Consciousness Naturalised

The mind-body problem becomes an insoluble "Hard Problem" if the concept of consciousness offered by common sense is not subjected to profound revision in the light of cognitive sciences. First of all, one must distinguish among the essential properties of mental states awareness and intentionality. The latter can be naturalized if, after identifying in the sensori-motor coordination the origin of all cognitive processes, it is reduced to being a first-order property of the brain dynamics. Consequently, consciousness whose function is to give consistency and unity to a part of the mental representations that brain dynamics implement in a given moment can be understood as a second-order property of those same dynamics. Consciousness is not a "thing," but the "format" of a part of the brain dynamics. The brain, however, having to monitor itself to get a finer tuning of the perception-action circle, ends up becoming a victim of a (albeit very useful) self-illusion when it presents to itself this aspect of its dynamics as if it were an external "force"