In Defense of Human Consciousness

Many scientists proclaim that consciousness is an illusion, a mere byproduct of chemical activity in the brain. In the computer age, scholars have further conceptualized consciousness as the "software" that regulates human functions, reducing our foibles and feats to complex but ultimately predictable robotics. In this intellectually rigorous book, Joseph P. Rychlak makes a case for the existence of consciousness as a state of awareness that allows individuals to weigh opposites and "form introspectively framed intentions" to guide their own behaviour. "We have serious problems in modern society", Rychlak writes, "and at least some of them stem from the fact that human agency and personal responsibility are considered illusions. To make his case, Rychlak applies the elegant tenets of Logical Learning Theory, a decades-long study of how the mind works. Scholars have recently acknowledged the lack of an adequate vocabulary for understanding consciousness and they will find suggestions for that critical vocabulary in this work.