The nature of consciousness will still be a mystery by the time this essay ends. We are concerned here with an approach, not an arrival. To some readers it may seem, for the first three quarters of the essay, that the approach begins unnecessarily far out in left field, but I hope that by the end, it will be seen that I have backed off so far in order to come at the subject from a new direction. Bear with me. The systems approach sometimes requires developing a lot of detailed groundwork before one can hazard any generalizations.