Footnote:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description:
Introduction / Josh Weisberg and David Rosenthal -- What is it like to be a bat? / Thomas Nagel -- What is it like to be boring and myopic? / Kathleen Akins -- Consciousness and its place in nature / David Chalmers -- The explanatory gap / Joseph Levine -- A third-person approach to consciousness / Daniel Dennett -- What Mary didn't know / Frank Jackson -- In defense of the phenomenal concepts strategy / Katalin Balog -- What experience teaches / David Lewis -- On a confusion about a function of consciousness / Ned Block -- The intrinsic quality of experience / Gilbert Harman -- How to think about mental qualities / David Rosenthal -- Conscious experience / Fred Dretske -- The same-order monitoring theory of consciousness / Uriah Kriegel -- What kind of awareness is awareness of awareness / Michelle Montague -- Higher-order theories of consciousness / Josh Weisberg -- Perceptual consciousness as a mental activity / Susanna Schellenberg -- The nature of agentive awareness / Myrto Mylopoulos -- Realistic monism / Galen Strawson -- Property dualism and the merits of solutions to the mind-body problem / Fiona Macpherson.
"Right now, you are undergoing the conscious experience of reading this text, combined with a shifting background of sensory, emotional, and cognitive coloring. The conscious experience of the reading, together with the accompanying background feel of sensation, emotion, and thought, make up how things subjectively seem to you, how things appear, as best you can tell, from your own unique point of view. Consciousness is at once acutely familiar-it makes up the experienced moments of your waking (and perhaps your dreaming) life. But consciousness also raises deep and interesting philosophical questions, questions about how any mere physical subject could produce such a wonder, and questions about how there could be a seemingly private and isolated spot of personal subjectivity in an objective, impersonal world. Perhaps the challenge of developing a satisfying theoretical understanding of consciousness is beyond us-we've reached the limits of what we can comprehend. Or maybe today's shortcomings are only temporary barriers to an illuminating theory of consciousness, one properly embedding it in our scientific worldview. And possibly we already have the resources for a satisfactory theory from the way we think about things in commonsense terms. This reader provides an entry point for considering these and related theoretical questions surrounding consciousness. This introductory section begins with a brief background survey of contemporary debates on consciousness. It then provides a characterization of the notion of consciousness at issue, and considers why consciousness understood this way might be theoretically problematic. It follows with a survey of some of the major theoretical positions on consciousness, and it closes with a synopsis of the sections of the book"--