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Nature 439, 394-395 (26 January 2006) | doi:10.1038/439394a; Published online 25 January 2006

What is it like to speed date?

Adina Roskies1

BOOK REVIEWEDConversations on Consciousness

by Susan Blackmore

Oxford University Press: 2005. 288 pp. £18.99, $23

The hard kernel of the mind–body problem — how we get first-person experience out of a purely physical object like the brain — was famously articulated by Thomas Nagel in a paper entitled 'What Is It Like To Be A Bat?' (Phil. Rev.