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There are a plethora of books on consciousness.

From the science side of things the neuroscientist Antti Revonuso has a book "Consciousness: the science of subjectivity" which has a good mix of the philosophy and science of consciousness. Christof Koch, probably one of the leading neuroscientists who study consciousness, has a few books as well. The Quest for Consciousness is one of his, which has lots of neuroscience particularly visual neuroscience in it. That is mainly science, not much philosophy. Another neuroscientist who studies consciousness is Stanislas Dehaene who wrote a good book Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Click on the image of each book on the left in amazon (which opens up a preview) and scroll to the contents page and see if any of these books are the kind of thing you are looking for.

From the philosophical side there is (among many others) Susan Blackmores "Consciousness: An introduction" (an introductory book David Chalmers recommends) and William Seagers "Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment". There is also a great book that has short (5-7 pages) sections on philosophers and neuroscientists and their respective theories of consciousness by Andrea Eugenio Cavanna and Andrea Nani called "Consciousness: Theories in Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind". The first half of Michael Tye's book "Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind" is great for an overview of 10 philosophical problems of consciousness. It is very accessible and there are summaries of each problem provided. There are also great resources online such as Van Gulick's SEP article on consciousness, which would actually be a great place to start, and use it as a place to lead you to areas you are most interested in. Here is also a brief introduction to the philosophy of mind (the main philosophical discipline that deals with consciousness).

So there's a few links to some books and online articles, which should be more than enough to get you going.

By the way, there is a free masterclass on consciousness with Christof Koch on the World Science U website. You may also be interested in that.

Additionally you may like to check out the subreddit /r/sciphilconsciousness, which is all about the sharing and discussion of content related to the science and philosophy of consciousness.

I highly recommend John Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction.

Searle's is a bit biased towards his argument for "Emergent consciousness" throughout the book but he does give a very thorough and accessible overview of the history and important arguments/debates about consciousness/free will/personal identity. Also tons of helpful references at the end of each chapter that will lead you towards many of the notable papers. and books if you wish to follow up in more detail.

The books main strength lies in Searle's prose which (in this book at least) is engaging, easy to follow, full of life and energy and informative at the same time.

It is a bit older than the books mentioned by wyzaard above, so it might better serve as a compliment to read alongside the texts he recommended.

Let me get this straight. Nations have been keeping track of unindentified flying objects and that proves... what exactly? Aliens? Ancient aliens?

Homeopathy is not "partially correct", you are confusing it with placebo, and homeopathy claims to be a lot more than that. Homepathic so-called medicine has an effect identical to placebo, but their claims are much grander and are simply false, not "partially correct".

We seem to be getting a little off track here, and I feel I'm not getting through. I want to recommend a book to you that deals with these issues. The author is much better suited than me and certainly more persuasive. It's very accessible and quite a pleasant read. I hope you find the time to read it.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan

Many good points there, some worth following up on. (seriously, this is the best conversation I've had on reddit in awhile)

>I find it difficult to swallow that subjective conscious experience (particularly, that of humans) can ever be fully emulated by a computerized entity for one very simple, yet perhaps counterintuitive reason: irrationality.

That's interesting, and an argument I hadn't heard. I think some kinds of irrationality can already be seen in neural networks, for example, the tendency to overgeneralize, and the various biases that occur when we try to fit new data into an existing conceptual schema by forcing the "new thing" to be an instance of something familiar. We do this all the time, because our network of learned prototypes is exactly the thing that allows us to make sense of the world, and if we don't have an appropriate prototype for the new thing, we tend to attach it to whatever seems closest. And of course neural nets don't need to be programmed to do this (they don't even have a programming language); that's simply what a parallel processor does straight out of the box. As a side note, many people underestimate the importance of computational architecture - in theory, a Turing-style serial processor can do anything computable, but in practice where resources like memory, speed, and time are finite, serial processors and parallel processors have drastically different profiles of strengths and weaknesses.

But as you say, I don't know how we're going to get even neural networks to make irrational decisions based on emotions. Study of our own limbic systems and how they interact with the parts of the brain handling conscious awareness might reveal something, but I have to admit, feeling is quite a good magic trick.

>it's interesting to me that the intralaminar nucleus would be posited here. As you mention, its widespread connectivity makes for an attractive guess, though I would argue that the real "seat" of consciousness, should such a thing really exist, would be far more heavily dependent on prefrontal regions, or maybe even parietal regions.

A bit of detail I didn't get into last time: If you lesion one side of the intralaminar nucleus, the person ends up with hemineglect and has no awareness of one side of their body. If you lesion it bilaterally, you get an irreversible coma. It has feedback connections to all parts of the cortex, including the prefrontal regions, and that makes it a massively recurrent network. A natural hardware-level property of recurrent networks is short-term memory, which consciousness must crucially depend on to give us a sense of events unfolding in time. This all seems suggestive, but the intralaminar nucleus could just be something more like a power supply or a timing regulator - I don't know. Churchland devotes a chapter to exploring this possibility in The Engine of Reason. Rather than making a lot of noise about "eliminative materialism", which, as a label, tends to put people off, he just goes into how neural networks and brains do what they do and what it tells us about our mental lives and the traditional problems of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. But per his eliminativism, a "language of thought" in which behavior is motivated by "propositional attitudes" does not play any role.

Lately I've been contemplating the idea that 'consciousness' is not so much a thing, but a group of brain processes working together in concert, and this probably involves the default network, as well as the visual cortex and another pound worth of distributed squishware. Since these various brain lumps are all working together well enough to give me a sense of a coherent stream of events unfolding smoothly in time (as opposed to a disjointed cacophony of desynchronized sense data), it's tempting to suppose that there might be a central neural network tying everything together, but as we know, the brain can be very counterintuitive. I'm just excited to live in a time where our understanding of this stuff is growing by the year, rather than by the decade or century.

This is where I got my start:

Neural Networks for Statistical Modeling

It's old (1993) but it's a great introduction to the mechanics of how they actually work. It's gentle enough that I was able to teach myself from it as a freshman in high school. Once you have a good understanding of the underlying principles, especially the backpropagation algorithm, the applications will start to become much more apparent, and the techniques used in the field will become much more intuitive to grasp.

I don't know much about consciousness research, except at a high level. It tends, surprisingly, not to be very relevant to actually building a mind. You might check out Information Integration Theory. Or maybe Psi Theory.

Try Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright

The author covers evolutionary psychology which stands in opposition to the idea of free will.

You may also find Waking Up by Sam Harris useful.

Both of these books draw on neuroscience as well as philosophy and touch on the free will "problem".

I refer you to this book

>Schaller was neither a teacher of the deaf nor a linguist, but she had learned American Sign Language (ASL) and enjoyed interpreting for the deaf. Still, nothing had prepared her for Ildefonso, a languageless adult, born deaf and lacking instruction in even the simplest communication. With infinite patience and determination, Schaller taught this intense, lonely, but apparently intelligent man to grasp not just signs, but ideas and words. Their breakthrough to language is most spectacular, reminiscent of Keller's experience with "water."

extended interview here < < < - - - READ IN FULL NO TL;DR POSSIBLE

lots of stuff on line if you google it

Neuroethics: An introduction with readings It covers a pretty broad range, but i wouldn't consider it advanced. It depends on where youre coming from I guess

If you want advanced, I would just read the original papers of the people burnage noted and some of the works they cite/cite them.

Here's something you can read right now: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1OGo3_6VY_0ZGIwZDZmM2EtMDM1ZC00M2UzLTk0NDQtNTdlNTg3MWFjN2Rl/edit?pli=1

The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Thomas Metzinger.

Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Brain. Michael Gazzaniga (neuroscientist)

Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. Gregg Caruso and Owen Flanagan, Eds. (Part 3: Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Meaning in Life has 6 essays by Derk Pereboom, Caruso, Gazzaniga, and others, and other essays scattered throughout the book are also pertinent)

'Neurophilosophy and the Healthy Mind: Learning from the Unwell Brain' was a fun read. Involved a lot of case studies and the conclusions we might could draw from those with unwell brains.

Neurophilosophy book I started reading and it’s really good so far.

https://www.amazon.com/Neuro-Philosophy-Healthy-Mind-Learning-Unwell/dp/1469065932