Mind & Consciousness

One of the things that has always fascinated me, is how consciousness works. I am not talking about the manifestations in human behaviour and the thoughts and motivations and emotions of those humans that psychologists and psychiatrists study. I am talking about the “Hard Problem” of the philosophy of mind and consciousness researchers; how does the sum of all the neurophysiological activity in my brain translate into subjective “I” experiences, whatever that might be.

Ever since I became interested in Eastern Pilosophy at Stellenbosch University and started dabbling in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the different meditative traditions, I have wanted to know how it really works. Of course, no one really knows for sure, not even the most learned of modern scholars, and philosophers and hard-core reductionists alike all struggle to reach a consensus, if ever a consensus will be reached.

I have done my own reading and research on the matter, and though I would never claim to understand most of it, I find it fascinating to see what the experts in the field come up with.

One of the experts whose work I (mostly) follow is David Chalmers.

His blog is full of interesting links to even more resources on consciousness and philosophy of mind online.

MindPapers - A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness

Introduction

This is a bibliography of work in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of cognitive science, and the science of consciousness. It consists of 18416 entries, and is divided into 8 parts, each of which is further divided by topic and subtopic. Both online and offline material is included, with links wherever possible.

Go to MindPapers - A Bibliography of The Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness

History

MindPapers started life as an annotated bibliography in the philosophy of mind when I (David Chalmers) was a graduate student at Indiana. The first public version was a 645-entry version circulated by e-mail and ftp in November 1990. In 1994 I made the transition to the web (here’s a 1997 web version courtesy of the Internet Archive). In ensuing years, the bibliography followed me from Washington University to UC Santa Cruz to Arizona to ANU. In 2005, David Bourget (then at Toronto) added a search facility and links to the bibliography, along with other functions such as proxy browsing. In 2007, thanks to further work by Bourget (now a Ph.D. student at ANU), the system was overhauled, doubled in size, and relaunched as MindPapers.

In the early years, I entered all entries by hand, and annotated all the entries after I had read them. (Note that I don’t take much responsibility for these annotations by a past self.) After the mid-1990s, things became too busy for me to annotate entries further, but I updated the bibliography every couple of years. From 1999-2005, a number of research assistants at Arizona helped to update the bibliography regularly: Steve Biggs, Chris Evans, Farid Masrour, and Brad Thompson. The current version uses a number of automated importing tools (devised by David Bourget) to generate potential entries, but I still select and classify the entries myself.

The initial version of the bibliography had four parts, roughly corresponding to consciousness, mental content, philosophy of AI, and miscellaneous. Over time, separate parts devoted to the metaphysics of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science were added. In 1997, I added a major new part on the science of consciousness — not strictly philosophy of mind, but closely connected. In 2007, a major hole was filled with a part devoted to the philosophy of perception. Over time, the bibliography has also expanded backwards to cover material from around 1900 onwards (and occasionally earlier). Most areas of mainstream analytic philosophy of mind are covered, but coverage is thinner in some connected areas such as phenomenology, moral psychology, and propositional attitude semantics. A new part on the philosophy of action (incorporating the free will section and much else) would be a natural addition, but it would be a big project.

In 1997, I set up a separate web page for “Online Papers on Consciousness” (the link is to a very early version with 190 papers). This was devoted to free online papers only, in the philosophy and science of consciousness. Over time it expanded to include the same range of areas as the main bibliography. As online material (both free and commercial) became more and more common, it made sense to combine this with the main bibliography, and now the two are combined as MindPapers. By selecting appropriate viewing options (free online papers, compact format), one can approximate the online papers page, and there is still a separate front end available for this version. This front end has a somewhat different structure, reflecting a greater emphasis on issues about consciousness, and on accessibility to nonacademic/nonphilosophical audiences.

Some related pages that I have compiled include people with online papers in philosophy, web resources in consciousness and philosophy, and online bibliographies in philosophy, consciousness, and such.