Consciousness

Last Update: 12 February 2012

Note: or material is highlighted

General:
1. OED etymology and definitions of "conscious"
2. OED etymology and definitions of "consciousness"
3. Chalmers, David (compiler) (downloaded 2007), "Online Papers on Consciousness"
4. Davies, Martin (2003), "Consciousness", MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.
5. Koch, Christof; & Crick, Franciso (2003), "Consciousness, Neurobiology of" MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.
  - If you have trouble accessing MITECS by clicking on the links above, then do the following:
    1. link to the UB Libraries
    2. using the BISON catalog, select "Title begins with" from the drop-down menu, and then enter the title:
      and click on "GO" or hit return/enter
    3. this should take you to a list of books; the first item on the list is MITECS; click on that link
    4. that should take you to a list of both versions of MITECS; the first is the online version; click on that link
    5. that, in turn, should take you to the catalog entry that lists
      You would think that that would be a link, but it is merely a URL; open a new browser page and enter that URL.
      Or: Immediately to the left of that URL is an icon; that one is a link; click on it.
    6. With luck, you will be taken to MITECS, where you can click on the boldface title near the bottom the page, which, in turn, will take you to the table of contents.
    7. Whew!
6. Blackmore, Susan (2005), Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
7. Van Gulick, Robert (2007), "Consciousness", in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition).
8. University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies
Books (in chronological order):
1. Dennett, Daniel C. (1991), Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown).
2. Searle, John (1992), The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
3. Chalmers, David (1996), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press).
  - For a good (critical) summary of Chalmers's views, see:
    Dietrich, Eric (1998), "It Only Seems as if Zombies Are Logically Possible, or How Consciousness Hides the Truth of Materialism: A Critical Review of The Conscious Mind", Minds and Machines 8: 441-461.
  - For a good summary of the issues surrounding consciousness, see the first 13 paragraphs of §1 of this review of Chalmers's book:
    Searle, John R. (1997), "Consciousness & the Philosophers", New York Review of Books 44(4) (March 6).
4. Flanagan, Owen J.; Block, Ned Joel; & Güzeldere, Güven (eds.) (1997), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
5. Tye, Michael (1997), Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
  - Tye got his Ph.D. in philosophy from UB!
Articles (in chronological order):
1. Place, U.T. (1956), "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?", British Journal of Psychology 47: 44-50.
  - Reprinted in:
    Cummins, Robert; & Cummins, Denise Dellarosa (eds.) (2000), Minds, Brains, and Computers: The Foundations of Cognitive Science, an Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell): 361-366.
  - See also: Place, U.T., "Identity Theories", in Marco Nani & Massimo Marraffa (eds.), "A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind"
2. Smart, J.J.C. (1959), "Sensations and Brain Processes", Philosophical Review 68(2): 141-156.
  On Place's and Smart's identity theory, which claims that minds = brains in the same way that clounds = water molecules in suspension:
3. Nagel, Thomas (1974), "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Philosophical Review 83(4) (October): 435-450.
4. Block, Ned (1978), "Troubles with Functionalism", in C. Wade Savage (ed.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol.9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press): 261-325.
5. Jackson, Frank (1982), "Epiphenomenal Qualia", Philosophical Quarterly 32(127) (April): 127-136.
  1. Jackson, Frank (1986), "What Mary Didn't Know", Journal of Philosophy 83(5) (May): 291-295.
  2. Lodge, David (2001), Thinks... (New York: Viking), Ch.16 (pp.154-165).
    - This is a novel about a cognitive scientist at a British university. Ch.16 contains short stories "written by" creative-writing students (characters in the novel) at the university imagining what would happen when Jackson's Mary first sees the color red.
6. Johnson-Laird, Philip N. (1983), "A Computational Analysis of Consciousness", Cognition and Brain Theory 6(4): 499-508.
  - Revised as Ch. 16 of:
    Marcel, A.J.; & Bisiach, E. (eds.) (1988), Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 357-368.
7. Levine, Joseph (1983), "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 354-361.
8. Rosenthal, David M. (1986), "Two Concepts of Consciousness", Philosophical Studies 94: 329-359.
  - Rosenthal claims that consciousness is what might be called "meta-thought": thoughts about thoughts, on which, see the following "Zits" cartoon:
9. Dennett, Daniel C. (1988), "Quining Qualia", in A. Marcel & E. Bisiach (eds.), Consciousness in Modern Science (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press).
10. McGinn, Colin (1989), "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", Mind 98(391) (July): 349-366.
  - A commentary on McGinn's "mysterianism":
11. Block, Ned (1995), "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18: 227-287.
12. Morbini, Fabrizio; & Schubert, Lenhart K. (2005), "Conscious Agents" Technical Report 879 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Department of Computer Science).
13. Koch, Christof; & Greenfield, Susan (2007), "How Does Consciousness Happen?", Scientific American (October): 76-83.
  - To get a username and password, contact Bill Rapaport.
14. Koch, Christof (2008- ), "Consciousness Redux" (monthly column), Scientific American Mind, starting in issue 19(5) (October/November 2008)
On Mirror Neurons:
1. Rizzolatti, Giacomo; & Arbib, Michael A. Arbib (1998), "Language within Our Grasp", Trends in Neuroscience 21(5) (1 May): 188-194.
2. Rizzolatti, Giacomo; & Craighero, Laila (2004), "The Mirror-Neuron System", Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (July): 169-192.
On Unconsciousness
- Click on the link above to go to a list of readings on unconscious cognition.
- Martinez-Conde, Susana (2008), "Subconscious Sight", Scientific American Mind 19(2; April-May): 48-53.

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