(Philosophy of Mind Series) by David J. Chalmers
Booknews, Inc., September 1, 1996 Chalmers (philosophy, U. of California, Santa Cruz) challenges cognitive science and neuroscience to explain how subjective experience emerges, finding that neither can adequately explain the phenomenon. His proposed theory views conscious experience as an entity (like time, mass, and space) existing at a fundamental, irreducible level. All this heady thought is made concrete by lucid writing and many examples of "experiments" to illustrate the concepts of the author's theory, including applications to artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or. Synopsis
Synopsis
Synopsis
What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective life of a conscious mind? These questions are among the most hotly debated issues in science and philosophy today. Now, in The Conscious Mind, philosopher David J. Chalmers offers a cogent analysis of this debate as he lays out a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, but is still compatible with a scientific view of the world. Writing in a rigorous, thought-provoking style, the author takes us on a far-reaching tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness. Chalmers convincingly establishes that contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience do not begin to explain how subjective experience emerges from neural processes in the brain. He proposes that conscious experience must instead be understood in a new light - as an irreducible entity (like such physical properties as time, mass, and space) that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the sum of simpler physical parts. In the second half of the book, he sets out on a quest for a "fundamental theory" - a theory of the basic laws governing the structure and character of conscious experience - and shows how this reconception of the mind could lead us to a new science of consciousness. Customer Comments
The basic problem with any materialist theory of consciousness is that there is no room for consciousness to "do" anything - it is caused by certain material processes but does not itself cause anything. The firing of a neuron can always be explained in terms of the firing of other neurons, the impingement of a photon on a photoreceptor, or some other objectively observable cause. At no point is it necessary to say that "this neuron fired because the brain it was part of had such-and-such a subjective experience". Thus consciousness is not logically necessary in our objective description of the material world, so we can at least conceive of a world where David Chalmers' zombie twin writes papers and books about the mind-body problem without ever having any subjective experience itself. This seems absurd but the absurdity is inherent in all the various flavors of functionalism or property dualism. And "new physics" won't change the picture at all - string theory, quantum gravity, quantum multiverses, and any as yet unconcieved of physical theory are all simply more of the same kind of "ontological stuff" that we already have - objective procedures for predicting the behavior of objectively measurable things. Some functionalists attempt to make the problem go away simply by declaring conscious states a matter of definition - "pain" is some set of states of an information processing system, "pleasure" is some other, etc. Thus whether a robot that makes a convincing whine when you hit it actually experiences pain is a matter of definition. Few would deny that there is indeed a correlation between neural states and subjective experience, but anyone who has actually experienced pain knows that it is more than a matter of definition - your pain won't go away just because everybody else on the planet has redefined your neural state as pleasure. Finally, substance dualism, for good reasons not considered seriously by most philosophers, doesn't solve any of the problems but merely hides them behind a black screen. Chalmers recognizes the absurdities inherent in all theories of consciousness. He refuses to sweep the problems under a rug; he argues for a form of property dualism while being honest enough to point out that it leads to the bizarre conclusion that we puzzle about the nature of consciousness for reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that we actually "are" conscious. Like me you probably won't be willing to go as far as Chalmers wants to take you, but his book makes it plain that all the apparent avenues of escape lead to pitfalls at least as bad as the ones on the road he takes. If Chalmers is right, and consciousness must be added as an "extra feature" in our description of reality, it is devilishly hard to see how we will ever have a good theory of it. How will we be able to convincingly determine whether that poor robot really hurts? The book is very clearly written; you don't need a formal education in philosophy to follow his arguments. Overall this is one of the best books on the mind-body problem I've read.
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