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?)
Every time I've heard someone mention Being No One, it's been accompanied by some statement along the lines of "this book was above my level". This has certainly piqued my interest, but it hasn't instilled me with confidence about my ability to tackle it.
I've tried reading the book several times; I feel that the problem isn't so much that the content is intrinsically difficult, but rather that the style of writing is generally terrible. Paragraphs are spent on something that could have been expressed in a sentence, and every now and then one gets the feeling that the book is written using English vocabulary and German sentence structure. A good editor could have cut down the length by hundreds of pages without losing anything essential.
The content is great if you can work your way through it, but despite that, I've still never managed to work my way through the whole book.