British psychologist Stuart Sutherland wrote in 1989: “Consciousness is a a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading had been written about it“. Despite this sentiment, which has quite a bit of truth to it, below are seven great books on consciousness to read.

I. The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience by Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt

This is a great book for anyone interested in the evolutionary bases of consciousness. It rightly points out that solving “the hard problem” of consciousness requires recourse to philosophical, neurobiological and neuroevolutionary domains. The book starts with the Cambrian explosion, and demonstrates how vertebrate consciousness evolved from an amphioxus-like, invertebrate stage. This is a clear and very readable account of the evolution of consciousness, even if it only provides a sound theory on the development of a sensory consciousness, as opposed to a subjective, all-encompassing one.

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