Abstract
Zombies, Bats, Cats and Chaos: Workshop on Mind Out of Matter
The question of how conscious experience can exist in a material universe is second only to that of why the cosmos exists in the first place. This book addresses the easier of the two, ultimately defending a view of the conscious subject -- the I -- as a materially instantiated structure of dynamically changing information and of phenomenal experience as 'what it is like to be' such a changing structure. In the course of exploring the physical foundations of the conscious subject and its cognitive processes, the book rejects mathematically naïve versions of representation and of function, replacing each with an objective and precise alternative; it engages the 'consciousness physicists' on their own territory, showing why considerations from within quantum mechanics itself render the most popular quantum theories of consciousness untenable; and it explores computational and information theoretic properties of neural networks. Finally, it offers some extended conceptual housekeeping on questions about zombies, mental states, supervenience, puzzles of perspective, and description complementarity.
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