Focusing on diverse approaches to consciousness, this second edition offers a contemporary overview that engages with ongoing discussions about its nature. It examines the possibility of achieving a scientific understanding of consciousness, making it a valuable resource for those interested in the philosophical and scientific debates surrounding this complex topic.
Science, Emergence and Consciousness
The spectacular success of the scientific enterprise over the last four hundred years has led to the promise of an all encompassing vision of the natural world. In this elegant picture, everything we observe is based upon just a few fundamental processes and entities. The almost infinite variety and complexity of the world is thus the product of emergence. But the concept of emergence is fraught with controversy and confusion. This book ponders the question of how emergence should be understood within the scientific picture, and whether a complete vision of the world can be attained that includes consciousness.
Metaphysics of Consciousness opens with a development of the physicalist outlook that denies the need for any explanation of the mental. This "inexplicability" is demonstrated not to be sufficient as refutation of physicalism. However, the inescapable particularity of modes of consciousness appears to overpower this minimal physicalism. This book proposes that such an inference requires either a wholly new conception of how consciousness is physical or a deep and disturbing new kind of physical inexplicability.