What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective life of a conscious mind? These questions are among the most hotly debated issues in science and philosophy today. Now, in The Conscious Mind, philosopher David J. Chalmers offers a cogent analysis of this debate as he lays out a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, but is still compatible with a scientific view of the world.

Writing in a rigorous, thought-provoking style, the author takes us on a far-reaching tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness. Chalmers convincingly establishes that contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience do not begin to explain how subjective experience emerges from neural processes in the brain.

He proposes that conscious experience must instead be understood in a new light - as an irreducible entity (like such physical properties as time, mass, and space) that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the sum of simpler physical parts.

In the second half of the book, he sets out on a quest for a "fundamental theory" - a theory of the basic laws governing the structure and character of conscious experience - and shows how this reconception of the mind could lead us to a new science of consciousness.