Book review of Owen Flanagan

Owen Flanagan:
CONSCIOUSNESS RECONSIDERED (MIT Press, 1992)

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Flanagan believes that the brain is enough to explain consciousness and starts out by attacking different theories of mind. He then reviews some theories of the brain, some theories of qualia. Then he responds to Nagel's theory that we cannot know how it feels to be a bat and to McGinn's theory that we cannot explain consciousness.. He attacks epiphenomenalism. Eventually he settles on William James' stream of consciousness: there is no "Mind's I" that thinks and is conscious, that are just thoughts that flow. Consciousness is not: consciousness flows. "The thoughts themselves are the thinkers". I do not think thoughts, thoughts think me. Flanagan thinks that consciousness is not a thing but a set of "conscious" processes. There is no "I": there is conscious activity. This conscious activity differs from the neural activity only in kind, but the mind "is" the brain. Flanagan does not explain where the conscious feeling comes from, but claims that the "gap between the subjective and the objective is an epistemic gap, not an ontological gap".

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