The question of consciousness has kept philosophers awake for centuries, and this is just the latest in a publication boom on the subject in the last 20 years. Culled from the Journal of Consciousness Studies, it's a series of essays which, despite the calibre of some contributors (Francis Crick, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, etc) makes for a very dry and unrewarding read.
Its greatest problem is that the essays are restricted to tangling with a "keynote" paper by David Chalmers, a philosopher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Chalmers argues against the reduction of consciousness to the "materialistic mechanical" constructs of brain chemistry, loftily dismissing neurology as solving the "easy" problems, the "ordinary science" of mapping mental functions on to brain circuitry. The hard problem, he and his apologists insist, is to provide a naturalistic account of conscious subjective experience. Limply appealing to information theory and observer paradoxes of quantum physics, Chalmer urges a "paradigmatic shift" in taking consciousness as a fundamental property in itself. It's a catchy, if rather vitalist notion, but wading through Chalmer's attempts to define the "something it is like to be a conscious organism", one becomes very sceptical of "dancing qualia" (units of consciousness); the claim that consciousness does not emerge from neurological processes, but somehow co-exists alongside them; let alone the question of whether consciousness can accompany "informationally differentiated systems" like a thermostat.
There are strong echoes of panpsychism - the assertion that consciousness somehow pervades the universe (derided by William James as the "mind-dust hypothesis") - but vindication is swift. Some early essays refreshingly pummel Chalmers onto the ropes - including one by Dennett, the celebrity on the subject.
However, the rest of the book fails to deliver. Although cognitive psychologists, an astrophysicist, a quantum physicist and even a neurologist contribute, they are hidebound by Chalmer's speculations. The rest ramble around the philosophical implications of mental representations, Cartesian homuniculi, free choice, Humean scepticism, and musty references to papers not reproduced.
Considering the subject, there is an infuriating lack of science to many of the "thought experiments" here. Editor Jonathan Shear has produced a book with extraordinary limitations. There is not index, nor anything to identify the authors' core disciplines. At the end of the day, consciousness remains "the zerological subject", as Umberto Eco once characterised it.