For the most part humans do not think about the fact that they are conscious beings.

Thinking about the “conflict” between the part of the self which is acting and the part of the self which is conscious raises intriguing questions.

And perhaps one way of phrasing that, is to think about what it might mean if we could explain today, consciousness in a very scientific way. Well, it seems like if we could do that, then we ought to, in principle, be able to build an artificial consciousness. Perhaps we wouldn’t be able to do that today. But at some point in the future, if we understand rigorously, all the science that gives rise to consciousness, then surely we could at some point build an artificial consciousness. That is, we can build an artifact that we would want to say is conscious. And I think there's something very kind of paradoxical about that, at least at first glance, that makes many people resist the idea that science actually could explain consciousness.

I am not sure that people do initially spend a great deal of time wondering why am I conscious and so on, because to be ourselves, to be human, it's part and parcel of it. We’re just conscious. We know ourselves, and take it for granted that we're thinking about what we’re thinking about and seeing what we’re seeing. And then if you come across a course like this, and start to discover “Oh that's weird, I'm doing a lot of things I don't know I'm doing. How can that be? What part of me is inside doing it? So what bit of me is it that's conscious than? Which part is me?” Those sorts of questions emerge, and immediately become really intriguing.