The Blind Mindmaker

Have you ever looked up at the sky and wondered what it is you're seeing? On a clear day your gaze will be met with a glorious expanse of blue. But that blue isn't in the sky. And it isn't even in the light your eyes detected. It is in fact generated somewhere deep inside your brain. Yet amazingly, it still has a shape that closely resembles the image of the sky projected onto the retinas of your eyes - including the exact curvatures of the clouds and horizon line. This book explains how and why this subjective image is formed. It tells you what it is made of, what advantage it gave our ancestors, and how it came to have its perfect retinal-image-like form. And it does the same for all our other experiences too. In short, it offers a relatively complete solution to what Australian philosopher David Chalmers called the Hard Problem. Unlike other attempts at explaining consciousness, though, this one accounts for all the design-like features of our experiences as products of natural selection and the established laws of physics. It invokes none of the magical functionalism that other theories appear to require. It thus explains our amazing subjective images in exactly the way science suggests they ought to be explained. And astonishingly, it even indicates why we understand what they mean. The argument of this book is so compelling that anyone who wants to know the most justifiable view of reality, what part they play in the workings of a brain, or what's likely to happen to them after they die, is strongly encouraged to become familiar with it. "There is something very refreshing about this book. It is free of the tired jargon of philosophy of mind. It sticks to a scientific agenda in a way that a lot of scientists would do well to emulate." Jonathan C. W. Edwards (Journal of Consciousness Studies)