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Is Consciousness Everywhere
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Book Synopsis Is Consciousness Everywhere? by : Philip Goff
Download or read book Is Consciousness Everywhere? written by Philip Goff and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2022-10-05 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, originally a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, uses the recent writings of Philip Goff as a jumping-off point for discussions of panpsychism — the idea that consciousness is a fundamental and pervasive aspect of our universe that cannot be understood in other, more basic, terms. The contributors to this book explore various issues of panpsychism from the perspectives of science, philosophy, and theology. Some papers focus on further motivating and developing the panpsychist position. Others explore various challenges that the panpsychist faces. Collectively, they shed new and important light not only on panpsychism, but on the fundamental question of the place of consciousness in nature more generally.
Book Synopsis The Feeling of Life Itself by : Christof Koch
Download or read book The Feeling of Life Itself written by Christof Koch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking argument that consciousness—more widespread than previously assumed—is the feeling of being alive, not a type of computation or a clever hack In The Feeling of Life Itself, Christof Koch offers a straightforward definition of consciousness as any subjective experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted—the feeling of being alive. Psychologists study which cognitive operations underpin a given conscious perception. Neuroscientists track the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the organ of the mind. But why the brain and not, say, the liver? How can the brain—three pounds of highly excitable matter, a piece of furniture in the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as any other piece—give rise to subjective experience? Koch argues that what is needed to answer these questions is a quantitative theory that starts with experience and proceeds to the brain. In The Feeling of Life Itself, Koch outlines such a theory, based on integrated information. Koch describes how the theory explains many facts about the neurology of consciousness and how it has been used to build a clinically useful consciousness meter. The theory predicts that many, and perhaps all, animals experience the sights and sounds of life; consciousness is much more widespread than conventionally assumed. Contrary to received wisdom, however, Koch argues that programmable computers will not have consciousness. Even a perfect software model of the brain is not conscious. Its simulation is fake consciousness. Consciousness is not a special type of computation—it is not a clever hack. Consciousness is about being.
Book Synopsis Consciousness and Its Place in Nature by : Galen Strawson
Download or read book Consciousness and Its Place in Nature written by Galen Strawson and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Panpsychism is the philosophical view that consciousness, mentality, or 'mindedness' in some form is fundamental in the universe. The idea has existed for centuries, but only recently has it had a serious resurgence. Galen Strawson has been on the front line of the battlefield on the topic of panpsychism since the 1990s. His paper on ‘realistic monism’, contained in this volume and originally published in 2006, is now considered something of a classic and a catalyst for panpsychism’s recent revival. This long overdue new edition of the book gives the original commentators, where they feel they have something more to add, an opportunity to update their thinking on the topic of panpsychism in general and Strawson’s realistic monism in particular. Seven new postscripts are included, which aim to enhance the original collection and push the discussion onwards. Eighteen years have passed since the first edition of this groundbreaking volume, and Strawson remains a distinctive and important voice in the field — the new edition is a must-read for all who are interested in consciousness studies.
Book Synopsis Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience by : The Dalai Lama
Download or read book Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience written by The Dalai Lama and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed as a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Western neuroscientists, this book takes readers on a journey through opposing fields of thought—showing that they may not be so opposing after all Is the mind an ephemeral side effect of the brain’s physical processes? Are there forms of consciousness so subtle that science has not yet identified them? How does consciousness happen? Organized by the Mind and Life Institute, this discussion addresses some of the most troublesome questions that have driven a wedge between Western science and religion. Edited by Zara Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience is the culmination of meetings between the Dalai Lama and a group of eminent neuroscientists and psychiatrists. The Dalai Lama’s incisive, open-minded approach both challenges and offers inspiration to Western scientists. This book was previously published under the title Consciousness at the Crossroads.
Download or read book Galileo's Error written by Philip Goff and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2019 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a leading philosopher of the mind comes this lucid, provocative argument that offers a radically new picture of human consciousness--panpsychism, an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward.ward.
Book Synopsis Consciousness and Fundamental Reality by : Philip Goff
Download or read book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality written by Philip Goff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A core philosophical project is the attempt to uncover the fundamental nature of reality, the limited set of facts upon which all other facts depend. Perhaps the most popular theory of fundamental reality in contemporary analytic philosophy is physicalism, the view that the world is fundamentally physical in nature. The first half of this book argues that physicalist views cannot account for the evident reality of conscious experience, and hence that physicalism cannot be true. Unusually for an opponent of physicalism, Goff argues that there are big problems with the most well-known arguments against physicalismChalmers' zombie conceivability argument and Jackson's knowledge argumentand proposes significant modifications. The second half of the book explores and defends a recently rediscovered theory of fundamental realityor perhaps rather a grouping of such theoriesknown as 'Russellian monism.' Russellian monists draw inspiration from a couple of theses defended by Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Matter in 1927. Russell argued that physics, for all its virtues, gives us a radically incomplete picture of the world. It tells us only about the extrinsic, mathematical features of material entities, and leaves us in the dark about their intrinsic nature, about how they are in and of themselves. Following Russell, Russellian monists suppose that it is this 'hidden' intrinsic nature of matter that explains human and animal consciousness. Some Russellian monists adopt panpsychism, the view that the intrinsic natures of basic material entities involve consciousness; others hold that basic material entities are proto-conscious rather than conscious. Throughout the second half of the book various forms of Russellian monism are surveyed, and the key challenges facing it are discussed. The penultimate chapter defends a cosmopsychist form of Russellian monism, according to which all facts are grounded in facts about the conscious universe.
Book Synopsis Is Consciousness Everywhere? by : Philip Goff
Download or read book Is Consciousness Everywhere? written by Philip Goff and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2022-10-05 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, originally a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, uses the recent writings of Philip Goff as a jumping-off point for discussions of panpsychism — the idea that consciousness is a fundamental and pervasive aspect of our universe that cannot be understood in other, more basic, terms. The contributors to this book explore various issues of panpsychism from the perspectives of science, philosophy, and theology. Some papers focus on further motivating and developing the panpsychist position. Others explore various challenges that the panpsychist faces. Collectively, they shed new and important light not only on panpsychism, but on the fundamental question of the place of consciousness in nature more generally.
Book Synopsis The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience by : David Papineau
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience written by David Papineau and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is going on when we are consciously aware of a visual scene, or hear sounds, or otherwise enjoy sensory experience? David Papineau argues controversially for a purely qualitative account: conscious sensory experiences are intrinsic states with no essential connection to external circumstances or represented properties.
Book Synopsis The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by : Julian Jaynes
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Book Synopsis Exploring Consciousness by : Rita Carter
Download or read book Exploring Consciousness written by Rita Carter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on the foundation of her bestselling book "Mapping the Mind, " Carter ponders the nature, origins, and purpose of consciousness and includes topical essays from leading scholars. 110 illustrations, most in color.
Download or read book Out of Our Heads written by Alva Noë and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It's widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don't have a clue. In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.
Download or read book Consciousness written by Christof Koch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the human brain that combines “the leading edge of consciousness science with surprisingly personal and philosophical reflection . . . shedding light on how scientists really think”—this is “science writing at its best” (Times Higher Education). In which a scientist searches for an empirical explanation for phenomenal experience, spurred by his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book—part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation—describes Koch’s search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest—his instinctual (if “romantic”) belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a “fringy” subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work—to uncover the roots of consciousness.
Book Synopsis The Mystery of Consciousness by : John R. Searle
Download or read book The Mystery of Consciousness written by John R. Searle and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.
Book Synopsis Panpsychism in the West, revised edition by : David Skrbina
Download or read book Panpsychism in the West, revised edition written by David Skrbina and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated edition of a comprehensive study of the theory that mind exists, in some form, in all living and nonliving things. In Panpsychism in the West, the first comprehensive study of the subject, David Skrbina argues for the importance of panpsychism—the theory that mind exists, in some form, in all living and nonliving things—in consideration of the nature of consciousness and mind. Panpsychism, with its conception of mind as a general phenomenon of nature, uniquely links being and mind. More than a theory of mind, it is a meta-theory—a statement about theories of mind rather than a theory in itself. Panpsychism can parallel almost every current theory of mind; it simply holds that, no matter how one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. After a brief discussion of general issues surrounding philosophy of mind, Skrbina examines the panpsychist views of philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the post-structuralists. The original edition of Panpsychism in the West helped to reinvigorate a neglected and important aspect of philosophic thinking. This revised edition offers expanded and updated material that reflects the growth of panpsychism as a subdiscipline. It covers the problem of emergence of mind from a non-mental reality and the combination problem in greater detail. It offers expanded coverage of the pre-Socratics and Plato; a new section on Augustine; expanded discussions of Continental panpsychism, scientific arguments, Nietzsche, and Whitehead; and a new section on Russellian monism. With this edition, Panpsychism in the West will be continue to be the standard work on the topic.
Book Synopsis Human and Machine Consciousness by : David Gamez
Download or read book Human and Machine Consciousness written by David Gamez and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines. Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets out a bold interpretation of consciousness that neutralizes the philosophical problems and explains how we can make scientific predictions about the consciousness of animals, brain-damaged patients and machines. Gamez interprets the scientific study of consciousness as a search for mathematical theories that map between measurements of consciousness and measurements of the physical world. We can use artificial intelligence to discover these theories and they could make accurate predictions about the consciousness of humans, animals and artificial systems. Human and Machine Consciousness also provides original insights into unusual conscious experiences, such as hallucinations, religious experiences and out-of-body states, and demonstrates how ‘designer’ states of consciousness could be created in the future. Gamez explains difficult concepts in a clear way that closely engages with scientific research. His punchy, concise prose is packed with vivid examples, making it suitable for the educated general reader as well as philosophers and scientists. Problems are brought to life in colourful illustrations and a helpful summary is given at the end of each chapter. The endnotes provide detailed discussions of individual points and full references to the scientific and philosophical literature.
Book Synopsis The Nature of Consciousness, the Structure of Reality by : Jerry Davidson Wheatley
Download or read book The Nature of Consciousness, the Structure of Reality written by Jerry Davidson Wheatley and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes how understanding the structure of reality leads to the Theory of Everything Equation. The equation unifies the forces of nature and enables the merging of relativity with quantum theory. The book explains the big bang theory and everything else.
Download or read book Being You written by Anil Seth and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of 2021—Bloomberg Businessweek; A Best Science Book of 2021—The Guardian; A Best Science Book of 2021—Financial Times; A Best Philosophy Book of 2021—Five Books; A Best Book of 2021—The Economist Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science. What does it mean to “be you”—that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood. Now, internationally renowned neuroscience professor, researcher, and author Anil Seth is offers a window into our consciousness in BEING YOU: A New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is both a leading expert on the neuroscience of consciousness and one of most prominent spokespeople for this relatively new field of science. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness. Seth has been interviewed for documentaries aired on the BBC, Netflix, and Amazon and podcasts by Sam Harris, Russell Brand, and Chris Anderson, and his 2017 TED Talk on the topic has been viewed over 11 million times, a testament to his uncanny ability to make unimaginably complex science accessible and entertaining.
