The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind) Revised ed. Edition

In The Journal of Consciousness Studies, David Chalmers wrote: “ Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted.” The mystery of consciousness revolves around the question: “How can living physical bodies in the physical world acquire such phenomena?” Chalmers favors the non-reductionist, non-physical approach which may ultimately provide pivotal concepts needed to resolve the question.In The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, David Chalmers introduces the notion of the hard problem of consciousness. According to Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness is explaining how we experience it with respect to: (1) sensory inputs and the mysterious modes of their neural processing and (2) qualia - phenomena where the processing is accompanied by ineffably subjective aspects of conscious experience which apprehend the redness of red, the beauty of mathematical forms, love, the selfness experience. These have a relationship with physical brain-states, but are not identical to brain states because they are transcendent - essentially objectively unmeasurable - states of consciousness.Chalmers observes that subjective information processing invariably accompanies sensory and neural signal processing. We do not just retain visual sensations; we judge the quality of colors, the contrast of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field with meaningful images that are conjured up mentally, that are felt emotionally, and inspire experiential conscious thought. What unites these states of consciousness somehow transcends the physical sensory experiences.Empirical science and neuroscience have attempted to explain the nature of conscious experience. But to fully account for conscious experience, Chalmers suggests that we need an extra ingredient to explain and elucidate the hard problem of consciousness. That extra ingredient should explain how accumulated experiences, arising in and retained by the brain, are elaborated, interpreted, and qualified by our consciousness.Roger Penrose and Staurt Hameroff (Toward a Science of Consciousness), suggest that human cognition may depend on quantum wavefunction collapses in microtubules, the cytoskeletons of a neuron. Penrose and Hameroff suspect that wavefunction collapse in microtubules may be the physical basis of conscious experience. In The Conscious Mind, Chalmers writes that although “these ideas are extremely speculative . . . they could at least conceivably help to explain certain elements of human cognitive functioning.”Our embodiment is primarily a survival machine with no inherent consciousness, a Chalmerian zombie. In The Conscious Mind David Chalmers describes an isomorph, “A zombie [that] is just something physically identical to me but which has no conscious experience ‒ all is dark inside.” In any case, survival machines are programmed to respond to and survive their environments, to replicate and evolve, without any urgent need to assume human consciousness or engage in social intercourse.Chalmers argues for the transcendent nature of consciousness; insisting that “consciousness is simply not to be characterized as a functional property” and that, “No explanation given wholly in physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience.” In My Universe - A Transcendent Reality, author Alex Vary proposes a conceptual framework to help elucidate the transcendent nature of consciousness and its relation to the physical world. The proposed framework is based on deductions and information revealed primarily by distinct quantum phenomena which are demonstrably transcendent. An essential feature of the framework is the mesostratum; a signal transmission modality. The mesostratum machinery that Vary imagines offers an explanatory gap-filling linkage from a transcendent continuum to a physical neural discontinuum. Vary suggests ways to access the mesostratum, to explore it, to explain the nature of human consciousness; and cites examples of access to the mesostratum. Chalmers essentially intuits that non-physical agencies (perhaps mesostratum agencies) participated in the appearance and evolution of human consciousness. If mesostratum agencies modulate human consciousness then at least select humans should be able to reciprocally access, explore, and exploit resources of the mesostratum. Anecdotal examples are legion: prodigious savants, geniuses, virtuosos, such as Mozart, Goethe, John von Neuman.

A very good book. I work in the field of consciousness research, so I guess I'm biased with a lot of background knowledge, but I'd say, for experts this book is excellent. Chalmers approaches this problem like a mathematician. He doesn't cling to intuitions or cherished beliefs, he simply constructs arguments with cold-hearted rational thinking. His main point can actually be summarized quite simply: we, as a matter of fact, cannot deduce experiences from functional interactions. We can deduce output, and other functions, but not experiences. This then suggests a simple implication: experiences, unlike normal material entities, are not encompassed fully by functions (although they clearly correlate with it).I'd say you really appreciate this as someone working in the field (more maybe than if you don't), because the problems he predicts are exactly the problems that arise. Every theory of consciousness at some points hits a brick wall. Global Workspace: highlighted information is conscious; IIT: integrated information is conscious; recurrently processed information is conscious; attended or memorized information is conscious; information generating meta information is conscious; neuronal interactions at 40Hz generate consciousness, and so on.The problem with every theory, in the end, is that the starting point seems arbitrary and not rationally explainable. Why should 40Hz oscillations lead to experiences, but 39 Hz not? Why can information not simply be integrated unconsciously? What's so special about memory that it requires consciousness (as opposed to calculating root squares for instance)?These problems that we run into in the practice of consciousness research highlight Chalmers's points: there is, in our understanding, an unbridgeable gap between functions and experiences. This makes the problem of consciousness considerably more intractable then nearly all other scientific problems.