Consciousness and Object

What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made of that object. Consciousness is physical but not neural.
This groundbreaking hypothesis is supported by recent empirical findings in both perception and neuroscience, and is herein tested against a series of objections of both conceptual and empirical nature: the traditional mind-brain identity arguments from illusion, hallucinations, dreams, and mental imagery. The theory is then compared with existing externalist approaches including disjunctivism, realism, embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind. Can experience and objects be one and the same?

Ron Chrisley, Sussex University:
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.