This book was just about my first taste of the consciousness wars. Or no. I’ve been reading about consciousness for about ten years. But it made too much sense to me. My retinas see you, my visual cortex sees my retinas, but who sees my visual cortex? Where does the buck stop? Because the buck does stop. Once it hit me that vision is vision, something you wouldn’t expect from a brain of mere structure and function, electrons moving around, drugs being administered, I embraced magic, and demanded that we are souls, things beyond law. A point-of-view can be such an amazing thing to have that I can even slip into the thought, ‘Only one POV can exist, they’re so unbelievable.’ But as Smith said, ‘There’s no such thing as a leaf, there are only leaves.’

This book is a delightful bunch of mental flowerings. David Chalmers is the nuclear furnace sun around which the rest of these characters orbit. Although it can seem like some are in different galaxies altogether. His explanation is ‘Information is phenomenal.’ He deftly eludes every attack the others come up with, although this book is not the final round. He admits that his theory is probably wrong, but says this type of speculation is just what we need. My problem is, ‘Info is phenomenal, but where does the subject come from, you need a subject for anything phenomenal to be noticed.’

(...)Chalmers is a true scholar and looks like he reads everything written about the subject. If you can’t afford the book, there are hundreds of online papers he’s collected. My final line to you is ‘The war is not just in your head.’

Despite the temptation to grant only four stars because of some unevenness in the articles, the overall impression of *View...* is that of a "daring diversity of approaches" to understanding consciousness. All of these approaches represent a view from within conscious experience as opposed to the third person study of observed effects or technological readings of another's brain. Simultaneously, these views attempt to retain scientific credibility by demanding second person consensus or even corroboration by tradition. The book is united in the view of consciousness as largely unexplored terra incognita from the perspective of direct experience (at least in the West), thus rich with potential for brave explorations. (I seem to recall a great deal of inner exploration 30 years ago!) Yet, some of the articles, especially those on meditation, seem sometimes to offer a peculiar sort of reduction to the origins of mind in "pure consciousness experience" implying the lack of need to look any further. I agree that the objective scientific paradigm does much worse when it studies consciousness: It reduces subjective experience to an objective entity and must do so, probably degrading the direct conscious experience of those who so believe. This lively book remedies that and brings private experience - with flourish - back into the fold. In doing so, however, it retains empirical standards of comparison and suggests means of further experimentation or exploration. This is a carefully reasoned and intellectual foray into an aspect of consciousness studies which is most often ignored in the scientific community or aggrandized into a romantic & irrational mythology of "all experience is true" in New Age sorts of logical rejection. *View...* is a necessary bridge between these two extremes. Not that all writers are in agreement. Far from it: The editors, Jonathan Shear & the late, lamented Francisco Varela, invited a series of commentaries after the main theses had been presented and these sometimes are just as sharp & rewarding to read. Rich with insights and compelling with controversy & conflict, this book must be highly recommended.