The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness

Featuring many important updates and revisions, the highly–anticipated second edition of The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness offers a collection of readings that together represent the most thorough and comprehensive survey of the nature of consciousness available today. Chapters delve deeply into the wide variety of scientific and philosophical problems that arise from the study of consciousness as well as the philosophical, cognitive, neuroscientific, and phenomenological approaches to solving them.

Along with updates to existing scientific readings reflecting the latest research data, this edition features 18 entirely new theoretical, empirical, and methodological chapters covering such areas as integrated information theory, the resurgence in panpsychism, the renewed interest in more sophisticated first–person methodologies for the investigation of conscious phenomenology, and many others. Featuring contributions by leading experts in the study of consciousness, from across a variety of academic disciplines, the 54–chapter collection reasserts its role as the most thorough, authoritative, and up–to–date survey of the subject available today. Illuminating and thought–provoking, The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for those wishing to gain insights into the latest contemporary thinking on consciousness.

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Part I: The Problems of Consciousness

1. A Brief History of the Scientific Approach to the Study of Consciousness
Chris Frith and Geraint Rees

2. Philosophical Problems of Consciousness
Michael Tye

3. The Hard Problem of Consciousness
David Chalmers

Part II: The Origins and Distribution of Consciousness

4. Consciousness in Infants
Colwyn Trevarthen and Vasudevi Reddy

5. Animal Consciousness
Colin Allen & Michael Trestman

6. Rethinking the Evolution of Consciousness
Thomas Polger

7. Machine Consciousness
Igor Aleksander

8. Panpsychism
Philip Goff

Part III: Some Varieties of Conscious Experience

9. States of Consciousness: Waking, Sleeping and Dreaming
J. Allan Hobson

10. Affective Consciousness
Jaak Panksepp

11. Clinical Pathologies and Unusual Experiences
Richard P. Bentall

12. Altered States of Consciousness: Drug–Induced States
David E. Presti

13. Anomalous Experiences
Etzel Cardeña

14. Mindfulness
Peter Malinowski

15. Altered States: Mysticism
David Fontana

Part IV: Some Contemporary Theories of Consciousness

16. Global Workspace Theory of consciousness: Predictions and results
Bernard Baars

17. Information Integration Theory of Consciousness: An Outline
Giulio Tononi

18. The Intermediate level theory of Consciousness
Jesse Prinz

19. Representationalism about Consciousness
William Seager and David Bourget

20. Higher– order Theories of Consciousness
Peter Carruthers

21. Quantum Approaches to Brain and Mind: An Overview with Representative Examples
Harald Atmanspacher

22. Daniel Dennett on the nature of consciousness
Susan Schneider

23. Biological Naturalism
John Searle

24. Emergentism
Gerald Vision

25. Dualism, Reductionism, and Reflexive Monism
Max Velmans

26. Naturalistic dualism
David Chalmers

27. Physicalist Panpsychism
Galen Strawson

Part V: Some Major Topics in the Philosophy of Consciousness

28. Physicalism, anti– physicalist arguments and influential replies
Joe Levine

29. Physicalism and the knowledge argument
Torin Alter

30. Type Materialism for phenomenal consciousness
Brian P. McLaughlin

31. Functionalism and Qualia
Robert Van Gulick

32. The causal efficacy of consciousness
Jaegwon Kim

33. The neurophilosophy of consciousness
Pete Mandik, William Patterson

34. Self– consciousness
Jose Luis Bermudez

35. Philosophical Psychopathology and Self–Consciousness
G. Lynn Stephens and George Graham

36. Coming together: the unity of conscious experience
Barry Dainton

37. Consciousness and intentionality
George Graham, Terence Horgan, and John Tienson

Part VI: Major Topics in the Science of Consciousness

Topics in the Cognitive Psychology of Consciousness

38. Studying consciousness through inattentional blindness, change blindness, and the attentional blink
Michael A. Cohen & Marvin M. Chun

39. Conscious and Unconscious Perception
Sid Kouider and Nathan Faivre

40. Conscious and Unconscious Memory
John F. Kihlstrom, Jennifer Dorfman, and Lillian Park

41. Consciousness of Action
Marc Jeannerod

Topics in the Neuroscience of Consciousness

42. Methodologies for identifying the neural correlates of consciousness
Geraint Rees and Chris Frith

43. Conscious processing: Unity in time rather than in space
Wolf Singer

44. Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness: Some Ontological Considerations
Giulio Tononi

45. Split–Brain Cases
Mary K. Colvib, Nicole L. Marinsek, Michael B.Miller, and Michael S. Gazzaniga

46. Duplex Vision: Separate Cortical Pathways for Conscious Perception and the Control of Action
Melvyn A. Goodale

47. Altered States of Consciousness after Brain Injury
Johan Stender, Steven Laureys, and Olivia Gosseries

48. Anesthesia and Consciousness
John F. Kihlstrom, and Randall C. Cork

49. The Neuropsychology of Conscious Volition
Aaron Schurger

50. Phenomenological approaches to consciousness
Shaun Gallagher

51. Neurophenomenology and the elicitation interview
Michel Bitbol and Claire Petitmengin

52. Descriptive experience sampling
Russell T. Hurlburt

53. Experiential Neuroscience of pain
Donald D. Price

54. An Epistemology for the Study of Consciousness
Max Velmans

List of Web Resources

Index

Max Velmans is Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been involved in consciousness studies for over 40 years. He has over 100 publications on this topic including Understanding Consciousness (2000/2009) and Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness (2017). He is a co–founder and former Chair of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, and was responsible for the volume s scientific content. 

Susan Schneider is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, a faculty member in the technology and ethics group at Yale′s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her work is on the nature of the self and mind, which she examines through issues in philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence (A.I.), metaphysics, astrobiology, epistemology, and neuroscience. She is the author of The Language of Thought: a New Philosophical Direction (2011) and Science Fiction and Philosophy, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), and was responsible for the volume s philosophical content.