My 1991 proposal (in Consciousness Explained) that human consciousness be seen as a ‘user illusion’ met with incredulity in many quarters, in part because many people were unwilling or unable to abandon the idea of the primacy of the "first-person perspective”: (“How could I be wrong about my own conscious states?”) In the meantime, accumulating evidence and advances in theory have prepared the ground for a revival of this initially counterintuitive view, and a number of researchers are homing in on different versions of it.
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