Consciousness, emotions, and science

![CDATA[Consciousness is rather like time, as Augustine described it: You know what it is until you try to explain it. The ease of intuitive grasp of consciousness, coupled with the difficulty of intelligible exposition, offer clues to its nature. Because it is a necessary aspect of experience, we correctly feel that we know what consciousness is. At the same time, we struggle to articulate what is meant by consciousness because it is not external to our mental processes, but is a part of them. William James remarked that a purely cognitive descriptive of it would leave consciousness dry and without purpose, a situation corrected by appreciating the importance of emotion to consciousness. Even more counter-intuitive, it can be fairly asked whether persons are necessarily aware of their consciousness. These are the focal questions – the consciousness of things emotions can provide, and the possibility of lack of awareness of such consciousness – when considering the role of emotions in science, which this paper shall address.]]