The history of mankind in the last three hundred years has been punctuated by major upheavals in human thought that we call scientific revolutions – upheavals that have profoundly affected the way in which we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. First there was the Copernican revolution – the notion that far from being the center of the universe, our planet is a mere speck of dust revolving around the sun. Then there was the Darwinian revolution, culminating in the view that we are not angles but merely hairless apes, as Thomas Henry Huxley once pointed out. And, third, there was Freud’s discovery of the “unconscious” – the idea that even though we claim to be in charge of our destinies, most of our behavior is governed by cauldron of motives and emotions of which we are barely conscious. You conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

V. S. Ramachandran
A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers