Why Are We Conscious at All? | The Hard Problem for Sleep
On Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers & 2 more
The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Portrait: Daniel Dennett in Moscow, 2012. Dmitry Rozhkov, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped, via Wikimedia Commons.
Daniel Dennett was an American philosopher who spent his career arguing that the mind is something science can explain. In Consciousness Explained he described consciousness as a kind of user illusion the brain builds for itself, and in Darwin's Dangerous Idea he called natural selection a universal acid that eats through every traditional idea it touches.
1 episode 8 books
On Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers & 2 more
The Hard Problem of Consciousness

by Daniel Dennett
Dennett's provocative argument that consciousness is not what we think it is, and that the hard problem is a conceptual confusion rather than a genuine mystery.
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by Roger Penrose
A physicist's argument that consciousness involves non-computable quantum processes, challenging the assumption that artificial intelligence could ever be truly conscious.
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by Christof Koch
A neuroscientist's account of Integrated Information Theory, the most ambitious scientific attempt to measure consciousness mathematically.
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by Susan Blackmore
The standard textbook on consciousness studies, covering philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology in an accessible survey.
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by Antonio Damasio
Damasio's groundbreaking work on how the body and emotions are inseparable from consciousness and the sense of self.
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by David Chalmers
The book that defined the hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers argues that no purely physical explanation can account for subjective experience.
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by Annaka Harris
A short, lucid introduction to the mystery of consciousness that makes the philosophical puzzles accessible to any reader.
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by Philip Goff
A clear and accessible case for panpsychism: the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, present even in the simplest forms of matter.
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1788–1860

born 1953

1596–1650

1890–1937

1830–1886

1928–2017