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Author : William E. Barrett
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)
Download or read book THE SHAPE OF ILLUSION written by William E. Barrett and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : William E. Barrett
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780848804268
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (42 download)
Download or read book Shape of Illusion written by William E. Barrett and published by . This book was released on 1989-06-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Christopher Anvil
Publisher : Baen Publishing Enterprises
ISBN 13 : 1618247832
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (182 download)
Download or read book The Power of Illusion written by Christopher Anvil and published by Baen Publishing Enterprises. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of stories by the master of humorous science fiction adventure, including: The full-length novel, The Day the Machines Stopped¾and what happens, not just to civilization, but to humanity and its chances of survival when all the machines stop working at once? A man is captured by aliens who are investigating the Earth as a possible target for colonization. The aliens have science and technology far in advance of humans¾but, unfortunately for them, they have never developed the human art of bluffing. For the first time in book form, Anvil's stories of Richard Verner, who is called in to solve apparently insoluble problems, such as explaining why experimental missiles keep failing for no apparent reason, or locating a kidnapped judge, or even solving an inexplicable murder that's interrupting his vacation. And much more, in a generous volume of sardonically humorous science fiction. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Author : John C. Wathey
Publisher : Prometheus Books
ISBN 13 : 1633880745
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (338 download)
Download or read book The Illusion of God's Presence written by John C. Wathey and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential feature of religious experience across many cultures is the intuitive feeling of God's presence. More than any rituals or doctrines, it is this experience that anchors religious faith, yet it has been largely ignored in the scientific literature on religion.Starting with a vivid narrative account of the life-threatening hike that triggered his own mystical experience, biologist John Wathey takes the reader on a scientific journey to find the sources of religious feeling and the illusion of God's presence. His book delves into the biological origins of this compelling feeling, attributing it to innate neural circuitry that evolved to promote the mother-child bond. Dr. Wathey argues that evolution has programmed the infant brain to expect the presence of a loving being who responds to the child's needs. As the infant grows into adulthood, this innate feeling is eventually transferred to the realm of religion, where it is reactivated through the symbols, imagery, and rituals of worship. The author interprets our various conceptions of God in biological terms as illusory supernormal stimuli that fill an emotional and cognitive vacuum left over from infancy. These insights shed new light on some of the most vexing puzzles of religion, like the popular belief in a god who is judgmental and punishing, yet also unconditionally loving; the extraordinary tenacity of faith; the greater religiosity of women relative to men; religious obsessions with sex; the mysterious compulsion to pray; the seemingly irrepressible feminine attributes of God, even in traditionally patriarchal religions; and the strange allure of cults. Finally, Dr. Wathey considers the hypothesis that religion evolved to foster reproductive success, arguing that, in an age of potentially ruinous overpopulation, magical thinking has become a luxury we can no longer afford, one that distracts us from urgent threats to our planet.Deeply researched yet elegantly written in a jargon-free and accessible style, this book presents a compelling interpretation of the evolutionary origins of spirituality and religion.
Author : Mark Fineman
Publisher : Courier Corporation
ISBN 13 : 0486150097
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (861 download)
Download or read book The Nature of Visual Illusion written by Mark Fineman and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascinating, profusely illustrated study explores the psychology and physiology of vision, including light and color, motion receptors, the illusion of movement, much more. Over 100 illustrations.
Author : Christopher Layne
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801474118
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (741 download)
Download or read book The Peace of Illusions written by Christopher Layne and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a provocative book about American hegemony, Christopher Layne outlines his belief that U.S. foreign policy has been consistent in its aims for more than sixty years and that the current Bush administration clings to mid-twentieth-century tactics--to no good effect. What should the nation's grand strategy look like for the next several decades? The end of the cold war profoundly and permanently altered the international landscape, yet we have seen no parallel change in the aims and shape of U.S. foreign policy. The Peace of Illusions intervenes in the ongoing debate about American grand strategy and the costs and benefits of "American empire." Layne urges the desirability of a strategy he calls "offshore balancing": rather than wield power to dominate other states, the U.S. government should engage in diplomacy to balance large states against one another. The United States should intervene, Layne asserts, only when another state threatens, regionally or locally, to destroy the established balance. Drawing on extensive archival research, Layne traces the form and aims of U.S. foreign policy since 1940, examining alternatives foregone and identifying the strategic aims of different administrations. His offshore-balancing notion, if put into practice with the goal of extending the "American Century," would be a sea change in current strategy. Layne has much to say about present-day governmental decision making, which he examines from the perspectives of both international relations theory and American diplomatic history.
Author : Richard Hanania
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100051403X
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)
Download or read book Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy written by Richard Hanania and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that while the US president makes foreign policy decisions based largely on political pressures, it is concentrated interests that shape the incentive structures in which he and other top officials operate. The author identifies three groups most likely to be influential: government contractors, the national security bureaucracy, and foreign governments. This book shows that the public choice perspective is superior to a theory of grand strategy in explaining the most important aspects of American foreign policy, including the war on terror, policy toward China, and the distribution of US forces abroad. Arguing that American leaders are selected to respond to public opinion, not necessarily according to their ability to formulate and execute long-terms plans, the author shows how mass attitudes are easily malleable in the domain of foreign affairs due to ignorance with regard to the topic, the secrecy that surrounds national security issues, the inherent complexity of the issues involved, and most importantly, clear cases of concentrated interests. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of American Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis and Global Governance.
Author : Steven Sloman
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0399184341
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (991 download)
Download or read book The Knowledge Illusion written by Steven Sloman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.
Author : Bruce Hood
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199969892
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (999 download)
Download or read book The Self Illusion written by Bruce Hood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us believe that we are unique and coherent individuals, but are we? The idea of a "self" has existed ever since humans began to live in groups and become sociable. Those who embrace the self as an individual in the West, or a member of the group in the East, feel fulfilled and purposeful. This experience seems incredibly real but a wealth of recent scientific evidence reveals that this notion of the independent, coherent self is an illusion - it is not what it seems. Reality as we perceive it is not something that objectively exists, but something that our brains construct from moment to moment, interpreting, summarizing, and substituting information along the way. Like a science fiction movie, we are living in a matrix that is our mind. In The Self Illusion, Dr. Bruce Hood reveals how the self emerges during childhood and how the architecture of the developing brain enables us to become social animals dependent on each other. He explains that self is the product of our relationships and interactions with others, and it exists only in our brains. The author argues, however, that though the self is an illusion, it is one that humans cannot live without. But things are changing as our technology develops and shapes society. The social bonds and relationships that used to take time and effort to form are now undergoing a revolution as we start to put our self online. Social networking activities such as blogging, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter threaten to change the way we behave. Social networking is fast becoming socialization on steroids. The speed and ease at which we can form alliances and relationships is outstripping the same selection processes that shaped our self prior to the internet era. This book ventures into unchartered territory to explain how the idea of the self will never be the same again in the online social world.
Author : Mark Von Schlegell
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1584350261
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (843 download)
Download or read book Venusia written by Mark Von Schlegell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-08-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel about life under enlightened totalitarianism in the twenty-third century and the efforts of a mild-mannered junk dealer to change the human condition. Primitive literacy is redundant. Mere words are expelled. We inaugurate a world of pure presence. The mind, that intrudes itself between ourselves and those memories too terrible to know, must keep us moving beyond the grasp of their claw. To control the flow, it will be necessary that political order be imposed always temporarily. The state shall enjoy direct, creative access to the real. It's the end of the twenty-third century. Earth has violently self-destructed. Venusia, an experimental off-world colony, survives under the enlightened totalitarianism of the Princeps Crittendon regime. Using industrialized narcotics, holographic entertainment, and memory control, Crittendon has turned Venusia into a self-sustaining system of relative historical inertia. But when mild-mannered junk dealer Rogers Collectibles finds a book about early Venusian history, the colony—once fully immersed in the present—begins losing its grip on the real. With his Reality-V girlfriend Martha Dobbs, neuroscop operator Sylvia Yang, his midget friend Niftus Norrington, and a sentient plant, Rogers wages a war to alter the shape of spacetime, and in the process, revisions the whole human (and vegetable) condition.
Author : Samir El-Youssef
Publisher : Halban Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1912600013
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (126 download)
Download or read book The Illusion of Return written by Samir El-Youssef and published by Halban Publishers. This book was released on 2019-01-12 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meeting a friend after many years' separation, the narrator wonders whether the events they both lived through in Lebanon really took place. Time and distance give a sense of unreality but when the narrator and Ali meet at Heathrow Airport, after seventeen years, the past slowly begins to unfold.Like so many other Palestinians who were born in the Lebanon, they had to leave in the mid-1980s, when it became a battlefield for different militias and armies – Lebanese, Palestinian, Israeli and Syrian. Ali leaves for America and, two years later, the narrator leaves for London.Their memories are concentrated on one fatal night when they and two other friends are together for the last time, before tragedy strikes. But for the narrator, a personal tragedy had struck much earlier, one which he would never forget and could not share.
Author : N.E. Thing Enterprises
Publisher : Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0836270061
Total Pages : 37 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (362 download)
Download or read book The Magic Eye, Volume I written by N.E. Thing Enterprises and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 1993-10 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People worldwide are adding another dimension to their lives: the third dimension! Thanks to the 3D wonder of Magic Eye, people of all ages find themselves spellbound by the hidden images that suddenly are leaping from book pages, greeting cards, calendars, even T-shirts and mugs. This colorful Magic Eye book guides gazers through 23 different 3D, computer-generated illustrations. Complete instructions, including two detailed viewing techniques, will have them searching for visual surprises through beautifully executed, full-page designs. Expand your Magic Eye vision and watch the wonderful happen!
Author : Katharina Rein
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100048114X
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)
Download or read book Illusion in Cultural Practice written by Katharina Rein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores illusionism as a much larger phenomenon than optical illusion, magic shows, or special effects, as a vital part of how we perceive, process, and shape the world in which we live. Considering different cultural practices characterized by illusionism, this book suggests a new approach to illusion via media theory. Each of the chapters analyses a specific kind of illusionistic practice and the concept of illusionism it entails in a given context, including philosophy, perception and cognitive theory, performance magic, occultism, optics, physiology, early cinema, cartomancy, spiritualism, architecture, shamanic rituals, and theoretical physics, to show the diversity of shapes that illusionism and illusions can take. The book provides detailed analyses of illusions within performance and ritual magic, philosophy, art history and psychology as well as a first approach to the study of illusions outside of these established fields. It aims to find ways of identifying and analysing a wider range of illusions in the humanities. This multidisciplinary and comprehensive volume will appeal to scholars and students with an interest in media and culture, theatre and performance, philosophy, sociology, politics and religion. This publication was supported by the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. IKKM Books Volume 47 An overview of the whole series can be found at www.ikkm-weimar.de/schriften Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 license https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003188278-8/vanishing-lady-railway-illusions-movement-1-katharina-rein?context=ubx&refId=fe124e6e-8290-43e9-9d48-753bad162c50 Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003188278-13/talking-rocks-illusory-sounds-projections-otherworld-julia-shpinitskaya-riitta-rainio?context=ubx&refId=3aa829a8-8c0b-4103-870a-6fe5a4393e71
Author : Jonathan Stephen Harris
Publisher : Walter Foster
ISBN 13 : 1633223558
Total Pages : 131 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (332 download)
Download or read book The Art of Drawing Optical Illusions written by Jonathan Stephen Harris and published by Walter Foster. This book was released on 2017-11 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From impossible shapes to three-dimensional sketches and trick art, you won't believe your eyes as you learn to draw optical illusions in graphite and colored pencil. Perfect for beginning artists, The Art of Drawing Optical Illusions begins with a basic introduction to optical illusions and how they work. Jonathan Stephen Harris then guides you step-by-step in creating mind-blowing pencil drawings, starting with basic optical illusions and progressing to more difficult two- and three-dimensional trick art. Perspective and dimension are difficult to capture for both beginning and established artists, but now you can hone those skills in the most unique way possible, while also exercising your mind with these brain-boosting, unbelievable tricks!
Author : Laura Fisher
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780713723168
Total Pages : 143 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (231 download)
Download or read book Quilts of Illusion written by Laura Fisher and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Richard Shone
Publisher : Thames & Hudson
ISBN 13 : 0500771499
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (7 download)
Download or read book The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss written by Richard Shone and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2013-04-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exemplary survey that reassesses the impact of the most important books to have shaped art history through the twentieth century Written by some of today’s leading art historians and curators, this new collection provides an invaluable road map of the field by comparing and reexamining canonical works of art history. From Émile Mâle’s magisterial study of thirteenth-century French art, first published in 1898, to Hans Belting’s provocative Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, the book provides a concise and insightful overview of the history of art, told through its most enduring literature. Each of the essays looks at the impact of a single major book of art history, mapping the intellectual development of the writer under review, setting out the premises and argument of the book, considering its position within the broader field of art history, and analyzing its significance in the context of both its initial reception and its afterlife. An introduction by John-Paul Stonard explores how art history has been forged by outstanding contributions to scholarship, and by the dialogues and ruptures between them.
Author : Arthur Gilman Shapiro
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019979460X
Total Pages : 833 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)
Download or read book The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions written by Arthur Gilman Shapiro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visual illusions are compelling phenomena that draw attention to the brain's capacity to construct our perceptual world. The Compendium is a collection of over 100 chapters on visual illusions, written by the illusion creators or by vision scientists who have investigated mechanisms underlying the phenomena. --
