Product Description

"The last great mystery for science," consciousness has become a controversial topic. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction challenges readers to reconsider key concepts such as personality, free will, and the soul. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are opening up these debates, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments and clearly describes the major theories, with illustrations and lively cartoons to help explain the experiments. Topics include vision and attention, theories of self, experiments on action and awareness, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of brain damage and drugs. This lively, engaging, and authoritative book provides a clear overview of the subject that combines the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience--and serves as a much-needed launch pad for further exploration of this complicated and unsolved issue.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79202 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 146 pages

About the Author

Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, freelance writer, and lecturer. Previously Reader in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, she left in 2000 to write an undergraduate textbook on consciousness. The author of numerous scientific articles and book contributions, she writes for several magazines and newspapers and is a frequent contributor on radio and television, both in the UK and abroad. She has presented several television programs including a Channel 4 documentary on the intelligence of apes. She has been training in Zen for twenty years. Her books include an autobiography, In Search of the Light (1996), The Meme Machine (1999), Consciousness: An Introduction (2003), and Conversations about Consciousness (forthcoming in 2005).

Customer Reviews

It's not there
Susan Blackmore concludes that consciousness isn't there--or at least it's not there in any traditional way. Consciousness isn't a ghost in the machine--or a viewer in the theater, as Daniel Dennett would say. Consciousness isn't an enduring subjectivity that rides in some mysterious way on neurological processes. Consciousness isn't a Jamesian stream of consciousness. Consciousness simply isn't there.

A reader might protest that she experiences consciousness. Fair enough, Blackmore responds. But what we really experience are moments of focused attention that come and go, and which we delusionally weave together into an enduring entity. And "delusional"--which eventually supplants "illusional" as the book progresses--is Blackmore's final word on consciousness, self, and free will. They're not there.

This is a fascinating thesis, although most of it's been said by philosophers of mind like Dennett (but then Very Short Introductions don't claim to be original). If correct--and I suspect a great deal of it is--it really does require a fundamental shift in the way we think about subjectivity and personal identity. Many of us probably are agreeable to the suggestion that our personalities change over time. But the claim that our subjectivity isn't what we think it is requires a pretty radical change of gears.

Ultimately, though, I don't see that Blackmore has addressed the problem of qualia. If I understand her, she dismisses it as one of those pseudo-problems that arise from faulty thinking about consciousness. But I don't follow her line of argument. Regardless of whether consciousness is enduring or sporadic, I experience subjectivity. What is it? How to account for it?

Three and a half stars.

Perfect introduction to a profound and complex subject
The relationship between mind and body, and the tremendous difficulty of explaining that relationship, have been central themes in modern philosophy since Descartes' famous 'cogito ergo sum'. In the subsequent centuries the entire heavy artillary of analytical philosophy has been brought to bear, categorical mistakes have been claimed, behavourist theories championed, yet the awkard I stubbornly remains, peering out at the world. A bundle of neurons and synapses themselves composed of randomly spinning atoms and electrons, somehow able to ask questions 'why am I? who am I? What am I?'.

Recently however, the problem of mind has taken on a new academic guise - consciousness studies. The ancient riddle has been reframed into a seemingly narrower and more fundamental question - the problem of consiousness, how can physical matter be self-aware, how can the brain think and feel? The central question may have become more focused, yet suddenly it is not just the philosophers who are discussing it. The study of consciousness is now truly a multi-disciplinary subject, drawing in experts in psychology and neuro-science amonst others. Suddenly a subject so old and profound appears to be one of the most exciting fields in academia. One that might even be on the verge of providing answers that would transform our very sense of self and identity.

Susan Blackmore does a remarkably good job here of introducing such a complex and wideranging subject. You really do get a sense of what the question is and just why it is so challenging. Not only that but you should get a feel of why the subject is particularly exciting at the moment and for those versed in the 'traditional' formulations of the philosophy of mind, this book stands as testamant to the fact that the study of consciousness is really a subject in its own right now.

Having said all that, this book (and others by Susan Blackmore) really should come with a government health warning. I've read David Hume's reflections on the illusory nature of the self, as well as some of those of Eastern Philosophy. Like Hume, I feel largely able to set aside such considerations as soon as I attend to other matters. Reading Blackmore, I really do feel a little shaken. I can give up the idea of a concrete self lurking behind my eyes controlling my fingers as I type this review, but when plausible argument after plausible argument chips away at the belief in consciousness itself, or at least our faith that there is a stream of consciousness, then the effect is rather more disturbing and profound.

Blackmore introduces all the main theories relating to consciousness here, in a very readable and succinct manner. You are fully made aware of her own viewpoint, but that is not a bad thing, as they are clearly put in contrast with the others and in a way that helps you come to your own conclusion, though as I just said, it may leave you a little unsettled.

Though the stream of consciousness mayby some kind of 'grand illusion' as Blackmore and of course Daniel Dennet quite persuasively argue for, its not clear that the problem of explaining consciousness is in anyway diminished. No matter how many insignificant little pieces you try to break conscious awareness into, the fundamental problem still remains : how does physical matter achieve any consciousness at all?

A must read introduction for those interested in the study of consciousness and the philosophy of mind. Just take care!

Consciousness as Subject, not Object
As a psychologist, Susan Blackmore seems very well informed about highly complex cerebral functions which she discusses in the context of a self or central consciousness. From her intense and detailed surveys she attempts to conclude that there is no self, soul, I, or integrating center of consciousness. In addition to her mesmerizing display of specific cerebral functions, she appends a curious, quasi-personal criticism against those who would allege that consciousness is a "mystery" beyond human comprehension. Her criticism has merit, but only if the term mystery ascribes not nescience but reality to the centered-self which is in question. Blackmore's own conclusion,that consciousness is non-existent, may be similarly criticized if its strength lies mainly in an assumption with which she begins.
Blackmore does not reflect on the possibility that the self cannot observe itself integrally as an object, any more than the eye can see itself or its act of seeing. The basic assumption for or against the existence of consciousness stands or falls not by the vigor of attacks by Blackmore or against her. It stands or falls by itself. Consciousness of one's self as a subject inside-out can be neither verified nor falsified by viewing it only as an object or a construct of objects.
Further insights attributed to Blackmore include allusion to "a pointless universe," an understandable reference, given the jarring misery which exists socially among peoples in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Kenya, etc.; or, by metaphorical extension, in our individual lives. However, to call the universe pointless or its smallest parts valueless may disclose more about the viewer's inner attitude than about reality, more about a hidden ideological assumption, than about scientific perception.
As we extrapolate verifications and falsifications from limited specialties and fields to broader, even cosmic, generalizations, it is tempting as much as it is wrong to extend and transfer to them an equivalent sense of certainty or quasi-infallibility. Such inflated perceptions resemble occasions when we stand so closely to a landscape, that we miss the whole of it, thereby denying what should have remained obvious. To describe either the self as non-existent or the universe as pointless, fleshed out in its logical ramifications, would deny value everywhere and in everything, from the smiles of infants to the heroism of those who live and die for others. Blackmore's many intelligent, penultimate insights about consciousness are to be as valued as her ultimate conclusion/assumption is to be resisted.