I was recommended Brainstorms by Dennett, which was slightly tricky to get hold of. It feels very worthy but I wouldn't call it riveting. I don't think Dennett does riveting, though I think he has his own sort of appeal, and did like the way Intuition Pumps was put together. I think Consciousness Explained is a more populist effort to, well, explain consciousness, though I haven't read it.
Susan Blackmore's also done Conversations on Consciousness, which is transcripts of interviews with notable academic figures on the subject, and is sitting in my to-read pile. She wrote The Meme Machine as well, which is more about memetics than consciousness, but does put forward some material on the topic, and is a quick read at <300 pages. As much as I want to like her, I personally find Susan Blackmore's writing a little annoying. YMMV.
Mind Hacks isn't about consciousness, but it's a very interesting CogSci book about how your brain pieces together the world in kludgey-messy ways, and how mental faculties we take for granted will fly apart at the seams if given the right corner-case. If you liked those aspects of the Consciousness VSI, you might like this.
Blindsight is an excellent hard sci-fi novel which you might want to consider reading if you like that sort of thing, and I'll say no more about it.
Blindsight is an excellent hard sci-fi novel which you might want to consider reading if you like that sort of thing, and I'll say no more about it.
If you liked Blindsight's ideas, you should definitely try to read Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity by Thomas Metzinger. Apparently Blindsight was heavily inspired by it. This is what the author has to say about it:
...Let's get the biggies out of the way first. Metzinger's Being No One is the toughest book I've ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven't), but it also
Does LW have a consensus on which books are worthwhile to read regarding consciousness? I read a small intro (Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press), and the summary seems to be "Consciousness is pretty damn weird and no one seems to have much of a handle on it". As a non-technical layman, are there any useful books for me to read on the subject?
(I have started reading Daniel Dennet's Intuition Pumps, and I'm a bit torn. He seems highly respected by good scientists, but I feel that if the book didn't have his name on it, I would be well on my way to dismissing it. Are Dennet's earlier works on consciousness a good read?)