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It's hard to put a finger on who exactly to recommend this to. There are portions (starting with the very beginning) that are excellent, hyper accessible narrative illustrations of important ideas, and these I would suggest to anyone. However, some of the other sections are much more abstract and technical, with a much more challenging train of thought to keep up with, that are likely to be confusing without some level of background.
I also, while I do find some of the research inspired by the questions interesting, fundamentally don't care a lot about abstract, pedantic debates about definitions of things like conciousness or free will, and there's a level of that here. However, where he eventually lands is largely consistent with my intuition that makes many of these discussions tedious to me. The arbitrary, meaningless debate is arbitrary and meaningless because, in order to keep it alive, the people perpetuating it have to abstract away more and more of any of the purely theoretical distinctions as their "gotchas" are demonstrated to be nonsensical. For me, this leads to "OK, if this theoretical difference never can be measured and never affects anything, in what context would it have any meaning?". He doesn't present it identically, but he gets to a similar place.
Also worth noting that this is fairly old now, and there are some points where it shows its age. However, with those caveats, this is worth reading and the model is a useful one.
It's hard to put a finger on who exactly to recommend this to. There are portions (starting with the very beginning) that are excellent, hyper accessible narrative illustrations of important ideas, and these I would suggest to anyone. However, some of the other sections are much more abstract and technical, with a much more challenging train of thought to keep up with, that are likely to be confusing without some level of background.
I also, while I do find some of the research inspired by the questions interesting, fundamentally don't care a lot about abstract, pedantic debates about definitions of things like conciousness or free will, and there's a level of that here. However, where he eventually lands is largely consistent with my intuition that makes many of these discussions tedious to me. The arbitrary, meaningless debate is arbitrary and meaningless because, in order to keep it alive, the people perpetuating it have to abstract away more and more of any of the purely theoretical distinctions as their "gotchas" are demonstrated to be nonsensical. For me, this leads to "OK, if this theoretical difference never can be measured and never affects anything, in what context would it have any meaning?". He doesn't present it identically, but he gets to a similar place.
Also worth noting that this is fairly old now, and there are some points where it shows its age. However, with those caveats, this is worth reading and the model is a useful one.
