I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

I. PRELIMINARIES 1. Two Concepts of Mind 2. Supervenience and Explanation II. THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 3. Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained? 4. Naturalistic Dualism 5. The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment III. TOWARD A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 6. The Coherence between Consciousness and Cognition 7. Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia 8. Consciousness and Information: Some Speculation IV. APPLICATIONS 9. Strong Artificial Intelligence 10. The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Notes Bibliography

The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance, and a double-aspect theory of information.

/pdf/facing-up-to-the-problem-of-consciousness-2zoy8nlhb9.pdf

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0140525X00038188

On a confusion about a function of consciousness.

of the original article: Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different consciousnesses. Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of consciousness based on the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct guesses. They cannot harness this information in the service of action, however, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are both access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.

On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Author's response

J n “Naming and Necessity”1 and “Identity and Necessity,”2 Kripke presents a version of the Cartesian argument against mate­ rialism. His argument involves two central claims: first, that all identity state­ ments using rigid designators on both sides of the identity sign are, if true at all, true in all possible worlds where the terms refer; second, that psycho-physical identity statements are conceivably false, and therefore, by the first claim, actually false. My purpose in this paper is to transform Kripke’s argument from a metaphysical one into an epistemological one. My general point is this. Kripke relies upon a particular intuition regarding conscious experience to support his second claim. I find this intuition important, not least because of its stubborn resistance to philosophical dissolution. But I don’t believe this intuition supports the meta­ physical thesis Kripke defends—namely, that pyscho-physical identity statements must be false. Rather, I think it supports a closely related epistemological thesis— namely, that psycho-physical identity statements leave a significant explanatory gap, and, as a corollary, that we don’t have any way of determining exactly which psycho-physical identity statements are true.3 One cannot conclude from my version of the argument that materialism is false, which makes my version a weaker attack than Kripke’s. Nevertheless, it does, if correct, constitute a problem for materialism, and one that I think better captures the uneasiness many philos­ ophers feel regarding that doctrine. I will present this epistemological argument by starting with Kripke’s own argument and extracting the underlying intuition. For brevity’s sake, I am going to assume knowledge of Kripke’s general position concerning necessity and the theory of reference, and concentrate only on the argument against materialism. To begin with, let us assume that we are dealing with a physicalist type-identity theory. That is, our materialist is committed to statements like: (1) Pain is the firing of C-fibers. On Kripke’s general theory, if (1) is true at all it is necessarily true. The same of course, is the case with the following statement: (2) Heat is the motion of molecules. That is, if (2) is true at all it is necessarily true. So far so good.

Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap

Conscious experience presents a deep puzzle. On the one hand, a fairly robust materialism must be true in order to explain how it is that conscious events causally interact with non-conscious, physical events. On the other hand, we cannot explain how physical phenomena give rise to conscious experience. In this wide-ranging study, Joseph Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on the "explanatory gap," the fact that we can't explain the nature of phenomenal experience in terms of its physical realization. He presents a careful argument that there is such a gap, and, after providing intriguing analyses of virtually all existing theories of consciousness, shows that recent attempts to close it fall short of the mark. Levine concludes that in the foreseeable future consciousness will remain a mystery.

Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness

On Leaving Out What It's Like

/pdf/phenomenal-concepts-and-the-materialist-constraint-1ei00zysk4.pdf

Phenomenal Concepts and the Materialist Constraint

Back in the 60's, the philosophy of mind, like so many things, was full of hope ard promise. Putnam had just invented functionalism and the words "multiple realization" were on everyone's lips. The idea that mentality was a higherorder property of physical systems promised to satisfy our materialist longings without depriving us of our minds. (We were very fond of our minds.) But now a sort offin de siecle exhaustion has settled over the philosophical world, and many among us have abandoned the dream of having our minds and reducing them too. On the one hand, Jaegwon Kim insists that we must retreat to the "strong" typereductionism of the 50's if we expect our beliefs and desires to have any efficacy in a material world. On the other hand, philosophers including Lynne Rudder Baker (1995), Tyler Burge (1993), Stephen Schiffer (1987), and Stephens Stich and Laurence (1994) now maintain that reductionism in any form is probably impossible and certainly unnecessary. Throwbacks that we are, we mean to keep hope alive. We agree with Kim that Baker and the others are mistaken in thinking that an adequate theory of mind can do without a systematic account of relations between the mental and the physical. We deny that the mind-body problem is an artifact of either screwed-up philosophical priorities or metaphysical self-indulgence (though what's wrong with self-indulgence?). But at the same time, we reject Kim's form of reductionism for its failure to preserve the autonomy of the mental. We believe that a reconsideration of the original arguments for the multiple realization thesis will establish both the reality and the causal relevance of the mental, in a way that is consistent with the demands of materialism. We begin, in Part One, with our criticisms of Kim' s reductionist solution to the problem of mental causation, and argue for an alternative approach. In Part Two, we address arguments Baker and Burge have made against the need for reduction, and then explain why the autonomy of the mental cannot be taken for granted.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2216125.pdf

Joseph Levine

Papers

Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap

Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness

On Leaving Out What It's Like

Phenomenal Concepts and the Materialist Constraint

Reduction with Autonomy