I made a big mistake in my previous entry in this series.  Actually, I probably made a few dozen, not least of which was deciding to tackle this topic at all without first laying a lot more foundation.  But before I give up and go back to talking about boring topics like relativity and quantum mechanics, I want to try to fix one mistake that really stands out: I set out to write about the "mind-body" problem, and then casually switched to talking about "consciousness".  The irony is that I did not do this consciously.  I did not deliberately decide to conflate consciousness and the mind, at least not that I can recall.  I just started writing, and at some point the sentence "The Big Question I'm going to tackle here is the problem of consciousness" somehow popped onto my screen, and then mental inertia took over.  It never even crossed my mind (!) that I had tacitly changed topics until I found myself arguing with Don about whether or not thermostats are conscious, and it has taken me many, many hours of post-mortem to realize — to become consciously aware of the fact — that that entire discussion can be traced back to that one sentence.  Of course, "mind" and "consciousness" are not completely unrelated, but the fact that that very sentence was, in retrospect, a product of my mind but not my consciousness is ironic testimony to the fact that they are not the same thing.  I feel more than a little chagrined not just for tacitly conflating them, but for taking so long to figure out that this is what I had done.  The second installment in this series was an entire blog post warning about exactly this pitfall, and then I just went and stepped in it. In my defense I will say that I didn't originally intend to write about either the mind-body problem nor consciousness until much later in this series.  My original plan was to lay a lot more foundation first.  I was going to take at least half a dozen entries to cover classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and...