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Books

The Conscious Brain by Jesse J. Prinz

Sam Clarke ponders The Conscious Brain.

Consciousness is hard to understand. It is difficult to see how any physical mechanism, no matter how complex it might be, could give rise to conscious experience. And yet the brain (which is, after all, just a bag of gooey mechanisms) somehow manages to achieve this. This emergence of consciousness should strike the contemporary cognitive scientist as completely incredible. Although it is within the realms of current understanding to explain, for example, how a machine could discriminate between red and green, explaining whether a machine could experience the quality of redness or greenness as we do is not at all clear to anyone.

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