Consciousness as Complex Event

“In Consciousness as Complex Event: Towards a New Physicalism, Craig DeLancey argues that what makes conscious (or “phenomenal”) experiences mysterious and seemingly impossible to explain is that they are extremely complex brain events”

“DeLancey does not use some vague and informal notion of complexity. Instead, he uses the formal notion of Kolmogorov complexity, which he refers to as descriptive complexity”

“DeLancey is clear that he does not wish to supplement his complexity-based defense of physicalism with other existing strategies (the phenomenal concepts strategy, the ability hypothesis, knowledge by acquaintance etc. (23))”

“The central claim is that “what makes a phenomenal experience mysterious is its [descriptive] complexity” (21)”

“From the perspective of algorithmic information theory (which studies Kolmogorov complexity) this central claim is puzzling. For it seems to suggest that if something has sufficiently high Kolmogorov complexity, then we will find it mysterious and difficult to explain. But this is not so”

“chapter one offers a simple and readable introduction to the notion of Kolmogorov complexity”

“Chapter two clarifies a number of issues in philosophy of mind, from the apparent simplicity and ineffability of conscious experiences, to the access/phenomenal distinction, to the “overflow argument””

“Chapter three is largely independent from the rest and tries to clarify how we should understand physicalism (as a theory and not a stance)”

“Chapter four contains the attempts to respond to the anti-physicalist arguments”

“The final chapter of this book (chapter five) tries to test a prediction of the book’s main claims: that relatively less complex phenomenal experiences are not mysterious”

“Complexity-based accounts therefore still need to explain what the difference is between consciousness and complex but well-understood physical phenomena”