Matter and Consciousness

Preface to the 2013 Edition

Preface to the 2013 Edition Since the original edition of this text appeared, the several sciences that bear on the philosophical issues surrounding the mind have continued to make gratifying progress, as was only to be expected. In addition, the philosophical literature has become enriched by a number of arresting thought experiments that try to move the debate forward—but, perhaps surprisingly, away from materialism, in one direction or another. For example, the inaccessibly alien subjective experience of Thomas Nagel’s bat, the residual phenomenal ignorance of Frank Jackson’s scientifically omniscient neuroscientist Mary, the missing inner life of David Chalmers’s otherwise humanlike zombies, and the absence of any real semantic content in the inner states of John Searle’s Chinese-speaking room have all become icons of philosophical resistance. They have all raised new doubts (or old doubts in a new form) about the prospects of comprehensive explanatory success for the research programs of computational artificial intelligence and cognitive neurobiology—that is, for the prospects of a purely physicalist account of all mental phenomena. Even so, the computational and cognitive sciences continue to make relentless and illuminating progress in accounting for diverse cognitive phenomena , as this new edition will also try to highlight. viii Preface to the 2013 Edition In sum, the intellectual situation is now even more engaging and taut with controversy than it was thirty years ago, when the issues compelled me to write the first edition of this text. My hope is that this new and relevantly augmented edition will allow both teachers and students to delve yet a few layers more deeply into the philosophical and scientific issues that shape our current understanding of the Mind and its place in Nature. I commend their evaluation to your own native intelligence, whatever its ultimate nature—physical or nonphysical. ...