Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates

by Stuart R. Hameroff (Editor), Alfred W. Kaszniak (Editor), David J. Chalmers (Editor)

Can there be a science of consciousness? This issue has been the focus of three landmark conferences sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The first two conferences and books have become touchstones for the field. This volume presents a selection of invited papers from the third conference. It showcases recent progress in this maturing field by researchers from philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, phenomenology, and physics. It is divided into nine sections: the explanatory gap, color, neural correlates of consciousness, vision, emotion, the evolution and function of consciousness, physical reality, the timing of conscious experience, and phenomenology. Each section is preceded by an overview and commentary by the editors.

Contributors
Dick J. Bierman, Jeffrey Burgdorf, A. Graham Cairns-Smith, William H. Calvin, Christian de Quincey, Frank H. Durgin, Vittorio Gallese, Elizabeth L. Glisky, Melvyn A. Goodale, Richard L. Gregory, Scott Hagan, C. Larry Hardin, C. A. Heywood, Masayuki Hirafuji, Nicholas Humphrey, Harry T. Hunt, Piet Hut, Alfred W. Kaszniak, Robert W. Kentridge, Stanley A. Klein, Charles D. Laughlin, Joseph Levine, Lianggang Lou, Shimon Malin, A. David Milner, Steven Mithen, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Stephen Palmer, Jaak Panksepp, Dean Radin, Steven Z. Rapcsak, Sheryl L. Reminger, Antti Revonsuo, Gregg H. Rosenberg, Yves Rossetti, Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Jonathan Shear, Galen Strawson, Robert Van Gulick, Frances Vaughan, Franz X. Vollenweider, B. Alan Wallace, Douglas F. Watt, Larry Weiskrantz, Fred A. Wolf, Kunio Yasue, Arthur Zajonc

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science

200 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 1999

About the author

Dr. Stuart R. Hameroff, M.D. (Hahnemann Medical College, 1973?; B.S., Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh), is Emeritus Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology and director for the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. He is also the lead organizer of the Science of Consciousness conference and, with Sir Roger Penrose, formulated the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) model of consciousness.

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE THIRD CONFERENCE ATTEMPT TO ADDRESS THE "HARD PROBLEM" OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The Preface to this 1999 collection states, "As a new millennium beckons... questions have emerged from a long darkness that dominated psychology for much of the last century. This international and interdisciplinary introspection has stemmed in part... from a sense that now is the time for the science of the mind to address its central and most difficult problem. The most burning issue is that of whether conscious experience... can be accommodated within present-day science... three interdisciplinary and international Tucson conferences ['Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates' and 'Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates'] have been held in 1994, 1996, and 1998... The conferences have been integrative, attempting to assimilate and synthesize a variety of approaches toward understanding the conscious mind..." (Pg. ixx-xx)

David Chalmers [author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory] says in his Introduction, "It is natural to hope that an explanation of consciousness might be a physical explanation... But some have argued that any purely physical explanation of consciousness will be incomplete. Neurophysiology will very likely yield a systematic correlation between states of the brain and states of consciousness, but will this correlation be a complete explanation? ... Given any physical account, one can ask why THAT process should yield consciousness: and many have suggested that a physical theory alone cannot answer this question." (Pg. 1)

One essayist says, "Would even a complete and adequate physics tell us all the general facts about the stuff the world is made of?... I am going to argue that the answer is 'no.' ... the missing facts are like the kinds of facts we can use to cross the explanatory gap... The gap arises because the experiential face of consciousness involves facts that seem to go beyond just facts about what it does... So even after our physical theories explain what consciousness does, there are further questions about its nature that we need to ask and answer. There are the 'hard problem' questions..." (Pg. 33-34)

Another suggests, "Will the preferred future explanations of sensory qualities take the form only of correlations among the behavioral, phenomenal, and neural domains, or will they involve a proper reduction of phenomenology to neural mechanisms? We are simply too ignorant of the relevant facts to answer these questions now... We must go much further in solving the 'easy' problems of consciousness before we can clearly understand just what the 'hard' problem consists in, or whether there really is a 'hard' problem at all. And anyway, aren't the 'easy' problems hard enough?" (Pg. 72)

Co-editor Stuart Hameroff asks, "How did consciousness evolve?... either it was selected for as an adaptive feature, or it emerged as the byproduct of other adaptive features... But this raises some serious questions. What is the function of consciousness?... Some have argued that any function that consciousness might perform could in principle be performed without consciousness. If this were so, it would be unclear why consciousness should ever evolve. So the search for the function of consciousness is crucial to understanding the evolution of the mind." (Pg. 245)

This volume, and even more the two previous volumes, are of great interest to anyone studying the philosophy of mind, or the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness.