So the phrase can be used happily by old-fashioned interactionist dualists (which is, of course, what most of us are most of the time) as well as by physicalists, functionalists, epiphenomenalists, identity theorists and what have you (each of which is what some of us are some of the time). Even behaviourists, who ignore consciousness, and eliminative materialists, who dismiss it as a misleading term in folk psychology, cannot deny that neural activity accompanies what they ignore or dismiss. But all this is much too cynical. The neural correlates of consciousness are fashionable because they are important and almost accessible.
Why such patterns should be associated with thoughts or feelings is among the most difficult of all problems. When Charles Darwin asked “why is thought being a secretion of the brain more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?” he was not minimizing the difficulty but rather arguing that failure to understand how the brain produces thoughts should not lead us to reject the idea that it does. Difficult though the problem is, determining what the neural correlates of consciousness are would seem to be a possible first step towards solving it. The trouble is that taking even this first step involves simultaneous monitoring of two elusive sets of events: the contents of consciouness and the relevant neural activity in a vast collection of neurons that are involved in many different processes.
