Marko asked:

What are the defenders of consciousness talking about? I often get stuck in philosophy of mind when
reading an essay "defending" consciousness, saying it is out of reach for SCIENTIFIC explanations
etc. The Turing Test may be insufficient, but why? Because it does not take consciousness and/ or
understanding into consideration? But what is it that the Turing Test doesn't take into consideration?
That may be the hard problem, yes, but are there any straightforward philosophical essays or
scientific research that have accomplished a good explanation of WHAT they're talking about? Could
you help me find it (tip me of some philosopher...) or perhaps give me some material or answers of
your own?

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I assume that by "defenders of consciousness" you do not mean people who maintain that we are
conscious, nor people who maintain that it is useful to study consciousness, but instead you mean
something like people who maintain that consciousness is a "thing" that is "beyond" "scientific"
explanation or understanding. Well. It sounds to me as if you are reading rather haphazardly in an
area in which haphazard reading is very dangerous. You can easily get sucked into some school,
etc.... and the issue of consciousness is one fraught with veryextreme feelings, since it touches not
merely on science, but religion, mysticism, and so forth.

I'm somewhat at a disadvantage here, because this is an area in which I'm extremelyinterested, and
I've done so much reading in it, that without knowing your background better, I feel at a real loss as to
what to recommend you to read. So first, take a look at a very good site, Dave Chalmers':
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/. Second, realize that hisposition on consciousness vis-a-vis
science is a very particular one, which many people (including me) disagree with. But he's very
knowledgeable in this area (and, actually, very approachable).

Meanwhile, the Turing Test has this general problem: what if everyone else but you, or, say, half the
people walking around, are "zombies"? That is, what is there, if anything, about consciousness that
necessarily changes behavior? What if you can have creatures perfectly simulating the behavior of
conscious entities, without themselves being conscious? So far, we cannot prove that there cannot be
such creatures. Well, if not, we're sort of stuck, aren't we, insofar, at the very least, as evaluating the
necessity for and effectiveness of the Turing Test? Think about it. If consciousness does not change
behavior, then a non-conscious person could behave exactly the way we do (including, of course,
talking about being conscious), just without having phenomenal experiences. This is the "zombie
problem", and there's lots of literature on it.

The "hard problem" is something else, more or less (although they're interrelated). That is, how do
you go from the physical to the mental? More specifically, given some neural circuit that we knowis
involved in, say, color vision, all we've got there is neurons firing, right? Where's the color? Neurons
aren't colored (well, they are, but you know what I mean); neural discharges aren't colored; there's no
little man in our heads sitting watching the neurons firing and seeing colors... so where do the colors
come from? All there are, are just neurons reacting to other neurons. And of course we can ask the
same question about allqualia, all conscious experiences: smell, touch, taste... anger (an angry
neuron?), fear... the meaning of an equation... and on and on. Nasty, right? And so far unsolved (and
according to Chalmers, unsolvable with science as presently conceived, which is where I — and
others — disagree with him). There are also people who do not recognize this as a problem; they
claim that colors (etc.) are "real", i.e., really and actually out there in the world, and that we have
"direct" access to them (I'm putting that in quotes because I don't really understand how it could
possibly work). They are a rather small minority.

I could go on and on. Some intro books:

Old book: Ornstein: The Psychology of Consciousness.

Very old, very good book: Ashby: Design for a Brain.

Good and controversial: Dreyfus: What Computers Still Can't Do.

Also controversial: Searle: The Mystery of Consciousness.

Very good but one-sided: Baars: A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness.

Computer-oriented: Churchland: Matter and Consciousness

and Dennett: Consciousness Explained(which he doesn't).

Some anthologies: Metzinger: Conscious Experience; Farthing:The Psychology of Consciousness;
Cohen: Scientific Approaches to Consciousness.

Then there are Clarke, Flanagan, Edelman, Lycan, Dretske, Varela, Chalmers... and on and on and
on. And I'm not even considering conventional philosophy of mind nor phenomenology here.
Chalmers' site also probably has good intro books; I haven't seen it in a while.

This is a hugearea. Do not expect easy or quick answers.

Steven Ravett Brown