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Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provide

Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"

lamename 4y ago
Not quite "in a nutshell" but honestly the page + exploring references will get you far https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
For the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below) Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Handbooks-Philosophy/dp/1138936219/ https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Hand...) is far more comprehensive and while being more academicky is still an excellent read. Unfortunately both miss what I think is easily the best and most computationally robust and fleshed out consciousness theory, but that's because it's so tragically unknown. I co-authored a book that covers this (while staying accessible) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-mind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-... So much of the stuff in the mathematical-this and physics-that of conscious experience is just crap because there is very little understanding of biological consciousness and what it is and where we can find it, and where we cannot. These start with assumptions of what consciousness is and then go on to mathematize these non-validated assumptions. (Integrated Information Theory) IIT is the most popular among these. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 -- this article captures well why IIT, and many like it, are bad models of consciousness.
- conrod_ 4y ago
  Thanks for the reply! I have to say, I am quite giddy. When I posted this question, I wasn't expecting to get a reply from an author and researcher on this very topic. I am a software engineer by profession, but this is a topic that has been on the back of my mind for many years. Even when I read popsci books about the universe and the big bang and so on, i felt spiritually unsatisfied because they often do not address this elephant in the room - consciousness. A theory of everything that explains the laws of universe will be imo incomplete if it doesn't also explain, at the fundamental level, the laws of the universe that exists behind our eyes. It really deserves more attention and awareness among geeks and the general public.
  - b800h 4y ago
    You might be waiting a long time. Things like Tarski's Undefinability Theorem (moreso than Gödel) make it rather unlikely that this will turn out to be possible. But I agree with your assertion.
  - techno_tsar 4y ago
    There has been a turn in consciousness research in the last in the decade towards some kind of panpsychism for precisely your sentiment: a completed physics should also be a completed phenomenology. David Chalmers has written extensively and seriously entertained panpsychism in recent years. Galileo’s Error, published in 2019, by Phillip Goff traces the history of the mind-body problem and illustrates how we divorced our consciousness from the physical world during the development of early modern science and philosophy. Last century, Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell argued in favour for neutral monism, a stance which holds that the mental and physical are two sides of the same coin. It seems like these ideas are coming back after a long stretch of dogmatic physicalism. Panpsychism gets a bad rep for sounding like it has associations with vacuous or flimsy New Age beliefs, but it means a totally different thing in the context of philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. It is the claim that consciousness might be a building block of the universe. The main problem with panpsychism is not that it is incredulous, but that it currently lacks a compelling explanation for our individual subjectivity. If consciousness and mental properties are ubiquitous in the universe, why do I have my consciousness and you have yours? The main motivation to believe in panpsychism seems to be its incredible elegance and self-consistency. That alone does not make it true, but it might be a very big hint on where to look for answers.
ethanwillis 4y ago
IMO. Intentionally seeking flawed understanding isn't a good way to live. I'd recommend just taking your time and reading progressively harder works.
- epgui 4y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is the best attitude to adopt if your goal is learning.
didericis 4y ago
Depending on what exactly you mean by “the nature of consciousness”, it’s fundamentally impossible to answer. The fact that we think we can observe and comprehend a mechanism doing the observation does not preclude things we cannot see. You might be able to pan a cctv camera and get some insight about the camera itself if you find a reflection, but you can’t pan it over to the linux driver. It is not a given that all of the observer exists within the observable universe.
- l33t233372 4y ago
  This school of thought strikes me as fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of the scientific method. We try to find out about these black boxes through repeated observation, theorizing, and testing. It seems short sighted to suggest we can’t find out things about consciousness in a similar way.
  - didericis 4y ago
    The scientific method is about paying strict and close attention to what we can observe. The black boxes we can make sense of must have enough datapoints within the observable universe to be understood. We can almost definitely learn a lot more about consciousness related phenomenon than we already know through science, and I don’t know the answer to OP’s question about the current cutting edge of that, but I think it’s always going to be about related phenomenon rather than consciousness itself. Unlike other phenomenon, which are only revealed to us because aspects of their existence appear in our observable universe, we don’t really “observe” the core experience of consciousness. The goalposts can be moved indefinitely whenever consciousness related phenomenon are made sense of. The fundamental experience is not observable, which means we can’t really see that black box at all. To me the mystery of that is much more satisfying than thinking we can ever get a definitive answer.
    - Nevermark 4y ago
      We observe everything indirectly. It is easy (and cognitively useful) to forget that, when the indirection is very reliable. As far as consciousness, we won’t just have to speculate based on our own consciousness. As artificial minds become highly self-aware (a functional ingredient of consciousness), we will be able to construct very controlled experiments. There will be endless numbers of experiments we will be able to do once we can edit self-aware entities and both externally query and internally monitor them.
jsuth 4y ago
Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore is exactly what you're looking for. Make sure you get the latest edition. https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Emily-Troscianko-Susan-Blackmore/dp/1138801313 https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Emily-Troscianko-Susan-... She has another book called Conversations on Consciousness that's basically transcribed interviews with prominent figures that's also worth checking out. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254499.Conversations_on_Consciousness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254499.Conversations_on_...
- epgui 4y ago
  I can't say how good this book is, but the author has a PhD in parapsychology. This makes me question how prone they are to magical thinking, and also whether I'd want to read what they have to say about this topic. Yes this comment is an ad hominem, and no I have not read the book... All I have is a skeptical hunch that this might not represent "the state of the art" on the topic.
  - hanche 4y ago
    If you had read anything by Susan Blackmore (I have, but admittedly long ago), I think you’d find that she’s not at all into magical thinking.
    - epgui 4y ago
      That's certainly reassuring to hear!
  - mellosouls 4y ago
    After an initial, intense, personal experience understandably awakened her interest she always approached the subject from a scientific point of view: From her wiki page: It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena—only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.
epgui 4y ago
You're asking the wrong question by excluding cognition and using a very ill-defined word ("consciousness"). "Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, many of which are what we usually refer to as "cognition". People who like to talk about consciousness have a problem keeping the goalposts in place (and trying to exclude cognition from consciousness, presumably because "cognition" doesn't sound mysterious enough, is a great example of this sort of moving of goalposts). The truth is consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, and it can only be understood as such. Of course we have a lot more to learn, but we understand the fundamentals of neuroscience and biochemistry, and we know how our conscious experiences emerge from those. A neuroanatomy textbook (eg.: Blumenfeld) is probably the best place to start. There is unfortunately no single "thing" called "consciousness" that we will ever be able to point to.
- Nevermark 4y ago
  That view seems pessimistic without any strong argument, other than critiquing people for not yet understanding something we all agree we don’t understand yet. > Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, […] A collection of things is a thing. > The truth is consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, […] I don’t think that is controversial at all. We have unraveled the workings of many emergent phenomena. Emergent doesn’t mean incomprehensible.
  - epgui 4y ago
    It's only a thing if you can define it, but there is no agreed upon definition of what collection of things comprise consciousness. We have all the pieces, and we know we have all the pieces (note: this doesn't mean we don't have a lot more to learn, both can be true). There is little controversy over how it all roughly works together. The only real controversy is semantics: what do we mean when we say "consciousness". In programmerland, one might say something like "the abstraction you're using is counter-productive", for whatever reason, when looking at some junior hire's code. It's very much the same here: trying to understand consciousness is asking the wrong question. It's like asking "Why is there a God?": it's an unproductive question because it's a question that can't be answered. The abstraction in the question simply doesn't map 1:1 to abstractions in the world in which we live. If we want to understand our world, we'll maximize our odds of success if we focus on studying the abstractions of this world. I wouldn't describe myself as a pessimist at all, and I'm not sure why you thought my comment was pessimistic... But this opinion of mine (because that's what it is, it's an opinion, not an argument) is a professional opinion. This isn't my field of expertise, but I do have expertise in very adjacent fields.
Helmut10001 4y ago
Cognition and consciousness are not easily separable. Some psychology and neuroscience publications that I found particularly good: Gibson (1950), Ittelson (1973), Kosslyn (2005), Northoff (2004) ("Mind–body problem"), Dewey, & Bentley (1949). Particularly the first and last should get you started. [1]: Gibson, J. J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Boston: Houghton Mifflin [2]: Ittelson, W.H. (1973). Environment and Cognition. Seminar Press, New York, NY, 187 pp [3]: Kosslyn, S. (2005). Mental images and the brain. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 333–347 [4]: Northoff, G. (2004). Philosophy of the brain: The brain problem. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. [5]: Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Boston: Beacon Press
- mahathu 4y ago
  Agree with [1] in particular and would definitely add Wilson (2002) to the list!:) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12613670/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12613670/
hackerlight 4y ago
"Philosophy of mind" is the discipline you're looking for. They're far off from a preliminary theory let alone a coherent definition of the word consciousness. It is not an easy problem.
Syntonicles 4y ago
A prominent figure in the space is David Chalmers, who made it his life's work to characterize and explore theories of consciousness. He's a philosopher in New York (originally Australia) He coined "The Hard Problem" and "The Meta Problem". You should get an overview in his books. They're a bit dated but it's not like there's been substantial progress. There's a recent book called "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" which purports to be what you are looking for. She's an author who is married to Sam Harris, a neuroscience PhD and public thinker who focused a lot of consciousness. His ideas permeate her thinking and I found her treatment to be less open minded. There's a series mirrored on YouTube called "Closer to Truth", where Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews famous physicists, mathematicians, etc. on this and other grand unsolved questions. You can find interviews with most of the analytical thinkers in the consciousness space if you wade through. The most "mathematically rigorous" theory is Integrated Information Theory by Giulio Tononi. The logical conclusions of his theory are outlandish or eye-opening, depending on your bias. I don't buy it myself but the there might be something in the approach. The most mathematically gifted individual with a theory is Roger Penrose. His scientific work is absolutely brilliant but his ideas about consciousness are quite frankly ridiculous and unmotivated. The best, most rigorous theory I know of comes from a Neuroscientist at Princeton named Michael Graziano. He put forth the "Attention Schema Theory". I strongly recommend his book "Rethinking Consciousness" which makes a case for it, and provides an overview of the other approaches and how they relate to his ideas. I've been very much swayed by Graziano's work, and we have the technology today to test his theory by integrating actively controlled attention mechanisms into machine learning models. If his ideas are correct, that could lead to models organically making similar claims to humans regarding phenomenological states. The theory is agnostic about whether the claims would be substantiated.
- naasking 4y ago
  To counter Chalmers, read Dennett and "Consciousness Explained", which is the basis of Graziano's work. Good to see another fan! I posted his latest review paper earlier in this thread.
orangkiwi 4y ago
"Conscious" by Annaka Harris sounds like a good overview, although I haven't read it yet so I'm not sure how rigorous it is.
captainkrtek 4y ago
“Altered States of Consciousness” by Marc Wittmann was an interesting read for me, give the description a read to see if it aligns with what you’re looking for. Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self (The MIT Press) https://a.co/d/ghPhlDW https://a.co/d/ghPhlDW
sambapa 4y ago
"The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger
naasking 4y ago
A somewhat unpopular but strictly pragmatic view on human non-specialness and what that means for consciousness is eliminative materialism, where the qualities we attribute to consciousness are actually illusory, like other sensory illusions. This puts it strictly within the bounds of known physics, no magic. This paper is a good, accessible overview of how this would work in neuroscience: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119

lamename 4y ago

Not quite "in a nutshell" but honestly the page + exploring references will get you far https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

ChaitanyaSai 4y ago

For the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below) Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Handbooks-Philosophy/dp/1138936219/ https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Hand...) is far more comprehensive and while being more academicky is still an excellent read. Unfortunately both miss what I think is easily the best and most computationally robust and fleshed out consciousness theory, but that's because it's so tragically unknown. I co-authored a book that covers this (while staying accessible) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-mind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-... So much of the stuff in the mathematical-this and physics-that of conscious experience is just crap because there is very little understanding of biological consciousness and what it is and where we can find it, and where we cannot. These start with assumptions of what consciousness is and then go on to mathematize these non-validated assumptions. (Integrated Information Theory) IIT is the most popular among these. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 -- this article captures well why IIT, and many like it, are bad models of consciousness.

conrod_ 4y ago
Thanks for the reply! I have to say, I am quite giddy. When I posted this question, I wasn't expecting to get a reply from an author and researcher on this very topic. I am a software engineer by profession, but this is a topic that has been on the back of my mind for many years. Even when I read popsci books about the universe and the big bang and so on, i felt spiritually unsatisfied because they often do not address this elephant in the room - consciousness. A theory of everything that explains the laws of universe will be imo incomplete if it doesn't also explain, at the fundamental level, the laws of the universe that exists behind our eyes. It really deserves more attention and awareness among geeks and the general public.
- b800h 4y ago
  You might be waiting a long time. Things like Tarski's Undefinability Theorem (moreso than Gödel) make it rather unlikely that this will turn out to be possible. But I agree with your assertion.
- techno_tsar 4y ago
  There has been a turn in consciousness research in the last in the decade towards some kind of panpsychism for precisely your sentiment: a completed physics should also be a completed phenomenology. David Chalmers has written extensively and seriously entertained panpsychism in recent years. Galileo’s Error, published in 2019, by Phillip Goff traces the history of the mind-body problem and illustrates how we divorced our consciousness from the physical world during the development of early modern science and philosophy. Last century, Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell argued in favour for neutral monism, a stance which holds that the mental and physical are two sides of the same coin. It seems like these ideas are coming back after a long stretch of dogmatic physicalism. Panpsychism gets a bad rep for sounding like it has associations with vacuous or flimsy New Age beliefs, but it means a totally different thing in the context of philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. It is the claim that consciousness might be a building block of the universe. The main problem with panpsychism is not that it is incredulous, but that it currently lacks a compelling explanation for our individual subjectivity. If consciousness and mental properties are ubiquitous in the universe, why do I have my consciousness and you have yours? The main motivation to believe in panpsychism seems to be its incredible elegance and self-consistency. That alone does not make it true, but it might be a very big hint on where to look for answers.

ethanwillis 4y ago

IMO. Intentionally seeking flawed understanding isn't a good way to live. I'd recommend just taking your time and reading progressively harder works.

epgui 4y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is the best attitude to adopt if your goal is learning.

didericis 4y ago

Depending on what exactly you mean by “the nature of consciousness”, it’s fundamentally impossible to answer. The fact that we think we can observe and comprehend a mechanism doing the observation does not preclude things we cannot see. You might be able to pan a cctv camera and get some insight about the camera itself if you find a reflection, but you can’t pan it over to the linux driver. It is not a given that all of the observer exists within the observable universe.

l33t233372 4y ago
This school of thought strikes me as fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of the scientific method. We try to find out about these black boxes through repeated observation, theorizing, and testing. It seems short sighted to suggest we can’t find out things about consciousness in a similar way.
- didericis 4y ago
  The scientific method is about paying strict and close attention to what we can observe. The black boxes we can make sense of must have enough datapoints within the observable universe to be understood. We can almost definitely learn a lot more about consciousness related phenomenon than we already know through science, and I don’t know the answer to OP’s question about the current cutting edge of that, but I think it’s always going to be about related phenomenon rather than consciousness itself. Unlike other phenomenon, which are only revealed to us because aspects of their existence appear in our observable universe, we don’t really “observe” the core experience of consciousness. The goalposts can be moved indefinitely whenever consciousness related phenomenon are made sense of. The fundamental experience is not observable, which means we can’t really see that black box at all. To me the mystery of that is much more satisfying than thinking we can ever get a definitive answer.
  - Nevermark 4y ago
    We observe everything indirectly. It is easy (and cognitively useful) to forget that, when the indirection is very reliable. As far as consciousness, we won’t just have to speculate based on our own consciousness. As artificial minds become highly self-aware (a functional ingredient of consciousness), we will be able to construct very controlled experiments. There will be endless numbers of experiments we will be able to do once we can edit self-aware entities and both externally query and internally monitor them.

jsuth 4y ago

Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore is exactly what you're looking for. Make sure you get the latest edition. https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Emily-Troscianko-Susan-Blackmore/dp/1138801313 https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Emily-Troscianko-Susan-... She has another book called Conversations on Consciousness that's basically transcribed interviews with prominent figures that's also worth checking out. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254499.Conversations_on_Consciousness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254499.Conversations_on_...

epgui 4y ago
I can't say how good this book is, but the author has a PhD in parapsychology. This makes me question how prone they are to magical thinking, and also whether I'd want to read what they have to say about this topic. Yes this comment is an ad hominem, and no I have not read the book... All I have is a skeptical hunch that this might not represent "the state of the art" on the topic.
- hanche 4y ago
  If you had read anything by Susan Blackmore (I have, but admittedly long ago), I think you’d find that she’s not at all into magical thinking.
  - epgui 4y ago
    That's certainly reassuring to hear!
- mellosouls 4y ago
  After an initial, intense, personal experience understandably awakened her interest she always approached the subject from a scientific point of view: From her wiki page: It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena—only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

epgui 4y ago

You're asking the wrong question by excluding cognition and using a very ill-defined word ("consciousness"). "Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, many of which are what we usually refer to as "cognition". People who like to talk about consciousness have a problem keeping the goalposts in place (and trying to exclude cognition from consciousness, presumably because "cognition" doesn't sound mysterious enough, is a great example of this sort of moving of goalposts). The truth is consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, and it can only be understood as such. Of course we have a lot more to learn, but we understand the fundamentals of neuroscience and biochemistry, and we know how our conscious experiences emerge from those. A neuroanatomy textbook (eg.: Blumenfeld) is probably the best place to start. There is unfortunately no single "thing" called "consciousness" that we will ever be able to point to.

Nevermark 4y ago
That view seems pessimistic without any strong argument, other than critiquing people for not yet understanding something we all agree we don’t understand yet. > Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, […] A collection of things is a thing. > The truth is consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, […] I don’t think that is controversial at all. We have unraveled the workings of many emergent phenomena. Emergent doesn’t mean incomprehensible.
- epgui 4y ago
  It's only a thing if you can define it, but there is no agreed upon definition of what collection of things comprise consciousness. We have all the pieces, and we know we have all the pieces (note: this doesn't mean we don't have a lot more to learn, both can be true). There is little controversy over how it all roughly works together. The only real controversy is semantics: what do we mean when we say "consciousness". In programmerland, one might say something like "the abstraction you're using is counter-productive", for whatever reason, when looking at some junior hire's code. It's very much the same here: trying to understand consciousness is asking the wrong question. It's like asking "Why is there a God?": it's an unproductive question because it's a question that can't be answered. The abstraction in the question simply doesn't map 1:1 to abstractions in the world in which we live. If we want to understand our world, we'll maximize our odds of success if we focus on studying the abstractions of this world. I wouldn't describe myself as a pessimist at all, and I'm not sure why you thought my comment was pessimistic... But this opinion of mine (because that's what it is, it's an opinion, not an argument) is a professional opinion. This isn't my field of expertise, but I do have expertise in very adjacent fields.

Helmut10001 4y ago

Cognition and consciousness are not easily separable. Some psychology and neuroscience publications that I found particularly good: Gibson (1950), Ittelson (1973), Kosslyn (2005), Northoff (2004) ("Mind–body problem"), Dewey, & Bentley (1949). Particularly the first and last should get you started. [1]: Gibson, J. J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Boston: Houghton Mifflin [2]: Ittelson, W.H. (1973). Environment and Cognition. Seminar Press, New York, NY, 187 pp [3]: Kosslyn, S. (2005). Mental images and the brain. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 333–347 [4]: Northoff, G. (2004). Philosophy of the brain: The brain problem. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. [5]: Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Boston: Beacon Press

mahathu 4y ago
Agree with [1] in particular and would definitely add Wilson (2002) to the list!:) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12613670/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12613670/

hackerlight 4y ago

"Philosophy of mind" is the discipline you're looking for. They're far off from a preliminary theory let alone a coherent definition of the word consciousness. It is not an easy problem.

Syntonicles 4y ago

A prominent figure in the space is David Chalmers, who made it his life's work to characterize and explore theories of consciousness. He's a philosopher in New York (originally Australia) He coined "The Hard Problem" and "The Meta Problem". You should get an overview in his books. They're a bit dated but it's not like there's been substantial progress. There's a recent book called "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" which purports to be what you are looking for. She's an author who is married to Sam Harris, a neuroscience PhD and public thinker who focused a lot of consciousness. His ideas permeate her thinking and I found her treatment to be less open minded. There's a series mirrored on YouTube called "Closer to Truth", where Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews famous physicists, mathematicians, etc. on this and other grand unsolved questions. You can find interviews with most of the analytical thinkers in the consciousness space if you wade through. The most "mathematically rigorous" theory is Integrated Information Theory by Giulio Tononi. The logical conclusions of his theory are outlandish or eye-opening, depending on your bias. I don't buy it myself but the there might be something in the approach. The most mathematically gifted individual with a theory is Roger Penrose. His scientific work is absolutely brilliant but his ideas about consciousness are quite frankly ridiculous and unmotivated. The best, most rigorous theory I know of comes from a Neuroscientist at Princeton named Michael Graziano. He put forth the "Attention Schema Theory". I strongly recommend his book "Rethinking Consciousness" which makes a case for it, and provides an overview of the other approaches and how they relate to his ideas. I've been very much swayed by Graziano's work, and we have the technology today to test his theory by integrating actively controlled attention mechanisms into machine learning models. If his ideas are correct, that could lead to models organically making similar claims to humans regarding phenomenological states. The theory is agnostic about whether the claims would be substantiated.

naasking 4y ago
To counter Chalmers, read Dennett and "Consciousness Explained", which is the basis of Graziano's work. Good to see another fan! I posted his latest review paper earlier in this thread.

orangkiwi 4y ago

"Conscious" by Annaka Harris sounds like a good overview, although I haven't read it yet so I'm not sure how rigorous it is.

captainkrtek 4y ago

“Altered States of Consciousness” by Marc Wittmann was an interesting read for me, give the description a read to see if it aligns with what you’re looking for. Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self (The MIT Press) https://a.co/d/ghPhlDW https://a.co/d/ghPhlDW

sambapa 4y ago

"The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger

naasking 4y ago

A somewhat unpopular but strictly pragmatic view on human non-specialness and what that means for consciousness is eliminative materialism, where the qualities we attribute to consciousness are actually illusory, like other sensory illusions. This puts it strictly within the bounds of known physics, no magic. This paper is a good, accessible overview of how this would work in neuroscience: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119