Overview

Have you ever looked up at the sky and wondered what it is you're seeing? On a clear day your gaze will be met with a glorious expanse of blue. But that blue isn't in the sky. And it isn't even in the light your eyes detected. It is in fact generated somewhere deep inside your brain. Yet amazingly, it still has a shape that closely resembles the image of the sky projected onto the retinas of your eyes - including the exact curvatures of the clouds and horizon line. This book explains how and why this subjective image is formed. It tells you what it is made of, what advantage it gave our ancestors, and how it came to have its perfect retinal-image-like form. And it does the same for all our other experiences too. In short, it offers a relatively complete solution to what Australian philosopher David Chalmers called the Hard Problem. Unlike other attempts at explaining consciousness, though, this one accounts for all the design-like features of our experiences as products of natural selection and the established laws of physics. It invokes none of the magical functionalism that other theories appear to require. It thus explains our amazing subjective images in exactly the way science suggests they ought to be explained. And astonishingly, it even indicates why we understand what they mean. The argument of this book is so compelling that anyone who wants to know the most justifiable view of reality, what part they play in the workings of a brain, or what's likely to happen to them after they die, is strongly encouraged to become familiar with it. There is something very refreshing about this book. It is free of the tired jargon of philosophy of mind. It sticks to a scientific agenda in a way that a lot of scientists would do well to emulate. Jonathan C. W. Edwards (Journal of Consciousness Studies)

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9781541283954

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Colin S. Morrison is a science graduate, writer and freelance philosopher who is an expert in consciousness studies. He gained his honours degree in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in the 1990s, and currently lives in the UK, where he teaches mathematics. He has studied the mind and the difficulties of explaining subjective experience for twenty years, presented at high-profile international conferences, and discussed his ideas with the world's leading philosophers. He is now confident he has found the only scientifically defensible solution to the mind-body problem. Unlike all previous theories of consciousness, his proposal - Position Selecting Interactionism - explains the image-forming capability of our experiences purely as a product of natural selection acting upon ordinary matter. It invokes no substances, forces or principles that are not implied by successful scientific theories. And most interestingly, it requires none of the strange functionalism to which other theories attribute the astonishing appropriateness in the way particular types of experience represent particular types of data (pain for damage, unpleasant emotions for detrimental circumstances, pleasant feelings for beneficial circumstances, and so on). But what really makes his theory stand out from all the rest is that it provides a full explanation of what experiences are. He never brushes them aside as 'illusions' or 'an issue that will disappear when we have fully understood how the brain works'. His theory explains exactly what they are and what they have evolved to do. It tells us precisely what role they play in the workings of the human brain. And it shows us how and why they acquired that role. He has previously published parts of this theory in abbreviated form in the Toward a Science of Consciousness program book for the years 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014, and in The Science of Consciousness 2016 program book, all published by the University of Arizona Centre for Consciousness Studies. However, the present work is ground-breaking as it is the first full-length account of this theory. It is the first publication that brings all the arguments that support it together in one place, and shows why this author believes it to be far superior to all the many other theories of consciousness that have to date been advocated in the philosophical literature.

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