Reddit reviews The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind)

This is a good introductory essay by Nick Bostrom from The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. And this is a relevant survey essay by Drew McDermott from The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.

If folks aren't taking well to the background reading, they might at least do alright jumping to Section 5 from the Descartes' Discourse (they can use this accessible translation). One little snippet:

>I worked especially hard to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that doesn’t have reason, we couldn’t tell that they didn’t possess entirely the same nature as these animals; whereas if any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated as many of our actions as was practically possible, we would still have two very sure signs that they were nevertheless not real men. (1) The first is that they could never use words or other constructed signs, as we do to declare our thoughts to others. We can easily conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions that will cause a change in its organs (touch it in one spot and it asks ‘What do you mean?’, touch it in another and it cries out ‘That hurts!’, and so on); but not that such a machine should produce different sequences of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence—which is something that the dullest of men can do. (2) Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would be bound to fail in others; and that would show us that they weren’t acting through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is practically impossible for a machine to have enough different •organs to make •it act in all the contingencies of life in the way our •reason makes •us act. These two factors also tell us how men differ from beasts [= ‘non-human animals’].

That sets the stage for historically important essay from Turing of Turing-Test-fame. And that essay sets up nicely Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Scientific America has two accessible articles: Searle presents his argument here, and the Churchland's respond.

As always, the SEP and IEP are good resources for students, and they have entries with bibliographies on consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, AI, computational theories of mind, and so on.

There are countless general introductions to philosophy of mind. Heil's Philosophy of Mind is good. Seager's introduction to theories of consciousness is also quite good, but maybe more challenging than some. Susan Blackmore's book Conversations on Consciousness was a very engaging read, and beginner friendly. She also has a more textbook-style Introduction that I have not read, but feel comfortable betting that it is also quite good.

Searle's, Dennett's and Chalmer's books on consciousness are all good and influential and somewhat partisan to their own approaches. And Kim's work is a personal favorite.

(sorry for the broad answer--it's a very broad question!)

You'll need this

the main proponent of dualism in contemporary philosophy is david chalmers. his defining work is "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory," but you can also read all of his papers for free on his website. he has also at some points argued for panpsychism, but his core commitments still lie with dualism.

yes, he and his arguments are usually taken very seriously in academic philosophy. for example, here's a video of him at a conference on a boat, with other big name philosophers of mind such as dennett and the churchlands.

i guess i should also mention that the kind of dualism that chalmers argues for is not the classic cartesian substance dualism, but rather a weaker form of dualism called property dualism

here's a useful sep article about dualism

Every book on consciousness will have its own pet theory. I haven't found many great books on the neuroscience of consciousness, though Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch have a pretty good review paper on the subject. The one caveat is that they mostly review evidence for their own theory of consciousness, the Information Integration Theory.

As for the philosophy of consciousness, there are a number of good books, again each with their own agenda/pet theory. If you want the entire spectrum of opinions, check out Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness, which both provides a good overview of the field and also offers a defense of Churchland's materialist view; I'd also check out John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind, which presents Searle's biological naturalism, a sort of "centrist" view in the array of popular positions, and which is written in very straightforward language; a third option, which is more complicated than the other two but is really important in the field, is Chalmers' The Conscious Mind.

Hope that helps!

As /u/Das_Erlebnis said, there's tons of literature in the philosophy of mind. Check out some books, e.g. Chalmer's [The Conscious Mind] (https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy/dp/0195117891/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8) and Dennett's [Consciousness Explained] (https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MK07ERGEZ7B8NBW6JBS1).

Edit: I'll add Nagel's essay [What is it like to be a bat?] (http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf) to the list.

I don't think the subjective self (what I think you are calling "mind" here) is something separate from the physical brain (standard Cartesian Duality), but rather, is a property of it.

Couple of books I can recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy/dp/0195117891
https://www.amazon.com/Neurophilosophy-Toward-Unified-Science-Mind-Brain/dp/0262530856

Seth Lloyd -- Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos

Gregory Chaitin -- How real are real numbers? -- this paper, and all of Chaitin's writing, has been hugely influential on my thinking

I haven't read it, but I have heard Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence highly recommended. Ditto for Max Tegmark's Life 3.0.

I also recommend reading anything by David Chalmers, just on general principle. The Conscious Mind is a good place to start. I find his methods of contemplating the problems of consciousness to be more robust than the standard fare. The hard problem of consciousness (as Chalmers has dubbed it) suggests that there is something fundamental about what we are that modern science has completely failed to capture, even in the most sketch outline.

To go further, I recommend reading in a mystical direction. Specifically, ask yourself why there are patterns in mystical traditions that have arisen independently? And these are not just vague, hand-wavey correlations, but very specific, detailed correlations like the anatomical descriptions of dragons as winged serpents that slither through the sky, and so on. See Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and subsequent works for more along these lines.

If this is getting too far afield then you can ask yourself an even more basic question: why do we experience dreams and where, exactly, are these experiences happening? If you say, "it's all just remixes of past experiences being sloshed around in your skull like those #DeepDream images", how come they are so specifically odd and out-of-character? I have had extended conversations in my dreams with people I know (and people I have never met) and the detailed character of these conversations is far beyond anything that my pathetic brain could cook up, even by remixing past experiences. In short, when I dream, I am sometimes having genuine experiences, just not the kind of experiences I have in my waking body. Anyone who has had a lucid dream (I have experienced this a handful of times) is acutely aware of the fact that dream-space is some other place than the meat-space we occupy during waking hours. Where is this other place and why does it exist? What does it really mean to have conscious experience?

> Of course it's contested, but so is evolution. If anyone would like to link me to any serious evidence, I would be delighted.

Here's a book on the subject from about 15 years ago. The author has written a lot on related topics since, and has also published more recent articles since on many of the problems discussed in the book.

If you are interested in this subject I would highly recommend David Chalmers "The Conscious Mind".

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David Chalmers

I really enjoyed Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Chalmers' The Conscious Mind presents another popular view which, if I recall correctly, opposes Dennett's views. I'm slowly getting into work's by Steven Pinker.

Probably a general Philosophy of Mind reader would also benefit you just to get a good idea of the different views and topics out there within the discipline. I cannot remember which one I read years ago, although if I read one today I'd pick Chalmers' Philosophy of Mind or Kim's Philosophy of Mind.

> What's does the "hard problem" consist of? From what I can tell,
> Chalmers thinks its a confounding problem that we can't understand
> what the experience of feeling pain is like, say, in terms of brain states.

It's more than simply that. But, because consciousness is such a slippery topic to talk clearly about, it's not easy to briefly describe it in a way that communicates the points clearly. Whether you agree with Chalmer's views or not, I think he does a pretty reasonable job of stating the "hard problem" (I read his The Conscious Mind), and his description is pretty lengthy.

> He seems to think that by looking at the brain of a person who's in pain, we should
> be able to know what their experience of feeling pain is actually like. I dont share
> this kind of concern

No he doesn't. It's more the opposite.

> And Chalmers leans toward consciousness being fundamental, I believe

It's not entirely clear what exactly should and shouldn't constitute "fundamental", but I don't think that's true. He's say that it's not something "physical", basically meaning not something that can be understood in structural or functional terms, but that doesn't necessitate it being fundamental.

And BTW I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Chalmers, I'm just trying to clarify what his position is.