Irreducibly Conscious: Selected Papers on Consciousness

In the commotion surrounding the expanding field of consciousness studies, a few voices are drowning out the rest. In the opinion of the authors collected here, the field of consciousness studies has been overly influenced by efforts to reduce consciousness to a physical phenomenon, manifested by either the brain or the behaviour of the organism. Yet numerous scientists and philosophers have been arguing that consciousness is more than a physical process. In addition to the physical aspect of consciousness, the phenomenal or experiential aspect of consciousness needs further examination. This book consists of twenty articles that do just that. It stands out from the vast literature on consciousness by uniting in one volume non-reductionist essays on consciousness by a cast of distinguished and international researchers in fields as diverse as physics, philosophy, and cognitive science. In addition to showing the limits of the reductionist approach, the essays in this book shed new light on the study of consciousness by putting forward new sources and hitherto unexamined paths of research.