John R. Searle is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Making the Social World. (October 2014)
The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality
by Luciano Floridi
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
by Nick Bostrom
We are all beneficiaries of the revolution in computation and information technology—for example, I write this review using devices unimaginable when I was an undergraduate—but there remain enormous philosophical confusions about the correct interpretation of the technology. For example, one routinely reads that in exactly the same sense in which …
Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
by Christof Koch
The problem of consciousness remains with us. What exactly is it and why is it still with us? The single most important question is: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause human and animal consciousness? Related problems are: How exactly is consciousness realized in the brain? That is, …
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
by Antonio Damasio
What exactly is consciousness? There are a number of senses of the word in ordinary speech, but there is one that is most important for philosophy and science: consciousness consists of qualitative, subjective states of feeling or sentience or awareness. These typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and they go on until we fall asleep again or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness. Consciousness, in short, is a matter of the qualitative experiences that we have. To understand qualitativeness, think of the difference between drinking beer, listening to music, and thinking about your income tax. Each experience has a distinct quality.