The Consciousness Hype: What Do We Want Explained?

Abstract

The great flood of books on consciousness shows no sign of receding: 'the scientific race for consciousness is on'. If the flood is a race, a journalist observes, 'it is an unconventional one in which neither the starting line nor the finish have been agreed on. The arguments are not only over answers to questions, they are over what the questions should be, and what the terms of discussion mean.... Disagreements are dismayingly large, and on occasion blunt beyond the normal bounds of scientific discourse' (Gorman, 1997, pp. B7, B9). A dozen or so books on consciousness, which are reviewed in this essay, left me not only similarly impressed, but also quite puzzled. What is it that we wish to have explained about consciousness? Does it exist as stuff? Should scientific explanations of consciousness have anything to say about Timothy McVeigh, Nelson Mandela, a cheating banker, Mother Theresa, and so on-about the variety of human experience in short? In this critical review, such questions are addressed via an analysis of the current trends and progress in the science of consciousness and the science's principles of theory building.