My strategy for dealing with the problem of explaining consciousness is first to refute arguments
that it cannot possibly be dealt with scientifically, a task pursued in the next section. The more
positive task of sketching what a neuropsychological explanation of consciousness might look like is
pursued in Chapter 5, on how brains feel. There I offer not a general theory of consciousness but
rather a neural model of one important kind of experience, emotional feeling. This model is still
highly provisional but at least suggests one plausible route that neuroscience can take to bring
conscious experience within the scope of causal explanation. The difficulty of accounting for
consciousness is the major obstacle to my more general claim that mind-brain identity is part of the
best explanation of all the available evidence about mental phenomena, but I will try to show how
progress in overcoming it can be made. Other mental phenomena that are sometimes taken to show the
limitations of neural explanations will also be discussed in later chapters, including intuition
(Chapters 5 and 9) and free will (Chapter 6).