Bayne, T., Cleeremans, A., and Wilken, P.
(2009). The Oxford companion to consciousness.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hundreds of short entries by over 200 authors on
everything from access consciousness to zombies; pro-
vides an idea of the scope of consciousness studies.Chalmers, D. J. (1995b). The puzzle of conscious
experience. Scientific American, December, 62–68.The easiest version of Chalmers’s ‘hard problem’. For
more detail, read Chalmers, 1995a and 1996.Dennett, D. C. (1991). Explaining consciousness.
Consciousness explained (pp. 21–42). Boston, MA:
Little, Brown.The mystery of consciousness and the problems of
dualism.Gregory, R. L. (2004). The Oxford companion to the
mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Short entries on most authors and ideas presented
here, and a multi-authored section on consciousness.
Non-philosophers will find it helpful for looking up
philosophical concepts.In the late twentieth century, Freud’s unconscious was largely replaced by the idea
of a ‘cognitive unconscious’ (Kihlstrom, 1987) capable of subliminal perception and
many types of thinking, learning, and memory without awareness, and then by what
is sometimes called the ‘new unconscious’, which expands this notion to emphasise
emotions, motivation, and control (Hassin et al., 2005).
We will see later how difficult it is to think about the unconscious without
assuming a ‘magic difference’ between things that are ‘in’ or ‘out’ of conscious-
ness, things that have or have not ‘reached consciousness’ or been made
‘available to consciousness’. A wide range of evidence, which we will discuss
particularly in Chapters 4 and 8, suggests that we should reject any firm distinc-
tion of this kind, but ordinary intuitions about consciousness depend utterly
on such a distinction. This is a familiar situation, and just one more reason why
the problem of consciousness is so perplexing. The idea of the magic difference
will be one of the threads we will need to hold on to if we are to find our way
through the maze of theories and intuitions that promise to help us understand
consciousness.
READING