Preface

In this book, I neither solve the problems of consciousness, nor reduce consciousness to anything, nor discover consciousness in everything. Rather, I introduce some of the current neuroscientific proposals about consciousness and discuss them from a philosophical point of view. As impressed as I am by the extraordinary advances made in the past twenty years in the scientific study of consciousness, I am even more impressed by the philosophical and empirical difficulties researchers continue to face trying to make consciousness tractable. It is a peculiar feature of this line of work that virtually every promising empirical and philosophical theory of consciousness faces devastating empirical and philosophical objections. Some other scientific debates also have this feature (one thinks, for example, of Freudian psychology and quantum mechanics), but in the case of consciousness, it is part of the weft and weave of the phenomenon being studied. Consciousness is a most peculiar phenomenon, and our thinking about it inevitably reveals that peculiarity. Self-assured advocates for this or that view wince at such claims. They patiently point out that the peculiarities of consciousness arise only when this or that assumption is made and that we can live easily without this or that assumption, or that we are hoodwinked by language and are well advised to shed this or that semantic prejudice, or that some branch of science, working alone or in concert with other sciences, will, were we only to turn the job over to them, eliminate the mysteries.