Susan Blackmore has written Consciousness: A Brief Insight. To reward her for that, I've posted her photo here. S he's described on the back cover as a "psychologist, freelance writer, and lecturer." I've never heard of her before I happened to pluck this book off a shelf at a local library. It seems designed to give a brief (less than 200 pages long) survey of the field. Starts with a definition of the "hard problem of consciousness," which as per David Chalmers she understands as the question: how can a physical brain, a measurable structure, give rise to something as ineffable as qualia? "Qualia" is philosopher-speak for private experiences, all the severable droplets int he stream of consciousness. Blackmore notes that Chalmers invented the term "hard problem" to distinguish this question from various easier problems to which philosophers draw are attention when they can't solve the hard one and want to draw our atte...
