in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem. A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world. This is perhaps the biggest idea I can talk with you about today: the problem of consciousness and the problem of life are in effect the same problem, and that the problem with so much of the science of consciousness today is that it treats consciousness as somehow separable from the mode of dynamic activity, which is the consciousness. (By the way, I should say this idea, this critical notion of the intimate interconnectedness of the problems of consciousness and life, is something that forms a theme of the work of Evan Thompson, who