The Importance of Being Conscious

The Importance of Being Conscious addresses the question: in what ways does conscious experience matter, and why? Chapters by leading theorists consider the relationship between the distribution and nature of consciousness and its epistemic and ethical significance.

This volume is a collection of new work on the significance of consciousness: in what ways does conscious experience matter, and why? Many have thought that consciousness is not merely a theoretically puzzling phenomenon, but that it is important morally, epistemically, or in other ways. For example, this is a key reason why people care how consciousness is distributed: do animals, insects or even near future AIs have it? But in what sense (if at all) is this true, and why? And how does this relate to our view of what consciousness is? Do different theories of consciousness have different implications for how it matters? Does the view that consciousness reduces to a physical state of the brain imply that it does not matter in the way we think it does? The Importance of Being Conscious brings together a variety of perspectives on these questions from leading theorists in ethics and philosophy of mind.