Explaining
Consciousness: The Hard Problem
by Jonathan Shear (Editor)
Reviews
David Papineau, The Times Higher Education
Supplement, October 23, 1998
"The volume is determinedly interdisciplinary,
with a fair sprinkling of physicists and physiologists, alongside philosophers
and psychologists of all denominations... this is a useful survey of the
kind of work that has been spawned by the boom in consciousness studies."
Book Description
At the 1994 landmark conference "Toward
a Scientific Basis for Consciousness," philosopher David Chalmers distinguished
between the "easy" problems and the "hard" problem of consciousness research.
According to Chalmers, the easy problems are to explain cognitive functions
such as discrimination, integration, and the control of behavior; the hard
problem is to explain why these functions should be associated with phenomenal
experience. Why doesn't all this cognitive processing go on "in the dark,"
without any consciousness at all? In this book philosophers, physicists,
psychologists, neurophysiologists, computer scientists, and others address
this central topic in the growing discipline of consciousness studies.
Some take issue with Chalmers's distinction, arguing that the hard problem
is a nonproblem, or that the explanatory gap is too wide to be bridged.
Others offer alternative suggestions as to how the problem might be solved,
whether through cognitive science, fundamental physics, empirical phenomenology,
or with theories that take consciousness as irreducible.
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