Consciousness Resources

Broad Introductory Resources

These are resources that seem to provide good introductory descriptions of the breadth of issues around consciousness.

• Book: “Consciousness” by Annaka Harris. A short, readable introduction to the mystery of consciousness by a journalist who has been studying it passionately.
• Podcast episode: “Episode 25: David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation” on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast. A balanced, broad-ranging discussion between a very articulate physicist and one of the leading philosophers of mind.
• Essay: “Exploring Consciousness” by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. A fairly inclusive description of the main issues around consciousness studies, it includes significant pointers to videos and papers to allow deeper focused exploration. (See below for more from Kuhn.)
• Audio book: “Lights On” by Annaka Harris. Her journey to mostly concluding that consciousness is fundamental, it nevertheless covers a lot of ground.

Deeper Broad Resources

These are mostly sources of wide-ranging discussions and presentations that include a significant amount of materials on consciousness that can be found by searching. This allows continued exploration of specific topics of interest without necessarily having to cover everything.

Robert Kuhn’s Sites

Robert Lawrence Kuhn has spent his life researching consciousness and for the last several decades, producing materials to share that exploration. His work has become a good resource. His landscape work is helpful as a sort of index to the broad range of theories.

• Closer to Truth. A web site, YouTube channel, podcast, and three series on public television, the last still running. The web site has ways to search and access all the materials.
• Landscape of Consciousness. Related to Closer to Truth, the Landscape is an ongoing work to organize the myriad theories of consciousness and allow exploration of them in various ways. One page on this site is the essay mentioned above.
• “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications”: Kuhn’s original landscape paper, it still seems to be a nice resource for exploring the range of theories, if only just as a source of quick introductions. It’s static, though, so value may decline over time.

Podcasts

Some podcasts of a general nature have good collections of discussions on consciousness.

• Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. David is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, among many other things. This podcast covers many different aspects of the human brain and often include conversations with various researchers researchers.
• Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast. Sean is a professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University (in effect, a joint appointment between physics and philosophy) and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. In this podcast, Sean hosts conversations with many different thinkers, including leading consciousness researchers. It’s possible to search for “consciousness” on his site.
• Lex Fridman Podcast. Lex hosts longer, in-depth conversations on a wide range of topics. His site doesn’t include a search function, but does have a good list of episodes on a single page that can be searched by the browser.
• Institute of Art and Ideas. A large collection of interview, talks, debates, and other materials from a range of thinkers. I’ve not used it much, but it looks potentially interesting. It’s possible to search for “consciousness” on this site.

Online Encyclopedias of Philosophy

Because philosophy is an important part of consciousness explorations, philosophy resources are often helpful in understanding many of the topics. There are a couple online encyclopedias of philosophy that can be useful for targeted deep dives, in addition to providing some consciousness-specific articles.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work.” I’ve found this site to be helpful, and it has a good search facility.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource.” I’ve not used it much, but it looks potentially useful and gets referenced from time to time along with the Stanford site.

Focused Resources

These are resources that are generally very focused in their content. Although things like books may cover a broad number of topics in the field, they generally do so from a very specific, sometimes even dogmatic, viewpoint. Some of these items have been very influential in defining conversations about consciousness.

Books

These are books that are generally listed as being among the best, or most important, to learn about consciousness. Obviously, there are many others.

• “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory” by David Chalmers. The book-length treatment of the “hard problem” of conscious, which has become a concept that it seems everyone working in the field has to address, and how it points beyond materialism.
• “Consciousness Explained” by Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s account of “how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.” (Wikipedia) Dennett’s view of explicit physicalism.
• Being You: A New Science of Consciousness” by Anil Seth. “Anil Seth argues that consciousness is not a passive reflection of reality but an active, predictive process where the brain generates a “controlled hallucination” of the world and the self, constantly updating predictions based on sensory input.” (Google)
• “The Quest for Consciousness” by Christof Koch. A early book that lays out the idea of “neural correlates of consciousness”. Not sure about this book, but the idea is, like the “hard problem” one that pretty much everyone needs to wrestle with.
• Book: “Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction” by Susan Blackmore. A deeper, more detailed introduction from someone who has also written a full textbook on the subject. (I haven’t read this yet, but it looks helpful so far.)

Essays

Recommended from various places, some of these have come to define parts of the conversation.

• “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel. One of the canonical essays that provided what has been commonly adopted as the core topic defining consciousness.
• “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” by David Chalmers. An early presentation of consciousness as a “hard problem”, later leading to his book.
• “Epiphenomenal Qualia” by Frank Jackson. Presents the Knowledge Argument for qualia as a primary aspect of consciousness, and describes a famous thought experiment sometimes known as Mary’s Room.
• More coming…

Related Resources

Various materials that seem interesting but are borderline outside mainstream thinking – provocative explorations of non-human intelligences, examples of science fiction (and any other art I can find) that explore consciousness more deeply than just entertainment, Christian perspectives that explore alignment with science, podcasts that seem to include significant non-scientific content, and so on.

Michael Levin

Michael Levin’s research is on the fundamental nature of intelligence, and as such, focuses on non-human examples. This has given him some unique perspectives on how to define and recognize intelligence, its fundamental basis, and related topics like purpose, dualism, cognition, and indirectly, consciousness. He is a biology professor at Tufts University.

Octopus Minds

Octopus brains are constructed radically different from vertebrate brains. Yet they seem to be very intelligent, just not in the ways that we are familiar with. “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness” by Peter Godfrey-Smith, describes many fascinating aspects of them that may help us better understand minds in general.

Christian Viewpoints

Because I’m a Christian and the faith has a long history of deep engagement with science, there is some serious, science-based thinking about how consciousness relates to our understanding of reality. Included here as an example of science-informed religious thought, but not as the only such viewpoint.

• Podcast: Unbelievable? Hosted conversations between paired experts in particular topics related to Christianity. Interesting because they are discussions between two experts, generally including non-Christians, rather than interviews. Consciousness is a recurring topic. It’s possible to search for “consciousness” on this site. This can act as a pointer to other related resources.
• Blog: Kelvin’s Clouds. My own ponderings on various aspects of the relationship between Christianity and rational, scientific reasoning. It’s possible to search for “consciousness” on my site.
• Book: Am I Just My Brain by Sharon Dirckx. A Christian reflection of “the relationship between our brains and our minds”. Sharon’s background includes a PhD in brain imaging from the University of Cambridge, but she now works primarily as a Christian apologist.

Science Fiction

I’ve developed a list of science fiction stories, books, and movies that seem to explore matters related to consciousness, occasionally directly so. As I read through them, notes are added to describe, hopefully with few spoilers, what concepts or themes are explored.