding of them constitute the ordinary stuff of everyday social interaction.

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