Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It is probably the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe. The science of physics is not yet complete, but it is well-understood. The science of biology has explained away many of the mysteries surrounding the nature of life. There are many gaps in our understanding of these fields, but they do not seem intractable. We have some idea of what a solution that would fill these gaps might look like; it is just a matter of coming up with a theory that gets the details right.
Acknowledgments. vii
Preface: Taking Consciousness Seriously. ix
1 Preliminaries. 1
Two Concepts of Mind. 3
What is consciousness? 3
The phenomenal and the psychological concepts of mind. 10
The double life of mental terms. 15
The two mind-body problems. 21
Two concepts of consciousness. 23
Supervenience and Explanation. 30
Supervenience. 30
Reductive explanation. 39
Logical supervenience and reductive explanation. 44
Conceptual truth and necessary truth. 47
Almost everything is logically supervenient on the physical. 64
2 The Irreducibility of Consciousness. 81
Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained? 83
Is consciousness logically supervenient on the physical9. 83
The failure of reductive explanation. 94
Cognitive modeling. 98
Neurobiological explanation. 102
The appeal to new physics. 104
Evolutionary explanation. 107
Whither reductive explanation? 107
Naturalistic Dualism. 109
An argument against materialism. 109
Objections from a posteriori necessity. 116
Other arguments for dualism. 125
Is this epiphenomenalism? 134
The logical geography of the issues. 144
Reflections on naturalistic dualism. 156
The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment. 160
Consciousness and cognition. 160
The paradox of phenomenal judgment. 164
On explaining phenomenal judgments. 171
Arguments against explanatory irrelevance. 178
The argument from self-knowledge. 178
The argument from memory. 186
The argument from reference. 187
3 Toward a Theory of Consciousness. 195
The Coherence between Consciousness and Cognition. 197
Toward a nonreductive theory. 197
Principles of coherence. 202
More on the notion of awareness. 208
The explanatory role of coherence principles. 217
Coherence as a psychophysical law. 226
Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia. 231
The principle of organizational invariance. 231
Absent Qualia. 234
Fading Qualia. 236
Inverted Qualia. 245
Dancing Qualia. 251
Nonreductive functionalism. 258
Consciousness and Information: Some Speculation. 260
Toward a fundamental theory. 260
Aspects of information. 261
Some supporting arguments. 269
Is experience ubiquitous? 274
The metaphysics of information. 282
Open questions. 288
4 Applications 291
Strong Artificial Intelligence. 293
Machine Consciousness. 293
On implementing a computation. 295
In defense of strong AI. 299
The Chinese room and other objections. 301
Functional objections. 307
Conclusion. 309
The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. 311
Two mysteries. 311
The framework of quantum mechanics. 312
Interpreting quantum mechanics. 315
The Everett interpretation. 322
Objections to the Everett interpretation. 327
Conclusion. 331
Notes. 334
Bibliography. 366
