The mystery of consciousness

The nature of consciousness is the subject of a great deal of discussion, in one form or another. In The Mystery of Consciousness contributes to this discussion by looking at the work of other writers on the subject. Many of these, such as Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, and Gerald Edelman have an essentially reductionist viewpoint, and Searle shows how this point of view seems unsatisfactory in that it seems to avoid the difficult questions. He also discusses the work of Roger Penrose, in particular arguing that there are serious flaws in Penrose's idea of a link between consciousness and Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Searle heaps scorn - justifiably in my opinion - on Chalmers parallelist (property dualist) ideas but in many ways Searle's own ideas suffer from similar problems. I can't help thinking that often Searle just wants a good arguement, rather than to clarify the situation. He says that the solution to the problem is to stop thinking in terms of the old categories, but I don't see that as a solution - if there is one then it must be possible to see how it fits in with such categories. So I have my doubts about whether Searle really takes the debate any further towards resolution, but I feel that the book is useful in presenting an overview with comments on the work of other writers.