Thinking about consciousness

Consciousness is widely regarded as an intractable mystery. Many scientists and philosophers view it as an enigma whose solution waits on some unforeseeable theoretical breakthrough. David Papineau argues that this pessimism is quite misplaced. Consciousness seems mysterious, not because of any hidden essence, but only because we humans think about it in a special way.This text analyzes this special mode of thought in detail, and exposes the ways in which it can lead us into confusions about consciousness. At the heart of the book lies a distinction between two ways of thinking about conscious states. We humans can think about conscious states materially, as normal items inhabiting the material world. But we can also think about them phenomenally, as items that feel a certain way. Dualists hold that this phenomenal mode of thought describes some special non-material reality. But David Papineau argues that it is invalid to move from a distinctive phenomenal mode of thought to a distinct non-material reality. Contents: The case for materialism; conceptual dualism; the impossibility of zombies; phenomenal concepts; the explanatory gap; the intuition of distinctness; prospects for the scientific study of phenomenal consciousness. Appendix - the history of the completeness of physics.