Customer Reviews

Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As someone who has followed consciousness studies for over a decade now, I ave begun to feel disapponted at how slowly progress has been made. Philosopher rarely change their ideas substantially (notable exceptions: Tye and Dennett), scientists cannot escape sticking to neural correlates and workspace theory, physicists mantain quantum theory is of the essence, etc. Having said that, I allways loved reading Revonsuo, his papers and collections (He edited a nice book back in 1994, if my memory does not fail me). He has a no nonsense approach, and in many ways his consciousness as virtual-reality model is very intuitively appealing. In this book he tris to compress his ideas into a full-lenght book and succeeds. He knows the field and uses empiric evidence with skill in order to support his more speculative ideas. He is clearly a naturalist, representationalist, and (maybe) reductionist, which is not uncommon, but still difficult to defend. There are a couple of chapters in the book 17 and 18 I believe, where the "level" or "structure" of conscisouness in the brain is discussed, which cannot be missed by anyone interested in the topic. This is as good as a neuroreductive explanation of consciousness can get. The final chapters on zombies and the function of consicousness are well argued. Of course, as any other book written by a scientist, philosophers will have a field day showing how his arguments fail for seome reason or other, either because of conceivability, supervenience, entailment, something Kim or Kripke said, but this should never prevent the biological realist in reading and appreciating a nice framework like what Revonsuo has elaborated for us. This is amust for consciousness-freaks,, especially for those of us who believe it can be explained in cognitive neuroscience terms.

This is an excellent book for anyone who is interested in consciousness, and how it is created. It is one of those books that you want to read slowly, over several months, and let it sink into your everyday life as you come to grips with what your ego tunnel really consists of. I love the study of phenomenology, and this is one of the best books I have read on the creation of our conscious lives.