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Unwillingly to School. Edited by I. Berg and J. Nursten. (Pp. 312; £20.00.) Royal College of Psychiatrists/Gaskell: London. 1996.

This important book presents a well-argued and sophisticated exposition of a property dualist theory of consciousness written by a philosopher with a background in mathematics and computer science. Materialists believe that the events we experience in consciousness are simply events in our brains. A substance dualist holds that events in consciousness are a different series of events from their correlated brain events – something extra – and that the link between them is causal rather than one of identity. A property dualist tries to have the best of both worlds and suggests that events in consciousness that we experience and the brain events described by neuroscientists really are both brain events but represent different properties, or aspects, of them. Chalmers appropriately starts off with a catalogue of conscious experiences. I say ‘appropriately ’ because he does not attempt to define consciousness – a procedure that Crick (1994) has warned us against – but describes it and its contents. He then delineates two senses of ‘consciousness ’ – the phenomenal (our experiences) and the psychological (‘access to some information which can be used to control behaviour’). He says the latter presents no deep problems for cognitive science but the former does. He argues against the attempt to ‘explain’ consciousness merely by discovering its neural basis : ‘Neurobiological approaches...can also tell us something about the brain processes that are correlated with consciousness. But none of these accounts explains the correlation: we are not told why brain processes should give rise to experience at all. From the point of view of neuroscience, the correlation is simply a brute fact...the problem of consciousness goes beyond any problem about the explanation of structure and function, so a new sort of explanation is needed’ (p. 115). And again ‘Once we have explained all the physical structure in the vicinity of the brain, and we have explained how all the various brain functions are performed, there is a sort of explanandum: consciousness itself. Why should all this structure and function give rise to experience? The story about the physical process does not say’ (p. 107). Freddie Ayer said much the same in 1950. He pointed out that, if there are two sets of events a and b and you want to find the relation between a and b, it is not sufficient merely to accumulate data about a, or about b, You have to come up with a theory that relates a and b. Ayer concludes ‘If what we are seeking is a bridge across a seemingly impassable river it will not help us merely to elevate one of its banks. ’ As Gray (1992) has suggested, the problem of consciousness will only be solved by a theory that specifies, in scientific terms, what the relation is between the events that we experience in consciousness, that form the field of study of introspectionist psychology, and the events in the conscious-related neurons, as studied by neurophysiologists. If Ayer and Gray are right, it will not be solved by any theory that simply describes in ever more fascinating detail events in the neurons themselves, or how these events affect the behaviour of the organism. Any viable theory of consciousness simply cannot ignore the (phenomenal) events in a person’s consciousness. After his description of the contents of consciousness he accepts the validity of introspection: ‘When I introspect, I find [as did David Hume] sensations, experiences of pain and emotions, and all sorts of other accouterments ’ (p. 189). He also recognizes that (some of) the events in consciousness (e.g. those in the visual field) have a detailed internal structure and geometry: ‘An individual’s conscious experience is not in general a homogenous blob: it has a detailed internal structure’ (p. 223). As examples of this he gives, in the case of vision, stripes, squares, triangles and cubes as well as the geometry of depths. However, instead of following up on this important and promising insight, he proceeds to place much stress on the need to develop