If a physical monism were adopted, say the critics, then we lose many aspects of consciousness. In this chapter I will address many of these as an attempt to show programmatically that physicalist accounts of mind can deal with the ordinary aspects of experience we all have. For more neurological and physiological philosophical approaches, Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1992) or Paul Churchland’s The engine of reason, the seat of the soul: a philosophical journey into the brain (1995) are good, although they concede the qualia problem somewhat (Dennett thinks we are mistaken about our richness of experience) and a good overview of the field can be found in Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (second edition 2017). What I’m trying to do here is philosophical alone. Whatever the physiology may be, the philosophical issues are not hostage to the advances in science as such.
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