Taking The Mystery Out Of Consciousness

"Sensations are the building blocks of consciousness. They must first be combined into perceptions and converted into objects in the environment. Then neural systems must evolve mechanisms by which they can be remembered or recalled (neurobiologists identify the first appearances of memory in habituation, sensitization, and conditioning); and finally plasticity must develop—the capacity to shape, edit, and organize this neural content, present or remembered, into a picture, experience, or awareness of the 'world.' This, in the modern metaphysics of Democritus, is the way consciousness emerges in neural systems."

Consciousness Is Made of Atoms, Too