Reddit reviews Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press)

Farnswirth is right - it's one of the deepest problems in science.

If you like popular science books, you should read Christof Koch's [Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist] (http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Confessions-Reductionist-Christof-Koch/dp/0262017490/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412913491&sr=8-1&keywords=christof+koch), which is all about the science of consciousness, and also a memoir of one of the leaders of the field.

If you have a literary bent, you should read Giulio Tononi's [Phi] (http://www.amazon.com/Phi-A-Voyage-Brain-Soul/dp/030790721X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412913611&sr=8-1&keywords=giulio+tononi) - Tononi is a leading neuroscientist who's proposed one of the best modern theories of consciousness. It's a weird, weird book, but very informative and beautiful too..

Scholarpedia (basically peer reviewed Wikipedia) has a great article on the neural correlates of consciousness. That would be a good place to start. I suppose the dominant view is that consciousness is an emergent property which arises from complex patterns of neurodynamic activation spread across synchronously firing (i.e. phase locked) neurons widely distributed throughout the brain. Researchers are currently trying to find what are the bare minimum parts of the brain that have to be activated in order to give rise to consciousness, but its still a bit of a mess.

Probably one of the best researchers in this area is Christof Koch. He just came out with a new book this year called Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist which covers the history and state of the art of research on the neural basis of consciousness in an accessible way. He wrote that scholarpedia page above. He posts most (all?) of his publications here

You might also be interested in the work of Evan Thompson, who was involved in developing and promoting the idea of neurophenomenology as a research method for finding the biological basis of consciousness. His book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind outlines the theories he has developed by combining research and insights from cognitive neuroscience, biology, phenomenology, and dynamical systems theory. The book is very unique and utterly fascinating.

Some other people to look into:
David Chalmers, Ned Block, Daniel Dennet, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, Antonio Damasio, Francisco Varela

EDIT: This 2003 Nature commentary article from Christof Koch and Francis Crick is actually very informative, despite being 10 years old.

Also, here is a link to Ned Block's 2005 paper in which he discusses his theory of a distinction between what he calls "phenomenal consciousness" and "access consciousness," amongst other things.

I enjoyed Consciousness: Reflections of a Romantic Reductionist (http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Confessions-Reductionist-Christof-Koch/dp/0262017490/ref=la_B001IZVC1C_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343766764&sr=1-1) by Christof Koch. It was a thoughtful and pretty quick book, it was interesting, personal, and scientific all at the same time.

Consciousness by Christof Koch is an excellent short read. The author is the chief science officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Research, which makes it feel a little more credible than other pop-neuroscience books.

I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter Covers a lot of the same ideas as GEB, but more succinctly.

+1 for Vision by David Marr and The Computer and the Brain by von Neumann mentioned by others.

Also it's definitely a more technical book, but I've really enjoyed reading Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay. It explains many of the relationships between
info theory, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, and computational neuroscience.

He addresses this tons in his book Consciousness.

Also, note that our book is very much tongue-in-cheek! While all the science (save the zombie stuff) is as accurate as can be given current knowledge, there are much better references out there for the real meaty information.

To add to Tim's list, one of the most prominent contemporary neuroscientists studying consciousness right now is Christof Koch. Search for him in Pubmed with "consciousness" and you'll find some great stuff. While I've not read it, I've heard his book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, is nice.

> ... the "electricity running through our brains" acts in accordance to our individual neural architectures.

Again, explain to me how you could possibly know this. What if it was my conscious thought pulsing through my brain for years and years is what developed my neural architecture?

Furthermore, the neural structure of our brain is in constant flux and can change. Ever heard of Neuroplasticity?. And if our brains are plastic, what would shape them if it wasn't our conscious thought?

> The software of the brain is analogous to "hard coded" software, so to speak. (Albeit in a self-modifying structure.)

Wow. You're really just throwing out empirical one liners without backing up anything you say. I guarantee you no neuroscientist would be arrogant enough to make the retarded claims you are making because no one knows if consciousness is "hard coded" software. There are at least two very famous neuroscientists that believe consciousness is only a level of complexity and really doesn't have much to do with your brain (other than it being a complex vessel powerful enough to run the software that is consciousness) Read this

You're just regurgitating factoids you picked up from other reddit threads and your high school chemistry class without thinking about it. And if I'm wrong explain to me hos it could be proved that consciousness is "hard coded"

Hierarchical hidden markov models can achieve what the human brain does, and may in fact be the underlying abstract processes of the brain. Both things seem plausible to me.

Creating something that "thinks" well with HHMM is certainly possible. And I think if consciousness is really (as some propose) an innate property of all complex systems which reflect back on themselves, creating a mind which is conscious may take no special extra effort. Cristoph Koch has some interesting observations here.

Personally I think the primary challenge with HHMM for creating something like the human mind is not the difficulty of creating a tall and wide enough hierarchy, it's finding an appropriate sensory apparatus for an AI, so it might resemble something we would recognize. I think the human body plays a very large role in the human mind -- Perhaps even that the human mind physiologically extends farther into the nervous system and body than we usually give it credit. And our minds are tailored to exist in these bodies and to be very concerned with food and sex and physical power. It precedes and permeates our bodies and minds. An AI evolved without the symbiotic apparatus of a body like ours, which is the product of billions of years of trial in the physical and reproductive world, may be very alien to us in ways we do not expect.