I don’t know about you, but I suppose you are a person like me; that you have thoughts and feelings and experiences as I do; that these are your experiences that you know about. And I would call these features consciousness. Consciousness is how it is for us to live this life of ours, so it is a person’s subjective experience; it is psychological. Consciousness is about how we share our world and what we have in common one with another, so although it is my conscious experience or your conscious experience, it is also our conscious experience; it is a social psychological feature of people’s lives. We do things in this shared world about us and these acts have an impact on our lives and the lives of others, so we live in a world of people and relationships. We may come to take responsibility for this because we not only know consciously what we do, we can also reflect beforehand on what we will do and its impact. Over time, we may commit to people and perhaps to ideas. We can know consciously and act freely.

I want to think through the implications of this interpretation of consciousness and ask what this means for us not as a final explanation, but as a way station that may help us make a start on some big issues: issues of how we treat one another and ourselves, and issues to do with those things we most take for granted. In a sense the very character of consciousness that I am setting out calls for reflection on our life and living.