A purely social theory of consciousness

The mainstream scientific research of consciousness attempts to find mechanisms that make consciousness appear in a single human brain. This program has not been very successful. It seems very difficult to explain subjective consciousness relying upon neurobiological regularities. Several researchers in the past have proposed ideas of how consciousness may appear in socially interacting agents. I argue that this could be a better starting point for scientific understanding of consciousness. This approach avoids the hard problem of explaining subjective experience from underlying brain processes and analyses consciousness within a more appropriate context of behavioral and social sciences.