Description

Conscious experience presents a deep puzzle. On the one hand, a fairly robust materialism must be true in order to explain how it is that conscious events causally interact with non-conscious, physical events. On the other hand, we cannot explain how physical phenomena give rise to conscious experience.
In this wide-ranging study, Joseph Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on the "explanatory gap," the fact that we can't explain the nature of phenomenal experience in terms of its physical realization. He presents a careful argument that there is such a gap, and, after providing intriguing analyses of virtually all existing theories of consciousness, shows that recent attempts to close it fall short of the mark. Levine concludes that in the foreseeable future consciousness will remain a mystery.

Reviews

"...a very rich work. It contains, as preliminaries, a nice contribution to the irritatingly nontrivial problem of characterizing materialism, a useful discussion of mental causation, and a critique of David Chalmers' well-known conceivability argument for mind-body dualism." -- Inquiry

"Purple Haze is a thought provoking, well-written and honest book. ...I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the problem of consciousness."--Metapsychology Online Review

"The American philosopher Joseph Levine explores the 'explanatory gap' between physical sciences and consciousness: conscious phenomena cannot be explained in terms of material phenomena. Levine surveys a number of modern theories of consciousness and finds them inconclusive. In Levine's opinion, that gap will not be filled any time soon." -- Piero Scaruffi, Thymos.com

Product Details

216 pages; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-517308-6ISBN10: 0-19-517308-2

About the Author(s)