Reddit reviews Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul

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..

This debate reduces to the debate over the "hard problem" of consciousness: what sorts of arrangements of matter can produce "qualia" or "subjective experience"? It's a highly polarizing debate; one side wants to avoid any sort of dualism, whereas the other side suggests that experience might be a fundamental property of the universe. After lots of thought I'm more in favor of the latter approach, which has received some attention recently with the work of Giulio Tononi.

If Tononi's approach eventually yields results (likely decades away), we might be able to make quantitative statements about what a crustacean actually feels; whether it actually experiences anything like what we'd call pain or whether it's more of an automaton.

Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul by Giulio Tononi. A wonderful story exploring consciousness from both biological and philosophical perspectives.

Phi was pretty cool.

Depending on your girlfriend's preferences, this could be cool:
http://www.amazon.com/Phi-A-Voyage-Brain-Soul/dp/030790721X

Giulio Tononi has been claiming something similar for a while now (the book is only the latest incarnation).