This book proposes a novel and rigorous explanation of consciousness. It argues that the study
of an aspect of our self-consciousness known as the 'feeling of embodiment' teaches us that
there are two distinct phenomena to be targeted by an explanation of consciousness. First is an
explanation of the phenomenal qualities - 'what it is like' - of the experience and second is
the subject's awareness of those qualities. Glenn Carruthers explores the phenomenal qualities
of the feeling of embodiment using the tools of quality spaces as well as the subject's
awareness of those qualities as a functionally emergent property of various kinds of processing
of these spaces. Where much recent work on consciousness focuses on visual experience this
book rather draws evidence from the study of self-consciousness. Carruthers argues that in
light of recent methodological discoveries awareness must be explained in terms of the
organization of multiple cognitive processes. The book offers an explanation of anomalous body
representations and from that poses a more general theory of consciousness. Ultimately this
book creates a hybrid account of consciousness that explains phenomenology and awareness using
different tools. It will be of great interest to all scholars of psychology and philosophy as
well as anyone interested in exploring the intricacies of how we experience our bodies what we
are and how we fit into the world.
