Comparing 2019 to 1929

Three Things You Didn’t Know About the Crash of 1929 by Simon Black

October 28, 1929 – 90 years ago – is known as ‘Black Monday’ in financial circles. The US stock market had peaked the previous month, on September 3, 1929, with the Dow Jones stock index reaching a record high of 381. But throughout September and October, nervous investors began pulling their money out of the market. And over a three day period in late October (including Black Monday), the market lost more than 30% of its value. Ninety years later, I thought it would be prudent to look at three key insights from that historic crash, starting with:

Stocks are more overvalued today than they were in 1929

Back in 1929, the price/earnings ratio of the average company trading on the New York Stock Exchange was about 15. In other words, investors were willing to pay $15 per share for every $1 of the average company’s profit. That’s not high at all. In fact, a Price/Earnings ratio of 15 is completely in line with historic averages. Coca Cola’s Price/Earnings ratio back in 1929 ranged between 15 and 18. Today it’s 30… meaning that investors today are willing to pay roughly twice as much for each dollar of Coke’s annual profit. Coca Cola is actually quite an interesting case study. If we just go back a few years to 2010, Coca Cola’s annual revenue was $35 billion. By 2018 the company’s annual revenue had fallen to less than $32 billion. In 2010, Coca Cola generated $5.06 in profit (earnings) per share. In 2018, just $1.50. And Coca Cola’s total equity, i.e. the ‘net worth’ of the business, was $31 billion in 2010. By 2018, equity had fallen to $19 billion. So over the past eight years, Coca Cola has lost nearly 40% of its equity, sales are down, and per-share earnings have fallen by 70%. Clearly the company is in far worse shape today than it was eight years ago. Yet Coke’s share price has nearly DOUBLED in that period. Crazy, right? It’s not just Coca Cola either; the Price/Earnings ratio of the typical company today is about 50% higher than historic averages. (This means that the stock market would have to drop by 50% for these ratios to return to historic norms.) It’s clear that investors are simply willing to pay much more for every dollar of a company’s earnings and assets than just about ever before, including even right before the crash of 1929.

Stocks fell by nearly 90% in 1929… and it took decades to recover.

The ‘crash’ wasn’t isolated to Black Monday. From the peak in September 1929, stocks ultimately fell nearly 90% over the next three years. The Dow bottomed out in 1932 at just 42 points. 42 is lower than where the Dow was trading in 1885… so the crash wiped out DECADES of growth. And it took until November 1954 for the Dow to finally surpass its high from 1929. If that were to happen today, it means the Dow would fall to just 2,700… a level it hasn’t seen since the early 1990s. And it wouldn’t return to today’s highs until the mid 2040s. Most people think this is completely preposterous. And to be fair, I think the government and central bank will do everything in their power to prevent a severe crash. The Federal Reserve has already announced that it will print another $60+ billion per month, which should be favorable for the stock market in the short term. But just because we can’t imagine something happening doesn’t mean it can’t happen. In fact it’s happening right now in Japan: Japan’s stock market peaked in late 1989 with its Nikkei index reaching nearly 39,000. Within a few years the Nikkei had lost half of its value and would ultimately fall by 80%. Even today, thirty years later, the Nikkei index is still 40% below its all-time high. There is no law that requires the stock market to go up. It can fall. And it can stay low for years… even decades.

Adjusted for inflation, stocks have returned just 1.7% per year since 1929.

It’s best to think long-term about any investment. Businesses take time to grow and expand, and patient investors who understand this tend to do well. But when thinking about the long-term, it’s imperative to consider the extraordinary effects of inflation. Every single year your money loses around 2% of its value. But over time those small bites of inflation fester into a major chunk of your investment gains. Consider that, even according to the federal government’s monkey math, the US dollar has lost 94% of its value since 1929. So even though the Dow is more than 70x higher than it was in mid-1929, when you consider the effects of inflation, stocks are only about 5x higher over the past 90 years. That works out to be an average annualized return of just 1.7%. Even over the past 20 years - if you go back to late 1999, the stock market has only returned about 2.2% per year when adjusted for inflation. Think about all the risks and wild market swings that investors have had to deal with over the past 20 years - all for a measly 2.2%. It’s interesting to note that, when adjusted for inflation, GOLD has outperformed stocks over the long run. When adjusted for inflation, gold has averaged a 1.8% return since 1929 (slightly higher than stocks), and a 6.7% return since 1999 – more than 3x as much as stocks. But unlike stocks, people who own gold haven’t had to put up with the same risks. No shady brokers. No Enron scandal. They earned 3x more than the stock market – with the added benefit of being able to hold their investment right in their own hands.

Home

a poem by Rebecca Eschenroeder

Home

Is it a place? A location?

Is it a feeling? A sensation?

Is it the exhale that automatically rises from the depth of your soul, the moment you arrive. . . wherever that is?

Is it the timeless and limitless knowing that you are exactly where you are supposed to be. . . now. . . and now. . . and now.

Now.

It is where we are. . . always.

It is what we are experiencing. . . constantly.

It is the relief; the comfort when we come back to the breath.

It is timeless; it is limitless; because it is all there is. . .

Now is Home. Home is Now.

Feelings

Feelings Lead Us to Our Heart's Calling by Zoe Quiney

I have known longing in my bones for places I’ve never been and people I’ve never met.

I have fallen in love with strangers, in the split second that our eyes met, as we passed each other by. 

I have felt my heart break into a million tiny shards, sent skyward, scattered by the wind of unspoken words, and I have stitched it softly back together, over and over again.

I have let passion bring me to my knees, its hungry fire burning and ravaging the forests of my heart. 

I have stared deep into the abyss of my own emptiness, and filled it with wine and scribbled notes, written in the ink of my soul.

I have let oceans cascade down my cheeks, cleansing and healing me with their warm, salty tidal waves of release. 

I have been lit up with an iridescence that has shone from every pore, and I’ve discovered dark, sacred corners of myself, piled high with old fears and wounds, like dusty bones.

I’ve danced all night with my shadows, and I’ve set the world on fire with the determination of my spirit. 

I’ve felt the collective suffering of every being that has ever lived, and I have known the silent peace found in the stillness of old forests.

I’ve held the world to my chest and cried for it; loved it, laughed with it, and felt lost within it, all at once.

I have felt the burning stab of rejection by not being seen or heard, and I have responded by expanding my heart to embrace the universe and all the stars. 

I have known infinite freedom, beyond fear, and I have wrestled wolves of self-doubt to the death.

I’ve danced all night with my shadows.

I have breathed in the world and all its innocent magic, with delicate tenderness. 

I have swum in seas of love, so deep and so wild that I nearly drowned.

No Day Passes Without my Heart Being Stretched

I feel everything. All the time. No day passes without my heart being stretched to its capacity for one reason or another.

It sounds exhausting, and it can be, but it’s all I’ve ever known. To me, feeling is the truest of my experiences because it is a physical expression of being alive. To be constantly pulsating with stimuli, vibrating at various frequencies, is to experience the proof of your own existence.

I believe that life is measured in our ability to feel; the deeper and the more raw the feelings, the more authentically we’re living. Tears will flow and hearts will break; sadness will swamp us and stomachs will knot; rages will burn and passion will overcome us. That is how we are built; maybe it is our body’s way of reminding us we are alive.

If Walt Whitman contains multitudes, then I contain infinite galaxies; supernovas and nebulae; dying stars and black holes. I contain the lives of all my ancestors; I am made of every person I’ve ever known and loved for millions of years since human hearts existed.

My mind is a wide ocean; moods rise and shrink away like tides with the cycle of the moon. My heart is a mysterious guide—dark, loud and full.

No day passes without my heart being stretched to its capacity.

Sometimes I cry when I pass someone on the street because of the sadness in their eyes. Sometimes I want to reach out and embrace every person who has ever felt the way I do, and give them a piece of me, so that they can feel less alone.

Feelings Can be Our Trusty Guides

Life is challenging, yet beautiful.

Blessed are those who have known love and conquered fear in equal measures; who have offered a piece of their soul to the world and had it accepted and rejected simultaneously. Or those who have stood at the foot of their own dreams and trembled at the sheer sight of them.

Feelings contain lessons. We learn how to decipher each one that arises in different parts of the body; by distinguishing the acidic sting in the gut from the yearning pang of the heart, the quick-as-lightning flashes of the mind from the slow and steady call of the soul.

Feelings can be our trusty guides, if we allow them to be. They whisper to us to follow them; they can lead us astray if we misunderstand them, but if we learn to translate them, they will lead us to our heart’s calling.

If doubted, they can deceive us, yet they have the power to help us find our passions and lead us to our purpose.

Blessed are those who have offered a piece of their soul to the world.

Feelings open us up to our darkness and our light; they expose us and shake us, they destroy us and make us, but ultimately they release us.

By shutting our hearts down, we deny ourselves the chance to experience life in all its messy glory; we halt our evolution by pretending that we are small and that we don’t care. When, really, we do care. We care a lot, but we’re so afraid of admitting it.

I’m not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human.

Get to Know Yourself from the Inside Out

When we resist our own depths, we let our life force wither and die inside of us; our creativity suffers, our relationships suffer, we wilt.

By opening our hearts wide and listening to their truth, we can, and will, set ourselves free. Our bodies are our greatest guides; they show us things we never knew about ourselves and about others. They explain important messages in ways we could never articulate with words.

The truth that sits in your gut in the form of intuition is the most powerful messenger you will ever know.

To feel so deeply and so often, means to get to know yourself from the inside out. How well do we really know ourselves? How much do we truly love ourselves? Feelings are what make life worth living.

Feelings are what make life worth living; what inspire us to keep seeking, keep moving and keep creating. They are what drive us to keep loving even when we lose everything. Feelings decorate our souls and birth our dreams.

These feelings accompany the humble wonders of nature and the power and comfort of finding kindred connections.

Deep Feelings are a Gift

These feelings are what we are made of, beneath this skin and bone; these feelings were first created inside stars and passed down to us through the bloodlines of ancient sages. They connect us to each other with the invisible threads of our shared experiences.

When we let ourselves feel unapologetically and share the experience, we allow others to have the courage to sink into their feelings in a more authentic way and express themselves without shame.

Deep feelings are a gift; they have the capacity to transform us if we follow their wisdom. Allow yourself to feel from your core, with your heart, and let yourself be moved.

The feelings we feel so often, are our connection to the divine, and ultimately to ourself. Let them wash over you like waves; let them heal you. Let them break you and build you.

Let them show you who you are and then let them set you free.

Mermaid's Wineglass

I remember back in graduate school being fascinated by a little plant by the name of Acetabularia. With its dainty up-to-two-inch long stem, topped by a broad sombrero-like cap, it is best known by its poetic nickname – Mermaid's Wineglass. What is most fascinating when you hold this common little green algae from the subtropical waters of the Caribbean and Mediterranean is that, with all of its delicate detail, it consists of just one single cell.

Just one cell. All this beauty. Because of its size it is a most excellent model organism for studying cell biology. Its nucleus always can be found at the rhizoid, the base of the stalk, and only divides once the plant has reached its full height. Nowhere else in nature can one look at the entire complex morphology of life within a single cell large enough to be visible without a microscope.

The caps of Acetabularia may also be exchanged, even from two different species. If a cap is removed, the nucleus sees to it that it is regenerated. In addition, if a piece of the stem is removed, with no access to the nucleus in the rhizoid, this isolated stem piece will also grow a new cap. It was a wonderful little plant to play around with in the lab to visually appreciate the miracle of nature, reminding one just how remarkable each cell of every living thing really is, with its unfathomable number of chemical and energetic processes occurring at every instant, right there in your hand. A good analogy would be a whole automobile made of just one single moving part, with all its various functions operating at the genetically programmed direction of a single nuclear robotic brain within. When you extrapolate the magic of this one cell by 30,000,000,000,000 times, you get the average human body. Even with this great number of cells, there are really only about two hundred different types of cells in our bodies, each with its own genetically programmed nuclear brain directing all the chemical and energetic processes that keep us alive moment to moment. Wow, talk about running on autopilot!

The Inevitable Financial Reset

The top 1% of people own 53.2% of all stocks and mutual funds, and if you add in the next 9%, the rich control 93.2%, leaving the remaining 90% of us with just 6.8% of stocks and mutual funds. Furthermore, that same bottom 90% of us owe 72.4% of all the debt. It is debt slavery. When will the plebs tire of being indebted serfs to the elite few??? Why not Now!

What's wrong with this picture? The stock market, controlled and owned by the super-rich and those that serve their interests, has become increasingly fraudulent and parasitical. The families that own the Western central banks are printing money like never before and handing it over to corporations they also own, sucking the lifeblood out of 90% of the population. The financial system has become a giant black hole, which makes a collapse of all things connected mathematically inevitable. While it’s easy to spot a bubble, it’s harder to predict when it will burst. But a financial reset seems imminent. One thing financial experts do agree upon - when financial markets fight against reality, reality always wins.

Healing the Anger

The animus between people in America these days is troubling. I have become so desirous of avoiding confrontation that I no longer read or post anything on Facebook to avoid dealing with uncomfortably stark political differences with friends. Keeping relationships with people is more important than inserting myself into our differences of political opinion. Perhaps I am a coward. Or maybe it is not that important to me to be right. Or maybe inside I am willing to admit that perhaps I am wrong in my read of the world. Somebody is uninformed – maybe it is me! Or maybe I intuitively trust that all things will work out for the good, even if we have to go through some pain to get there, and in the end our differences will settle.

I see the problem largely as one rooted in fear. It is a fear that has arisen because everything we think and believe and take for granted to be real has all of a sudden been thrown into question. Realizing that others see things so differently undermines our whole sense of reality. It occurs to us, if only in a quickly suppressed flash, that everything we see, and everything we think we know may all be an illusion. And perhaps this sudden and disorienting sense of groundlessness, along with our survival instinct, is at the root of why we get so defensive and angry and fight so hard for our one-sided opinions, however arbitrary they may really be. With our fight-or-flight instincts, somewhere deep inside we think we are in a struggle for dear life, trying to survive and preserve our concept of “me.”

Or if we think outside the box and draw different conclusions, we fear being criticized or ostracized by the people we keep company with. To each of us, our current viewpoint - our current movie of waking life - seems irrefutably real. We are all convinced that the way we see things is the way they really are. The illusory appearance that consciousness creates is, after all, very convincing! And yet, no two of us see everything in exactly the same way. Some of us see things in completely opposite and utterly irreconcilable ways. So what really is real?

What happens within us when someone comes at us with judgment, anger, hatred and violence (whether actual or verbal)? How do we react when someone makes it clear that they despise us and consider us to be scum? What reaction does this bring forth? In my reckoning, it usually makes us tighten up and get even more hardened in our recalcitrant positions and hateful of the perceived adversary. But what would happen if we were met at such a moment with genuine (not fake or manipulative, but genuine) love and compassion by someone who sees beyond our surface behavior of opinionizing to the light inside of us, however buried it may be? In my experience, when we are met in such a way, we are much more likely to let go of our hardened opinions, taking a closer look at what we’re doing, and wake up to the reality that we can be all one people, one country, with mostly shared values and objectives, really. That is real.

Loserthink

I am thinking of picking up a copy of Scott Adams' latest book Loserthink, about how we look at the world from inside familiar bubbles, setting ourselves up to fail. Adams explains it is not exclusive just to “losers.” We all do it. Interesting! The problem is not that we lack the facts necessary to understand our reality: that, he explained in Win Bigly, is just part of the way we are wired. Rather, the problem is that the way we train ourselves to think tends to work well inside certain disciplines, but not others.

For example, he notes, it is common that Hollywood stars, many of whom are exceptionally talented and highly trained, fail to understand politics. The worst part is that they don’t know they fail: they act as though their opinions are the only correct ones. That is partly the result of conformity: few conservatives dare to come out of the closet in Hollywood. But it is also a result of loserthink: they assume their expertise in one area carries across to another.

Likewise with climate science, Adams says. To journalists, and even to many scientists, the familiar graphs that predict global warming far out into the future seem convincing. But to anyone with experience in the corporate world, Adams says, those graphs look like every phony economic projection ever used to sell an idea. That does not mean climate change is a fraud. What it means is that it is being sold as a fraud, which is why so many people doubt it.

The problem is that most people who believe in climate change are trapped in loserthink bubbles. (So, too, he says, are some of the climate skeptics.) Thinking narrowly does not make you a “loser,” but it means you are less likely to succeed. In the climate change example, that means you are less likely to persuade others, or you will adopt policies that make everyone miserable without solving the problem. 
 
There is something in Loserthink to shock everyone — which is his point. This book may be a way for many of us to break out of our “mental prisons”. Adams hopes that by encouraging his readers — and those they encounter online — to familiarize themselves with new ways of thinking, from different disciplines, he will help break down the divisions that have emerged in our society which make us all so unhappy.

Spiritual Healing

Life is like a river, ever flowing, but the water is never the same from moment to moment. Like a river, we humans too are ever in a state of dynamic flow. Most every part of our bodies is replaced in time. Stomach cells are renewed every two days. Skin cells last about two weeks. Red blood cells stay with us for around four months. And while the liver is completely rebuilt every year and a half or so, it takes a decade to regrow bones completely. Some brain cells, certain cells in the eyes, and some germ cells are never replaced over the course of a lifetime.

Disease can exist within the body and last a long time, but in most cases, it too may be replaced by excellent health. A disease that stays with us a long time is generally of our own creation. We are not victims of bacteria and viruses. Spiritually speaking, the body is following a “blueprint for illness” that YOU are providing.

Each part of the body follows the concept of what you believe yourself to be. The body will always do its best to come into alignment with your thoughts, so it is important to always think appropriately positive thoughts. If you harbor destructive thoughts or are self-punishing, if you often show aggression toward others or get angry and lash out in discontent, your thoughts are drawing illness and negative conditions. Whatever you put out always returns. What goes around comes around.

When you become ill, it is most certainly because you have been harboring negative thought patterns that have solidified into a kind of mental attachment that eventually manifests as a particular kind of malaise. You may seek treatment from a doctor, but it is not the doctor that heals you. Healing only begins when you deal with the original cause (your thoughts) yourself.

To heal yourself, first make a change in your self-awareness, then shift your thought patterns accordingly. Seeing yourself objectively is one of the hardest things to do. A person must be objective to understand how the mind may become distorted from time to time, or how one's lifestyle has seriously gone out of balance.

A good place to begin is to spend more time in self-reflection, expressing feelings of sincere gratitude. The body will always follow the mind's lead, so always establish a healthy image of yourself in your mind, one that corresponds to the complete opposite of whatever condition or illness you are currently experiencing. From this then determine to manifest a healthy image by doing the following:

First, be increasingly aware of how you think about your body and how you think about any illness you might have. You get that which you focus on most. If you constantly remind yourself how much you hurt or how bad your condition is, you are not going to heal. Change the way you think about your body to be more positive.

Next, keep a positive mindset as you go through the day and take action to correct your condition. Tell yourself that you will take the necessary steps every day to improve the condition, then do it.

Next, begin an encouraging conversation with your body. If you commit to taking steps to heal yourself and promise yourself that you will do what it takes, your body will begin to react in a positive manner. Attitude is 99 per cent of the battle.

Be patient. It may have taken a lifetime for your body to express your illness; give it some time to repair and rebuild. Plant the idea in your mind that you are moving in the direction of better health, then stand back and let the body do the rest.

Be consistent and do all the things that will help you heal. Keep a positive outlook and express abundant gratitude from your heart for all the wonderful opportunities you have been given to learn and grow.

Follow these steps to regain your health or anything else you may desire in life. Stop negativity in its tracks and replace it with a positive outlook, then get out of it's way and let the spirit within you do what it can only do to bring you back into healthful balance.

Letting Go

Scientific Caveat

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of a true scientist is a willingness to suspend disbelief and remain open to new discovery, even if it means challenging the existing order of things, alienating colleagues, or even opening oneself up to censure and professional ruin. The greatest discoverers have always been scientific heretics of one sort or another.

Unfortunately, to be a revolutionary in science today is to flirt with professional suicide. Much of most every field of study purports to encourage experimental freedom, but... the entire structure of modern scientific undertaking, with its highly competitive grant system and publishing and peer review system, depends upon researchers conforming to the accepted scientific worldview. The system as it exists tends to encourage individuals to carry out experimentation whose purpose is first and foremost to confirm the existing consensual view of things, or to further develop technology for industry, rather than to generate true innovation.

One must always keep this in mind when the words “scientific consensus” are used to support any issue or measure in the public domain. The climate conversation comes to mind. As with the evolution of every established social institution, eventually self-preservation of the institution rises above public benefit.

Open Wide the Doors of Perception

One of the greatest mysteries of both philosophy and science that has yet to be solved is how consciousness happens... and what happens when it goes wrong. With all our advances we still really don't know how the brain and body give rise to consciousness. Billions of neurons in the brain are working together to generate a conscious experience – not just any conscious experience, but your own individual experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. So how does this actually happen?

We experience joy and suffering; do other animals? Do they have a sense of self as well? If you have pets you have some sense of the answer. And what about plants? And as computers get smarter and faster, will there come a time when your iPhone develops a sense of its own existence?

The prospects for a conscious AI are probably pretty remote because consciousness has less to do with pure intelligence and more to do with our nature as living and breathing organisms. Consciousness and intelligence are different things. You don't have to be smart to suffer, but you probably do have to be alive.

Consciousness involves both awareness of the self and awareness of the world. Think of your brain in its bony skull, trying to figure out what's out there in the world. There's no light or sound inside the skull. All the brain has to go on are streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world. Perception becomes a form of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory input signals with its prior beliefs and expectations about the way the world is to form its best guess about the cause behind the signals.

The brain doesn't perceive anything directly nor does it interpret the world around it entirely from signals coming in from the outside world. It depends as much, if not more, upon perceptual predictions based upon experience flowing within it. We don't just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. The world comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.

Our conscious experiences of the world around us and of ourselves within it are kinds of controlled hallucinations that happen because we are alive. Hallucinations are a kind of uncontrolled perception. Perceptions could also be looked upon as a controlled hallucinations, in which the brain's predictions are being reigned in by sensory information from the world.

We are all hallucinating all the time, including right now. When we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality. When someone's hallucination varies enough from the norm, we call that illness. Your experience of being your self is a controlled hallucination generated by your brain. What if you are fooling yourself with your own self hallucination? How would you know?

Visual illusions can deceive the eyes and therefore the brain. All of us can be fooled by a good magician. But how can you be deceived about what it means to be you? Most of the experience of being a person is so familiar and so unified and so continuous that it is difficult not to take it for granted. But we shouldn't take it for granted. All the ways we look at ourselves as a unique self can come apart. The identity of the self in the brain is of rather fragile construction. Even the brain's idea of what the self is is a matter of a best guess, a kind of controlled hallucination.

The way we perceive the world outside is quite different than the way we perceive ourselves. The outside world is perceived as a bunch of objects; even the body is an object, a thing. But we don't perceive the world within us as objects – unless we have problems. We know we have a heart and kidneys and a spleen, but we we don't sense them as objects. Perception of the internal state of the body isn't about figuring out what is there, but about control and regulation – much of it autonomically – keeping our physiological variables within a narrow range of conditions to continue our survival.

When the brain uses predictions to figure out what is going on, we see that objects are the cause of sensations. When the brain uses predictions to control or regulate we experience how well or how badly that control is going. So most basic experiences of being a self or being a body organism are deeply grounded in the biological mechanisms that keep us alive.

Our conscious experiences of both the world and our self, since they depend on the identical mechanism of predictive perception, all stem from this basic drive to stay alive. We experience the world and ourselves with, through, and because of our living bodies. We literally predict ourselves into existence.

There are several implications here. Just as we can mis-perceive the world, we can mis-perceive ourselves when the mechanisms of prediction go wrong. Understanding this opens many new avenues in psychiatry and neurology because we can finally get at the mechanisms instead of just treating the symptoms, especially with conditions like depression and schizophrenia.

What it means to be me cannot be reduced to or uploaded to a software program running in a robot, no matter how advanced. The biological mechanisms that define us depend upon a living, breathing biology. Just making computers smarter is not going to make them sentient.

Finally, our way of being conscious is likely just one possible expression of being conscious. Human consciousness is just one example in a vast array of possibility in a very, very large universe. With the application of quantum thinking, a growing wealth of research suggests that not only do all living things have some form of conscious awareness, but so might all inanimate matter and energy as well. We must be careful to leave the door of possibility open to all manner of perceptual predictions, both on our own planet and beyond.

Understanding the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the great challenges for 21st-century science. As with life, so with consciousness, once we start explaining its properties in terms of things happening inside brains and bodies, the apparent insolubility of what consciousness is starts to fade away.