Author’s Abstract- This book was published with Oxford University Press in April 1996. It started life as my Ph. D. dissertation at Indiana University (1993), and was revised into a book by adding some new chapters, tightening up the arguments, and making it more accessible. A paperback edition has just been published.
- The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible (alas!), and that if one takes consciousness seriously, one has to go beyond a strict materialist framework. In the second half of the book, I move toward a positive theory of consciousness with fundamental laws linking the physical and the experiential in a systematic way. Finally, I use the ideas and arguments developed earlier to defend a form of strong artificial intelligence1 and to analyze some problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics2.
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