Consciousness and Object

“Despite impressive recent advances in our understanding of the brain, there remains the puzzle of consciousness itself: What is it? How does my brain produce it? How can it have a causal effect on my body? Manzotti presents a bold account of consciousness that answers these questions and more in a refreshingly novel way. His theory is both easy to understand and breathtaking, it its simultaneously upsetting the applecart of consciousness while somehow, miraculously, leaving everything exactly as it was, and where it should be. With a simplicity and elegance of prose that matches that of his theory, Manzotti takes you on a journey that avoids the pitfalls of both dualism and neural reductionism, that steers clear of internalism while dodging enactivism. He arrives at a position that will at least make you wonder “how did I not see this possibility before?”. Even if you are not persuaded, you will be hard-pressed to say why.”

“This bold book is an attempt to shake the earth underneath the dogmas that have been stifling the philosophy of mind, and rid it of any vestiges of dualisms and dichotomies that, despite avowals to the contrary, current identity theories fail to eradicate. It goes beyond direct realism, radical embodiment and extended mind theories, and offers a real, uncompromising physicalist monism, structured around the maxim that one's experience of an object is the object that one experiences. Packed with tight arguments and provocative thought experiments, and informed by the latest empirical findings, the book sets out to radically transform the paradigms within which consciousness is conceived and researched.”

“The book outlines a full-fledged physicalist account of conscious experience that may cast the basis for a radically new and surprisingly enthralling philosophy of nature. The defended view will present conscious experience as you have never conceived it – experience has been reloaded! To my knowledge, the mind-identity theory is the most radical attempt to overcome the existing theoretical shortcomings of the traditional mind-body dualism.”