Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
There&#x27;s a lot of talk in here about whether consciousness is binary, whether it can turn on and off like a lightswitch, as if that&#x27;s a good proxy for dualism vs. materialism.<p>I would argue that this is a totally separate question. In terms of my core intuitions, I&#x27;m a hardcore dualist. Chalmers is my favorite philosopher. But the idea of something being &quot;weakly conscious&quot; makes plenty of sense to me. In fact, I have <i>been</i> weakly conscious--waking up from being knocked out for one reason or another. During the process of coming out if it, I remember being in a hazy state, where experiences didn&#x27;t have the vividness or clarity that they normally do. Of course, it&#x27;s possible that it&#x27;s just my memories that are weak, but at any rate the idea that these experiences didn&#x27;t have the full character of normal conscious experience doesn&#x27;t strike me as any kind of evidence for materialism.<p>In my father&#x27;s last months, I saw him medicated on morphine to the point of being near unconscious, and it&#x27;s easy to imagine that he was having the same sort of weak experiences as I&#x27;ve had. None of this rattles my dualist intuitions at all.<p>What most dualists say is that it&#x27;s incredibly mysterious that anything has any level of consciousness above <i>zero</i>. Saying consciousness doesn&#x27;t need a special explanation because it&#x27;s possible to be weakly conscious is like saying gravity doesn&#x27;t need to be explained because it&#x27;s possible for objects to have small amounts of gravitation. It&#x27;s an unrelated issue.