The Enigma of Consciousness

Contents: Preface. 1. Mind, reality and science. 2. What is consciousness? 3. The brain as the seat of consciousness. 4. The unity of consciousness and concept of the self. 5. The origin of consciousness - the evolutionary approach. 6. The reductionist magic and Francis Crick\'s astonishing hypothesis. 7. Gerald Edelman\'s Universe of consciousness. 8. Cognitive science and consciousness. 9. Quantum mechanics, consciousness and Roger Penrose\'s non-computable mind. 10. Dualism revisited. 11. The other world and consciousness. An epilogue. Bibliography. Credits. Index.

"Alok Bhattacharyya\'s The Enigma of Consciousness is an incisive, brilliant and perhaps the most comprehensive study of consciousness with a stunning range of topics that has ever been undertaken to answer these and other intriguing questions. Written in a lucid and impressive style with a rare clarity of approach, the book chronicles the thoughts of the world\'s greatest minds on a perennial problem of philosophy and a current preoccupation of science since the times of the Upanishads and Plato. The author assembles a rich set of results from recent researches in the fields of neurobiology, genetics, palaeontology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, quantum physics and the new science of complexity, and critically examines if scientific bootstrapping can indeed capture consciousness in its true element and unravel its mystery. He also takes the readers on a scintillating tour of the other world, ruled by parapsychological phenomena, occult practices and mystical experiences to explore if these extra-ordinary phenomena, lying outside the range of our everyday experience and beyond rational explanation, can provide any new insight into the nature of consciousness.

The object of the author in this book is not to \'show the fly the way out of the fly bottle\', but to inform the readers where exactly we stand at the turn of this new millennium in our attempt to find a solution to the old riddle of consciousness. In the author\'s view, the nature of consciousness has proved too elusive to be encapsulated in any theoretical framework. Nevertheless, as the author sees it, with the best of cutting edge knowledge of the brain\'s function and its processes, we have at least bettered our understanding of the puzzle of consciousness in the past few decades." (jacket)