Customer Reviews

The Science of Consciousness

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This is a good collection of papers on the science of consciousness. Anyone interested on the field, or someone familiar with it, will find nothing terribly new, except perhaps the clinical papers, those dealing with the placebo effect and somatic consequences of consciousness. This would be a much better introductory text than an original contribution in general.

The introduction is about average. Papers on perception without awareness and consciousness in relation to memory and learning are quite good. Bernard Baars presents his cognitive theory of consciousness again. Then are the two really good papers, the jewels, one by Libet discussing neural correlates of consicousness, and a review of neuropsychology and dissociation in consciousness by A. Young, one of the best yet. Then there are the before mentioned papers on clinical matters, the often ignored section in consciousness studies. Max Velmans writes some philosophy of consciousness, and proposes a reflexive model, which I think was a little confusing, for mixing up phenomenology and objectivity. For example, for him pain is in the finger that hurts, not in the brain. But he admits the correlates and presumably mechanisms of pain are in the brain. He holds that pain is in the finger that hurts in a strange pseudo-phenomenological sense.

This is a good collection of papers on the science of consciousness. Anyone interested on the field, or someone familiar with it, will find nothing terribly new, except perhaps the clinical papers, those dealing with the placebo effect and somatic consequences of consciousness. This would be a much better introductory text than an original contribution in general.

The introduction is about average. Papers on perception without awareness and consciousness in relation to memory and learning are quite good. Bernard Baars presents his cognitive theory of consciousness again. Then are the two really good papers, the jewels, one by Libet discussing neural correlates of consicousness, and a review of neuropsychology and dissociation in consciousness by A. Young, one of the best yet. Then there are the before mentioned papers on clinical matters, the often ignored section in consciousness studies. Max Velmans writes some philosophy of consciousness, and proposes a reflexive model, which I think was a little confusing, for mixing up phenomenology and objectivity. For example, for him pain is in the finger that hurts, not in the brain. But he admits the correlates and presumably mechanisms of pain are in the brain. He holds that pain is in the finger that hurts in a strange pseudo-phenomenological sense.