Abstract

You know that you are conscious, but what exactly does that mean, and how could it possibly work? We have machines that can do amazing information processing, but what kind of stuff, or what kind of system, could we say is really conscious? How surprising is it that our own brains are conscious? Biting the Bullet of Consciousness looks at some of the proposals on offer, and comes down on the side of panpsychism, the apparently wacky belief that consciousness, or something like it, must exist way, way down in the basic building blocks of physics. Come on in, the water's fine. Along the way, we'll cover some old ground in new ways, including free will and the self, reference and meaning, and with luck, end up with a sense that there is a way forward in our thinking about minds: if not a paradigm shift exactly, maybe a paradigm scooch.