by Paul Weiner (Illustrator), Daniel Clement Dennett
Synopsis Consciousness separates us from other animals and machines - or does it? Can consciousness be scientifically reduced to chemical and mechanical processes? If so, where do morality, love, unhappiness, and joy fit in? Now the author of Brainstorms and coauthor of The Mind's I proposes an original model of consciousness based on new scientific fact and theory. Amazon.com
Dennett's writing, while always serious, is never solemn; who would have thought that combining philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience could be such fun? Not every reader will be convinced that Dennett has succeeded in explaining consciousness; many will feel that his account fails to capture essential features of conscious experience. But none will want to deny that the attempt was well worth making. Customer Comments This book, as has been often said, might better have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away." However, it does have its merits, particularly in the line of empirical evidence regarding neurophysiological activity. The main problem, though, is that this book actually says "nothing" of consciousness itself. As with nearly every other approach - whether philosophical, theological, psychological, empirical-scientific, etc. - this book describes very well a whole mess of phenomena arising "within" consciousness (from synapses to thoughts to human beings) but utterly fails to investigate the nature of awareness itself. It is an analysis of phenomena rather than noumenon, appearances rather than the witness of appearances, and the author, like nearly every other human being, fails to grasp this incredibly simple point. No amount of study and discourse on the nature of neurological activity, computational models, philosophies, thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, and psychological pathologies is going to give you the slightest understanding of what is aware of all those things. Consciousness - pure, ever-present, expansive awareness - is not a thing, not an object, not an experience, not a phenomenon capable of being observed. Rather, it is the infinite context in which all things, all phenomena, or all experiences arise, stay a bit, and pass away. Never does consciousness itself come or go, and this can be directly verified by everyone. (It is the mind and body - aggregate thoughts, feelings, memories, perceptions - that change, turn off and on, and come and go; never does consciousness itself turn off and become "unconscious." If you mistakenly identify yourself with the mind or body, however, rather than with awareness itself, "you" will naturally seem to fade out along with those things.) In truth, there is only one consciousness, one awareness, and it is the same in all beings, in all places and times. It is the infinite clearing, the vast emptiness, the unmoving space within which all people, places, and things come and go. But the emptiness itself never comes or goes, or even changes or moves at all. It is beyond time, beyond change, beyond spatio-temporal phenomena altogether, and it is what we truly are. Aware of time, you are timeless. Aware of space, you are spaceless. Aware of forms, you are formless. And when you discover the truth of this, the immediately, undeniably verifiable Fact of this, you will know what this world really is, and you will know exactly what you are doing here.
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