Another good review from my NYRoB (and you can see what I've been catching up on today) is John Searle's review of The Quest for Consciousness by Christof Koch. You can't read this one online for free, unfortunately, which is really too bad because it's a great article.

Here's a neat paragraph pair, just for instance:

Split brains. In treating some patients with an extreme form of epilepsy surgeons cut the corpus callosum, the body of tissue that connects the two halves of the brain. This cured the epilepsy but the patients then behaved as if they had two conscious minds, one in each hemisphere. According to Koch's interpretation, both halves of the brain are conscious, but they communicate only imperfectly. In one experiment, for example, if you show a spoon to a part of the visual system that connects to the right brain but not to the left, and you ask the patient "What do you see?," the patient, who has the capacity to use language in his left brain, says, "I don't see anything." But he then reaches out with his left hand, which is controlled by his right brain, and grabs the spoon. It is as if there were two conscious people in his head, only one of whom can speak. This is why the split-brain patients may seem normal. The left brain, which does the talking, says they feel just fine.

According to Koch, both halves of the brain are conscious and, by the way, both show binocular rivalry. I am a little surprised that he is confident that both halves are conscious. I once asked Michael Gazzaniga, the chief researcher in this field, if he thought they were both conscious and he said he could not tell because he could not think of an experimental way to resolve the question.

Searle isn't in love with the book, but says he "admire[s] Koch's book enormously" and recommends it to anyone looking to get a handle on the current state of research into consciousness. I'll probably be buying this book when it comes out in paperback and it doesn't cost $45.