Part 2 gives a new analysis of consciousness, grounded in its everyday phenomenology, which challenges presuppositions that form the basis of the dualism versus reductionist debate.

It also examines the consequences for realism versus idealism, subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity, and the relation of consciousness to brain processing.

It also introduces reflexive monism, an alternative to dualism and reductionism that aims to be consistent with the findings of science and with common sense.

Both reductionism and dualism are guilty, Velmans asserts, of not paying enough attention to the phenomenology of consciousness, the condition of being aware of something.

This, Velmans says, is guilty of breaking Leibniz's assertion that, in order for A to be identical to B (that is, for consciousness to be a state of the brain), the properties of A must also be the properties of B. Velmans here argues that the subjective, phenomenal experience of consciousness is entirely unlike the neural states of the brain, and thus may not be reduced to them; that is, the phenomenal properties of consciousness are not identifiable with the physical brain states that arguably cause them.