Reddit reviews Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Every book on consciousness will have its own pet theory. I haven't found many great books on the neuroscience of consciousness, though Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch have a pretty good review paper on the subject. The one caveat is that they mostly review evidence for their own theory of consciousness, the Information Integration Theory.

As for the philosophy of consciousness, there are a number of good books, again each with their own agenda/pet theory. If you want the entire spectrum of opinions, check out Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness, which both provides a good overview of the field and also offers a defense of Churchland's materialist view; I'd also check out John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind, which presents Searle's biological naturalism, a sort of "centrist" view in the array of popular positions, and which is written in very straightforward language; a third option, which is more complicated than the other two but is really important in the field, is Chalmers' The Conscious Mind.

Hope that helps!

• Patricia Churchland - Neurophilosophy
  
• Paul Churchland - Matter and Consciousness
  
• William Lycan (ed.) - Mind and Cognition

For an excellent and very readable introduction to the various issues and positions in the philosophy of mind, you might also check out Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness.

>it sounds to me like you have an incomplete understanding of evolution.

Elaborate please.

>this is no more an indicator than the fact that we have mathematical models to represent force or gravity.

Valid point, but does not the fact that there appears to be some kind of order to the universe which we can represent mathematically suggest some kind of design? For instance, say you found a rock and a motor in the desert, never having seen either before, but you had mathematical analysis, would not the ordered nature of the data retrieved from the analysis of the motor compared to the chaotic nature of the data retrieved from the rock suggest to you that the motor had been built and did not simply arise from nature?

>This sounds also like you have an incomplete understanding of the biological processess involved in the brain.

Ask any epistemologist or read any basic text on epistemology (might I suggest this as a starting point?) and you will see that there is currently little or no demonstrable or philosophically sound evidence of a link between mind and matter.

One way to see EM is as a rejection of language-like theories of cognition:

> Plainly, early humans modeled their conception of human cognitive activity on the only systematic medium of representation and computation available to them at the time: human language. And a good thing, too, for it gave us at least some predictive and explanatory advantages, for the behavior of humans, and also for animals. But ultimately, [the eliminativist] says, that linguaformal conception of our cognition is no more accurate for us than it is for any of the other creatures. Our brains work in essentially the same ways as all of our evolutionary brothers and sisters, and ‘propositional attitudes’ have little or nothing to do with our mostly shared cognitive activities. If we want to really understand human cognition, he concludes, we need to get rid of our linguaformal self-delusion, and learn to discuss, and even to introspect, our cognition from within the conceptual framework of a theory (cognitive neurobiology) that is adequate to all of the Earth’s creatures. Our current conception is useful, no doubt, but at bottom it must misrepresent our true cognitive economy.

(From Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness)