Volume 42, Number 17 · November 2, 1995
The Mystery of Consciousness
By John R. Searle
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
by Francis Crick
Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 317 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Consciousness Explained
by Daniel C. Dennett
Back Bay/Little, Brown, 511 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness
by Gerald Edelman
BasicBooks, 384 pp., $35.00
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind
by Gerald Edelman
BasicBooks, 304 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness
by Roger Penrose
Oxford University Press, 457 pp., $25.00
The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness
by Israel Rosenfield
Vintage, 157 pp., $10.00 (paper)
The most important problem in the biological sciences is one that until quite recently many scientists did not regard as a suitable subject for scientific investigation at all. It is this: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness? The enormous variety of stimuli that affect us—for example, when we taste wine, look at the sky, smell a rose, listen to a concert—trigger sequences of neuro-biological processes that eventually cause unified, well-ordered, coherent, inner, subjective states of awareness or sentience. Now what exactly happens between the assault of the stimuli on our receptors and the experience of consciousness, and how exactly do the intermediate processes cause the conscious states?
Review, 10017 words
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