Consciousness

"...The biologist Stephen J.Gould makes a good point: "Science is not 'organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition."

When I say I'm angry, I may be, but I might also be wrong. I might really be afraid or jealous or some combination of all these. Donald Hebb pointed out long ago that outside observers are far more accurate at judging a person's true emotional state than is the person himself.

Some, perhaps, many of the things we do, including the appraisal of the emotional significance of events in our lives and the expression of emotional behaviours in response to those appraisals, do not depend on consciousness, or even on processes that we necessarily have conscious access to."

Page 65.
'The Emotional Brain - The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life'
Joseph LeDoux, Phoenix Books, 1998