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Thinking About Consciousness
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Book Synopsis Thinking about Consciousness by : David Papineau
Download or read book Thinking about Consciousness written by David Papineau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking About Consciousness is a discussion of recent physicalist ideas about consciousness, written in an accessible style by David Papineau.
Book Synopsis Consciousness and Mind by : David Rosenthal
Download or read book Consciousness and Mind written by David Rosenthal and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2005-11-17 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought (HOT) that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits with and helps sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we're conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications.
Book Synopsis Brain, Consciousness, and God by : Daniel A. Helminiak
Download or read book Brain, Consciousness, and God written by Daniel A. Helminiak and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A constructive critique of neuropsychological research on human consciousness and religious experience that applies the thought of Bernard Lonergan. Brain, Consciousness, and God is a constructive critique of neuroscientific research on human consciousness and religious experience. An adequate epistemology—a theory of knowledge—is needed to address this topic, but today there exists no consensus on what human knowing means, especially regarding nonmaterial realities. Daniel A. Helminiak turns to twentieth-century theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan’s breakthrough analysis of human consciousness and its implications for epistemology and philosophy of science. Lucidly summarizing Lonergan’s key ideas, Helminiak applies them to questions about science, psychology, and religion. Along with Lonergan, eminent theorists in consciousness studies and neuroscience get deserved, detailed attention. Helminiak demonstrates the reality of the immaterial mind and, addressing the Cartesian “mind-body problem,” explains how body and mind could make up one being, a person. Human consciousness is presented not only as awareness of objects, but also as self-presence, the self-conscious experience of human subjectivity, a spiritual reality. Lonergan’s analyses allow us to say exactly what “spiritual” means, and it need have nothing to do with God. Daniel A. Helminiak is Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of many books, including Religion and the Human Sciences: An Approach via Spirituality and The Human Core of Spirituality: Mind as Psyche and Spirit, both also published by SUNY Press.
Book Synopsis Thinking about Consciousness by : David Papineau
Download or read book Thinking about Consciousness written by David Papineau and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2002-04-25 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relation between subjective consciousness and the physical brain is widely regarded as the last mystery facing science. This book argues that there is no real puzzle here. Consciousness seems mysterious, not because of any hidden essence, but only because we think about it in a special way. David Papineau exposes the resulting potential for confusion, and shows that much scientific study of consciousness is misconceived. Modern physical science strongly supports a materialist account of consciousness. But there remains considerable resistance to this, both in philosophy and in the way most people think about the mind; we fall back on a dualist view, that consciousness is not part of the material world. Papineau argues that resistance to materialism is groundless. He offers a detailed analysis of the way human beings think about consciousness, and in particular the way in which we humans think about our conscious states by activating those selfsame states. His careful account of this distinctive mode of phenomenal thinking enables him, first, to show that the standard arguments against dualism are unsound, second, to explain why dualism is nevertheless so intuitively persuasive, and third, to expose much contemporary scientific study of consciousness as resting on a confusion. In placing a materialist account of consciousness on a firm foundation, this clear and forthright book lays many traditional problems to rest, and offers escape from immemorial misconceptions about the mind.
Book Synopsis Shadows of the Mind by : Roger Penrose
Download or read book Shadows of the Mind written by Roger Penrose and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the author's thesis that consciousness, in its manifestation in the human quality of understanding, is doing something that mere computation cannot; and attempts to understand how such non-computational action might arise within scientifically comprehensive physical laws.
Book Synopsis The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness by : Mark Solms
Download or read book The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness written by Mark Solms and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime’s quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain’s obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience.
Book Synopsis Feeling & Knowing by : Antonio Damasio
Download or read book Feeling & Knowing written by Antonio Damasio and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understanding how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.
Book Synopsis Thinking Beyond the Brain by : David Lorimer
Download or read book Thinking Beyond the Brain written by David Lorimer and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness is the hot topic in scientific circles--its precise nature holding huge implications for the future of science as a viable discipline. And with so many recent advances in brain studies, questions of mind and consciousness have become critically important for both theorists and hard scientists. Are we "nothing but a pack of neurons" that will in due course reveal their secrets in the laboratory? Or do our conscious mind and self-awareness stem from some dimension beyond material investigation? How, too, are we to account for "parapsychological" phenomena in which consciousness seems to defy space and time boundaries? These latest contributions to the debate--selected from the annual "Beyond the Brain" conferences--show that it is time for radical rethinking of our theories and methods in investigating phenomena of the human mind.
Book Synopsis Consciousness and the Brain by : Stanislas Dehaene
Download or read book Consciousness and the Brain written by Stanislas Dehaene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2014 BRAIN PRIZE From the acclaimed author of Reading in the Brain and How We Learn, a breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness.
Book Synopsis The Consciousness Instinct by : Michael S. Gazzaniga
Download or read book The Consciousness Instinct written by Michael S. Gazzaniga and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The father of cognitive neuroscience” illuminates the past, present, and future of the mind-brain problem How do neurons turn into minds? How does physical “stuff”—atoms, molecules, chemicals, and cells—create the vivid and various worlds inside our heads? The problem of consciousness has gnawed at us for millennia. In the last century there have been massive breakthroughs that have rewritten the science of the brain, and yet the puzzles faced by the ancient Greeks are still present. In The Consciousness Instinct, the neuroscience pioneer Michael S. Gazzaniga puts the latest research in conversation with the history of human thinking about the mind, giving a big-picture view of what science has revealed about consciousness. The idea of the brain as a machine, first proposed centuries ago, has led to assumptions about the relationship between mind and brain that dog scientists and philosophers to this day. Gazzaniga asserts that this model has it backward—brains make machines, but they cannot be reduced to one. New research suggests the brain is actually a confederation of independent modules working together. Understanding how consciousness could emanate from such an organization will help define the future of brain science and artificial intelligence, and close the gap between brain and mind. Captivating and accessible, with insights drawn from a lifetime at the forefront of the field, The Consciousness Instinct sets the course for the neuroscience of tomorrow.
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 An End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life by : Mark Gober
Download or read book An End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life written by Mark Gober and published by Waterside Productions. This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness creates all material reality. Biological processes do not create consciousness. This conceptual breakthrough turns traditional scientific thinking upside down. In An End to Upside Down Thinking, Mark Gober traces his journey - he explores compelling scientific evidence from a diverse set of disciplines, ranging from psychic phenomena, to near-death experiences, to quantum physics. With cutting-edge thinkers like two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Ervin Laszlo, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences Dr. Dean Radin, and New York Times bestselling author Larry Dossey, MD supporting this thesis, this book will rock the scientific community and mainstream generalists interested in understanding the true nature of reality. Today's disarray around the globe can be linked, at its core, to a fundamental misunderstanding of our reality. This book aims to shift our collective outlook, reshaping our view of human potential and how we treat one another. The book's implications encourage much-needed revisions in science, technology, and medicine. General readers will find comfort in the implied worldview, which will impact their happiness and everyday decisions related to business, health and politics. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time meets Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.
Download or read book Conscious written by Annaka Harris and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "If you’ve ever wondered how you have the capacity to wonder, some fascinating insights await you in these pages.” --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience. What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we? In this wonderfully accessible book, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what might possess it. Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness—allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.
Book Synopsis Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness by : Patrick House
Download or read book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness written by Patrick House and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise, elegant, and thought-provoking exploration of the mystery of consciousness and the functioning of the brain. Despite decades of research, remarkable imagery, and insights from a range of scientific and medical disciplines, the human brain remains largely unexplored. Consciousness has eluded explanation. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers a brilliant overview of the state of modern consciousness research in twenty brief, revealing chapters. Neuroscientist and author Patrick House describes complex concepts in accessible terms, weaving brain science, technology, gaming, analogy, and philosophy into a tapestry that illuminates how the brain works and what enables consciousness. This remarkable book fosters a sense of mystery and wonder about the strangeness of the relationship between our inner selves and our environment.
Book Synopsis Matter and Consciousness by : Paul M. Churchland
Download or read book Matter and Consciousness written by Paul M. Churchland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Matter and Consciousness," Paul Churchland clearly presents the advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical issues. Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism. "A Bradford Book"
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.
Book Synopsis The Conscious Mind by : Zoltan Torey
Download or read book The Conscious Mind written by Zoltan Torey and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-08-08 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech. How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary breakthrough that created the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent mind—a new (“off-line”) internal response system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's “awareness” became self-accessible and reflective—that is, how the human brain acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues, as free will. Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to emerge—because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired “quality,” “cosmic principle,” “circuitry arrangement,” or “epiphenomenon,” as others have argued, but an indispensable working component of the living system's manner of functioning.
