Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780195173086)

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.

Author: Joseph Levine
ISBN-10: 0195173082
ISBN-13: 9780195173086
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 01/08/2004
Pages: 216
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.76lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.22w x 0.63d