Consciousness

This is a very good book on orthodox approaches to consciousness. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of all the major schools of thought including mysterianism, dualism, non-reductive views, identity theory, functionalism, first-order and higher-order representationalism. The author frames the question using David Chalmers' hard problem, which is itself an implicit theory, asking as it does why certain physical brain processes result in subjective experience. The sense here is that the brain causes rather than is correlated with consciousness. The author himself has a strong philosophical predilection to pursue the physicalist agenda, using the commonly held argument that it has been so successful in other areas. A key issue is whether the epistemic mystery of consciousness can only be resolved by adding another category to our metaphysical and ontological understanding, as dualism does. The author prefers what Karl Popper calls promissory materialism, assuming that consciousness will one day prove amenable to a physical approach, whether non-reductive or not.

The main limitation of the book is what it leaves out: there is no mention of the work of Sir Karl Popper and the detailed neurological dualist theories of Sir John Eccles in The Self and its Brain; nor is the work of Max Velmans on self-reflexive consciousness mentioned. Needless to say, there is no reference to the important work of Ken Wilber or even Alan Wallace and Iain McGilchrist. And, along with all other orthodox books on consciousness, nothing is said about anomalies that challenge the orthodox view, as magisterially set out in Irreducible Mind and more recently in Beyond Physicalism. It is a great pity that most undergraduates are exposed only to these orthodox approaches and lines of evidence, which serve only to perpetuate the intellectual blinkers of university departments, however clever and articulate the proponents, as in this otherwise sophisticated and lucid book.