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	Consciousness


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Consciousness

In the last 20 years it has become respectable again for scientists to investigate consciousness. Many prominent researchers have proposed theories and performed empirical studies aimed explicitly at explaining the neural origins of subjective experience and awareness. However there has been no major review of these developments, which remain somewhat scattered (across disciplines such as psychology, physiology, AI and quantum physics - not to mention sociology, philosophy, and religion) and idiosyncratic (in that they stem from the specialised knowledge and ways of thinking of their proponents, who have developed their ideas largely in isolation from those made in other disciplines).

While attempting to teach a course on these new ideas about consciousness and whole-brain dynamics, it become clear that there was no textbook or other coherent source of ideas that I could recommend to my students. The only way forward was therefore to write my own review and textbook. Accordingly, one year I taped my lectures, had them transcribed, re-wrote the text to convert spoken to written English, and then found myself spending several more years re-organising and updating the material as further ideas in the field continually appeared.

Since the aim of my course was to integrate work at the multiple levels of biology, psychology and philosophy, compiling a concise textbook that would give due consideration and weight to all these entailed making some compromises, such as aiming it primarily at final year psychology students, assuming they have basic knowledge of brain biology as well as psychology - but not of philosophy, which therefore is introduced briefly in Part I of the book. Nevertheless, advanced students and researchers across many disciplines should find the central themes of the book accessible, since we have all had to acquire some understanding of these various levels as we try to grasp how they relate to one another to give us subjective experience.

David Rose
June 2007