the workings of a munificent Deity has little appeal to the modern scientific mind. Within twentieth century philosophy and science it is far more fashionable to reduce dualism to a form of materialism, for example to assume or attempt to show that consciousness is nothing more than a state or function of the brain (physicalism or functionalism). If either form of reduction is successful the explanatory gap left by dualism disappears, for the reason that all that needs to be explained can then be explained within the domain of natural science. Fashion, however, is beginning to change (see, for example, the debates between Dennett, Fenwick, Gray, Harnad, Humphrey, Libet, Lockwood, Marcel, Nagel, Searle, Shoemaker, Singer, Van Gulick, Velmans, and Williams in Ciba Foundation Symposium 174, 1993). The reasons for this are many - but in essence they have to do with the realization that once one has explained everything that there is to explain about the material structure and functioning of brains, one will still be left with the problems of consciousness. To put matters crudely, one cannot find consciousness by any conceivable histological examination of the brain. Nor, as Nagel (1974) puts it, can one know what it is like to be something from a physical description alone. In Velmans (1991a) I have considered functional explanations of consciousness, tracing functional models of the mind through from input to output and concluded that consciousness cannot be found within any information processing "box" within the brain. Consciousness accompanies or results from certain forms of processing but can be dissociated conceptually, and in most cases empirically from the processes with which it is commonly identified in the cognitive literature (perception, learning, memory, language, creativity and so on). The same can be said of models of functioning couched in other terms, such as parallel distributed processing or the language of neurophysiol...
