Chapter 23 Further Reading: Philosophy of Mind
Primary Sources — Start Here
These are the papers and works that made the arguments we examined in this chapter. Most are relatively short and accessible; several are freely available online.
David Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (1995) Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219
The paper that introduced the "hard problem" distinction to mainstream philosophy. Chalmers clearly articulates the difference between the cognitive/functional questions about consciousness (the "easy problems") and the question of why physical processing gives rise to subjective experience at all. This paper is remarkably clear for a foundational philosophy paper and is accessible to careful readers without a philosophy background. Freely available on Chalmers' website at consc.net.
Start here if you are new to the hard problem. Read it carefully, then read Daniel Dennett's response for the strongest counterargument.
Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450
Perhaps the most widely read paper in philosophy of mind. Nagel argues that consciousness has an essentially subjective character — an "interior" — that cannot be captured by objective, third-person description, however complete. The bat serves as a vivid illustration: we can know every physical and functional fact about bat echolocation without knowing what it is like to echolocate. Short (about 14 pages), elegant, and profound.
Pair with Chalmers' 1995 paper. Together they make the case for consciousness as a genuine problem that exceeds functional explanation.
John Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (1980) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–424
The original Chinese Room paper. The argument is presented with great clarity, and the journal's format includes responses from many leading philosophers and cognitive scientists, followed by Searle's replies. Reading the original paper plus several responses gives you the best introduction to the debate. Available through JSTOR and many university libraries; also widely excerpted online.
Pay particular attention to the "systems reply" and Searle's response. This is where the argument is most contested.
Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) Philosophical Quarterly, 32(127), 127–136
The original Mary's Room paper, along with an associated paper "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986) that offers Jackson's further clarifications. The knowledge argument is presented carefully and with philosophical rigor. Note: Jackson later changed his mind and came to accept a physicalist interpretation of the thought experiment — his subsequent papers explain why, and are interesting to read alongside the original.
Read this after Nagel and Chalmers. It provides a different, complementary line of argument for the irreducibility of phenomenal consciousness.
Secondary Sources — For Deeper Engagement
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991) Little, Brown
The most influential physicalist response to the hard problem — written before Chalmers coined that phrase, but directly addressing the same issues. Dennett argues that our intuitions about consciousness are systematically misleading; there is no "Cartesian theater" where experiences parade before an inner witness; consciousness is, at bottom, "fame in the brain" — certain representations winning out for influence over behavior. Dennett's prose is vivid and occasionally polemical. Many philosophers disagree with his conclusions while finding his challenges to naive intuitions valuable.
Warning: Dennett denies that there is a hard problem at all. Reading him alongside Chalmers or Nagel is more illuminating than reading either alone.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part I: "The Body" (1945; English translation by Colin Smith, 1962; newer translation by Donald Landes, 2012)
Merleau-Ponty's masterwork. Part I, "The Body," is the most directly accessible entry point and contains his core arguments about the body schema, motor intentionality, and the irreducibility of embodied cognition to either objective description or Cartesian inner experience. The writing is dense but rewards careful reading. The 2012 Landes translation is clearer than the older Smith translation.
Read at least the Introduction and Part I, Chapters 1–3. This provides the phenomenological counterweight to purely cognitive or functional accounts of mind.
Popular and Accessible Works — Excellent Entry Points
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (2000) Harcourt
A neuroscientist's account of how consciousness emerges from the interplay of body and brain. Damasio argues that the body — not just the brain — is essential to consciousness, and that emotions are not merely "add-ons" to rational cognition but fundamental to the capacity for reasoning, attention, and decision-making. His case studies of patients with lesions to specific brain regions are illuminating. This is philosophy of mind written from empirical neuroscience — a productive perspective that complements the more purely philosophical accounts.
Accessible to readers without neuroscience background. Particularly relevant to those interested in the embodiment themes from Merleau-Ponty.
Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021) Dutton
The most current and science-informed popular account of consciousness research. Seth, a neuroscientist at Sussex, argues that consciousness is a form of "controlled hallucination" — the brain's active, predictive construction of a model of reality and of the self. He engages directly with the hard problem, offers the "real problem" as an empirically tractable reformulation, and surveys current neuroscience of consciousness including predictive processing, disorders of consciousness, and the self. Clear, engaging, and intellectually serious.
The best single popular science book on consciousness for someone who wants current neuroscience alongside the philosophy.
Philip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Mind (2019) Pantheon
A contemporary philosopher's accessible defense of panpsychism — the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality present in some degree in all physical systems. Goff argues that Galileo, in founding modern science, made a decision to exclude all subjective qualities from physical description — and that this "Galileo's error" set the stage for the hard problem. His positive proposal (panpsychism / cosmopsychism) is controversial but has become increasingly serious in mainstream philosophy. Accessible and thought-provoking.
Read if you are intrigued by the possibility that the hard problem's solution requires a more radical revision of our picture of nature than most physicalists allow.
On Personal Identity and Mind
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Part III: "Personal Identity" (1984) Oxford University Press
Parfit's treatment of personal identity through thought experiments involving fission, teleportation, and gradual psychological change is among the most influential in twentieth-century philosophy. He argues that personal identity is not what matters in survival — what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can hold to greater or lesser degrees and need not involve a fact of the matter about identity. His arguments are directly relevant to cases like the Upload thought experiment in the exercises.
Demanding but rewarding. Read Part III alone if the whole book is too much.
On AI and Consciousness
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, Chapter 3: "Forms of Superintelligence" (2014) Oxford University Press
Though primarily about AI safety, Bostrom's analysis of substrate-independent and whole-brain-emulation paths to artificial intelligence engages directly with questions about whether digital systems could be conscious and what moral status they might have.
Stuart Russell, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, Chapter 5 (2019) Viking
Russell, one of the world's leading AI researchers, takes seriously the question of machine values and moral status in a way that intersects with philosophy of mind. Accessible to non-technical readers.
An Online Resource
David Chalmers' website: consc.net
Contains a comprehensive, freely accessible archive of Chalmers' papers on consciousness, including "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," his papers on the zombie argument and qualia, and extensive resources on philosophy of mind. Also includes a large annotated bibliography.
An extraordinary resource for anyone who wants to pursue philosophy of mind seriously beyond this textbook.