Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Abstract

1. 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.
2. 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.