Religion & Consciousness

The word "consciousness" means different things to different people: "To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world."* As such, all that religion has to say about consciousness has already been said. But Crick and Dennett's consciousness, human or otherwise, is a phenomenon of the real or physical world, an emergent property of the brain which has only recently (in the last decade or so) been the subject of serious scientific investigation.

*Quote from Wikipedia.

Psychology & Consciousness

Psychology is mainly concerned with behaviorism . It does not address the question of consciousness and treats the brain as a "black box". In general, psychologists have no particular interest in how the human brain is constructed, how it works or how it evolved. Francis Crick writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis that academic psychology "denied the usefulness of consciousness as a psychological concept...partly because experiments involving introspection did not appear to be leading anywhere and partly because it was hoped psychology would become more scientific by studying behavior."