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“This is by Jean-Pierre Dupuy. It’s a French book that came out in English translation in 2000. I’ve chosen it because I think one of the main obstacles to developing a broadly materialist view of consciousness is that people get stuck in the metaphor of the brain as a computer. There is a tendency to equate the two, which in turn leads to the assumption that materialism is basically the same thing as having a functionalist perspective on the mind-brain relation: the brain is a computer, in which the wet stuff, the wetware, is the hardware, and the mindware is the software. Where does consciousness fit into this? Is it some specific kind of mindware running on the wetware of the brain? Can we therefore simulate consciousness? Thinking of the brain as a computer overly constrains the way we think about these questions about the scope of materialism in general, and about the way we interpret experimental data. The computer metaphor also leads to a neglect of the body and the environment, because computers work without a body and an environment. Unfortunately this metaphor, of the brain as a computer, has become very dominant, not just in consciousness research, but in cognitive science generally.” Read more...
Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness
Anil Seth, Scientist
