Rocco J. GennaroPart III is entitled “Major Topics in Consciousness Research.” The main criterion for selecting
most of the topics (especially in Parts II and III) was whether they are cutting-edge and “live,”
that is, whether innovative and provocative debate on the topic is underway in the research
community. Part III has by far the most chapters.
In general, it is always worth keeping in mind the two most common and opposing metaphysi-
cal positions on the nature of mind and consciousness: dualism and materialism. While there are
many versions of each, dualism generally holds that the conscious mind or a conscious mental
state is non-physical in some sense. On the other hand, materialists believe that the mind is the
brain, or, as “identity theorists” would put it, that conscious mental activity is identical with neural
activity. These views are critically discussed at length in Part I (especially in Chapters 3 and 4 by
Janet Levin and William S. Robinson). They include discussion of many different flavors of mate-
rialism and dualism, including identity theory, eliminative materialism, functionalism, substance
dualism, property dualism, and epiphenomenalism. Some form of materialism is probably more
widely held today than in centuries past. Perhaps part of the reason has to do with an increase in
scientific knowledge about the brain and its intimate connection with consciousness, including the
clear correlations between brain damage and various states of consciousness. Stimulation to very
specific areas of the brain results in very specific conscious experiences. Nonetheless, some major
difficulties remain such as the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers 1995), which
basically refers to the difficulty of explaining just how or why physical processes in the brain give
rise to subjective conscious experiences.
There are also a number of other anti-materialist metaphysical views discussed by William Seager
in Chapter 5, including panpsychism, idealism, and emergentism. The bigger picture and a more
historical overview is presented by Larry M. Jorgensen in Chapter 2. Part I also contains essays by
Amy Kind (Chapter 1) and Gregg D. Caruso (Chapter 6), which address such questions as: How is
consciousness related to one’s personal identity and the possibility of immortality? Is consciousness
necessary for free will and moral responsibility? In Chapter 7, Christian Coseru examines a range
of Indian philosophical conceptions of consciousness, including the naturalist theories of Nyāya, the
(largely phenomenalist) accounts of mental activity and consciousness of Abhidharma and Yogācāra
Buddhism, and the subjective transcendental theories of consciousness of Advaita Vedānta.
Part II (“Contemporary Theories of Consciousness”) contains chapters on many of the lead-
ing and currently active theories of consciousness. They address questions such as: What makes a
mental state a conscious mental state? Can conscious mental states be understood solely in terms
of representational states? Can consciousness be reduced to neurophysiology? Can conscious-
ness be understood as some kind of information integration? How closely related are con-
sciousness and attention? Are conscious states intimately connected with having sensorimotor
abilities? Can results in quantum physics shed light on the nature of consciousness?
To be more specific, in Chapter 8, Rocco J. Gennaro focuses his discussion on widely dis-
cussed “representational theories of consciousness,” such as the “higher-order thought (HOT)
theory of consciousness,” which attempt to reduce consciousness to “mental representations”
rather than directly to neural or other physical states. Various representational theories are criti-
cally discussed. In Chapter 9, Bernard J. Baars and Adam Alonzi explain and elaborate on Baars’s
very influential “Global Workspace Theory” (GWT) of consciousness (beginning with Baars
1988). According to Baars, we should think of the entire cognitive system as built on a “black-
board architecture,” which is a kind of global workspace (i.e. a functional hub of signal integra-
tion and propagation). Unconscious cognitions compete for the spotlight of attention from
which information is “broadcast globally” throughout the system. Consciousness consists in such
global broadcasting and functions as a dynamic and adaptable global workspace. Francis Fallon
(in Chapter 10) critically discusses the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) developed by the