Consciousness: A Guide to the Debates (Controversies in Science) (repost)

An exciting and up-to-the-minute introduction to consciousness research and its applications to our waking and sleeping moments. Science now debates great consciousness puzzles such as chess-playing computers, dream states, and optical illusions. Opposing theorists ponder if a red sunset exists in the sky or in the head and why feelings affect thinking.

Can objective science study subjective experience? Once philosophical, consciousness is now an exciting science. Author Anthony Freeman, managing editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, opens Consciousness with a history of mind study, and ends with a review of multidisciplinary cognitive science. Between, it's a wild ride of conflicting theories on the working of the brain and up-to-the-minute research. "Seeing" vs. "believing", mind/body connections, zombies, and assembly line robots are just the beginning. Even chaos theory and quantum physics are relevant, with opposing approaches inciting disciplinary battles. This illustrated and accessible volume profiles key researchers like Wilder Penfield, who chatted with his conscious sister while removing a tumor from her brain.

This is a little and very readable book. It is a good introduction to some of the issues in the field of consciousness studies. Freeman is an editor of the journal of consciousness studies and is quite informed on recent ideas put out on consicousness. As is usual for some authors, he is not particularily a good expositor of the philosophical ideas, but manages to give a nice overview of the central players, like Chalmers, Searle or Dennett.The chapters on the neuroscience of consicousness could have been a little bit more complete, although he does give space to the ideas of LLinas and Cotterill, two authors whith very important contributions that are often forgotten in other introductory books. At times, Freeman got out of track. For example, one chapter is devoted to learning and memory, but learning and memory only, and does not touch on their relations to consciousness, and seems out of sinc with the rest of the book. He writes a chapter on the physics side of the debate, with not many things new, apart from Penrose and Bohm.