my mind on books

I’m hoping to find lots of blog coverage of the 2008 Tucson conference “Toward a Science of Consciousness” that’s going on right now through Sunday, so I can participate vicariously. So far here’s what I’ve found:

Erik Davis on a pre-conference workshop on Julian Jaynes

Eric Schwitzgebel at the Splintered Mind discusses a workshop he led with Russ Hurlburt on inner experience

John Derbyshire reports from the conference

“HOT Implies PAM” presentation preview from Richard Brown

There’s been a lot of discussion on zombies recently at Overcoming Bias, starting with “Zombies! Zombies?”, followed by “Zombie responses” and “The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle.”

A recent book on the topic is Zombies and Consciousness by Robert Kirk (Oxford University Press, 2008)

from the book description:

By definition zombies would be physically and behaviourally just like us, but not conscious. This currently very influential idea is a threat to all forms of physicalism, and has led some philosophers to give up physicalism and become dualists. It has also beguiled many physicalists, who feel forced to defend increasingly convoluted explanations of why the conceivability of zombies is compatible with their impossibility. Robert Kirk argues that the zombie idea depends on an incoherent view of the nature of phenomenal consciousness.

David Chalmers’s “Zombies on the web” and bibliography of online papers on “Zombies and the conceivability argument”

Journal of Consciousness Studies: Symposium on Conversations with Zombies (v2 n4, 1995), “Sniffing the Camembert: on the conceivability of zombies” by Allin Cottrell (v6, n1, 1999)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on zombies

Wikipedia entry for “philosophical zombies”

• spiked review of books reviews ‘On Consciousness’ by Ted Honderich
• ‘Proust and the Squid’ reviewed at the Telegraph
• also at the Telegraph: ‘We-Think’
• New Metapsychology reviews this week include ‘Explaining the Brain’and ‘A Critique of Naturalistic Philosophies of Mind’

The Mind Science Foundation has put together a nice list of over 40 books in their “Consciousness Cyber Library”; plus they are compiling a “Consciousness Researchers Database.” If you’re in the San Antonio, Texas, area you can also take advantage of their speakers and events.

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Mind Hacks has a recent post on the book Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The Psychopathology of Common Sense by Giovanni Stanghellini (Oxford University Press, 2004), which takes a phenomenological approach to schizophrenia and manic-depressive or bipolar disorder.

Google Books page for Disembodied Spirits

The Mind Hacks post also mentions the book Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic, which I had just posted about yesterday (from an interested layperson’s perspective).