Download or read book Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness written by Jason Holt and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2003-02-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its discovery nearly thirty years ago, the phenomenon of blindsight—vision without visual consciousness—has been the source of great controversy in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and the neurosciences. Despite the fact that blindsight is widely acknowledged to be a critical test-case for theories of mind, Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness is the first extended treatment of the phenomenon from a philosophical perspective. Holt argues, against much received wisdom, for a thorough-going materialism—the view not only that mental states are brain states, but (much more controversially) that mental properties are physical as well. Designed not only for philosophers and scientists, Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness has something to say to anyone interested in the mystery of the human mind and in how philosophers and scientists are working toward solving that mystery.
Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Nature of Consciousness written by Ned Block and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997-09-10 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, this reader brings together most of the principal texts in philosophy (and a small set of related key works in neuropsychology) on consciousness through 1997, and includes some forthcoming articles. Its extensive coverage strikes a balance between seminal works of the past few decades and the leading edge of philosophical research on consciousness.As no other anthology currently does, The Nature of Consciousness provides a substantial introduction to the field, and imposes structure on a vast and complicated literature, with sections covering stream of consciousness, theoretical issues, consciousness and representation, the function of consciousness, subjectivity and the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, qualia, and monitoring conceptions of consciousness. Of the 49 contributions, 18 are either new or have been adapted from a previous publication.
Download or read book The Freeze Frame Revolution written by Peter Watts and published by Tachyon Publications. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This—THIS—is the cutting edge of science fiction.” —Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code—and unavoidable casualties. Note from the publisher: The red letters in the print edition (highlighted letters in the e-book) indicate special bonus content.
Download or read book Consciousness Lost and Found written by Lawrence Weiskrantz and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-06-03 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of `consciousness' is intrinsically related to one's awareness of one's self, of time, and of the physical world. What, then, can be learned about consciousness from people who have suffered brain damage such as amnesia which affects their awareness? This is the question explored by Lawrence Weiskrantz, a distinguished neuropsychologist who has worked with such patients over 30 years. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Consciousness Lost and Found provides a unique perspective on one of the most challenging issues in science today.
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
Download or read book Echopraxia written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts' Echopraxia, the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself. Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he's turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out. Now he's trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn't yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call "The Angels of the Asteroids." Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Blindsight A Case Study and Implications written by L. Weiskrantz and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1986-10-16 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of patients blind from damage to the neocortex have revealed that some can discriminate certain visual events within their 'blind' fields. They are not aware that they can do so, however - they think that they are only guessing. This book is an account of research into a particular case of this 'blindsight' phenomenon. It also discusses the historical and neurological background, and reviews other cases and issues. - ;Damage to a particular area of the brain - the neocortex - is generally understood to result in blindness. Studies of some patients suffering from this form of blindness have nevertheless revealed that they can discriminate certain types of visual events within their 'blind' fields. They are not aware that they can do so, however - they think that they are only guessing. This phenomenon has been termed 'blindsight'. The present book gives an account of research over a number of years into a particular case of blindsight, together with a discussion of the historical and neurological background, a review of cases reported by other investigators, and a number of theoretical and practical issues and implications. - ;PART I: Background; D.B.: Clinical history and early testing; PART II: Reaching for randomly located targets; 'Presence' versus 'absence'; Visual acuity; Movement thresholds; Discrimination of orientation; 'Form' discrimination; Detection with slow rate of onset; The natural blind-spot (optic disc) within the scotoma; Left versus right eye; Detection of direction of contrast; 'Waves'; Matching between impaired and intact fields; Matching within the impaired field; Double dissociations between form and detection; Standard situation; PART III: Review of other cases; Status, issues, and implications; References; Indexes. -
Download or read book Sensory Blending written by Ophelia Deroy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synaesthesia is a strange sensory blending: synaesthetes report experiences of colours or tastes associated with particular sounds or words. This volume presents new essays by scientists and philosophers exploring what such cases can tell us about the nature of perception and its boundaries with illusion and imagination.
Download or read book Blindsight written by Lawrence Weiskrantz and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-03-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of Blindsight, written by Lawrence Weiskrantz was an important and highly cited account of studies of the phenomenon - Blindsight. The updated edition retains the original text of the first edition, but brings the book up to date with developments in this area in the past decade.
Download or read book The Significance of Consciousness written by Charles Siewert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.
Download or read book The Nature of Consciousness written by Mark Rowlands and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Nature of Consciousness, Mark Rowlands develops an innovative account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, one that has significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. The most significant feature of consciousness is its dual nature: consciousness can be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed. Rowlands offers a clear and philosophically insightful discussion of the main positions in this fast-moving debate, and argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology and cognitive science.
Download or read book The Nature of Consciousness written by Susan Pockett and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book Description: Few books about consciousness get to the nitty gritty as quickly as this one. By the end of the preface, the essence of the novel hypothesis that is at the heart of the book is clear. The reader is then taken on a stimulating intellectual journey that ranges from ancient Hindu religious texts to the most up-to-the minute papers in the neuroscience literature as the author supports and defends the hypothesis. If you have any interest at all in the academic field of consciousness studies, don't miss this book!
Download or read book Mind Time written by Benjamin Libet and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our subjective inner life is what really matters to us as human beings--and yet we know relatively little about how it arises. Over a long and distinguished career Benjamin Libet has conducted experiments that have helped us see, in clear and concrete ways, how the brain produces conscious awareness. For the first time, Libet gives his own account of these experiments and their importance for our understanding of consciousness. Most notably, Libet's experiments reveal a substantial delay--the mind time of the title--before any awareness affects how we view our mental activities. If all conscious awarenesses are preceded by unconscious processes, as Libet observes, we are forced to conclude that unconscious processes initiate our conscious experiences. Freely voluntary acts are found to be initiated unconsciously before an awareness of wanting to act--a discovery with profound ramifications for our understanding of free will. How do the physical activities of billions of cerebral nerve cells give rise to an integrated conscious subjective awareness? How can the subjective mind affect or control voluntary actions? Libet considers these questions, as well as the implications of his discoveries for the nature of the soul, the identity of the person, and the relation of the non-physical subjective mind to the physical brain that produces it. Rendered in clear, accessible language, Libet's experiments and theories will allow interested amateurs and experts alike to share the experience of the extraordinary discoveries made in the practical study of consciousness.
Download or read book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness written by Kathleen V. Wider and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Kathleen V. Wider discusses Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of consciousness in Being and Nothingness in light of recent work by analytic philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. She brings together phenomenological and scientific understandings of the nature of consciousness and argues that the two approaches can strengthen and suppport each other. Work on consciousness from two very different philosophical traditions—the continental and analytic—contributes to her explanation of the deep-seated intuition that all consciousness is self-consciousness.
Download or read book The Memory of Whiteness written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published by Orb Books. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An early novel from Science Fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson, The Memory of Whiteness is now available for the first time in decades. In 3229 A.D., human civilization is scattered among the planets, moons, and asteroids of the solar system. Billions of lives depend on the technology derived from the breakthroughs of the greatest physicist of the age, Arthur Holywelkin. But in the last years of his life, Holywelkin devoted himself to building a strange, beautiful, and complex musical instrument that he called The Orchestra. Johannes Wright has earned the honor of becoming the Ninth Master of Holywelkin's Orchestra. Follow him on his Grand Tour of the Solar System, as he journeys down the gravity well toward the sun, impelled by a destiny he can scarcely understand, and is pursued by mysterious foes who will tell him anything except the reason for their enmity. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Frontiers of Consciousness written by Lawrence Weiskrantz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-16 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'Frontiers of Consciousness' is a truly interdisciplinary volume on consciousness, one which tackles some of the biggest and most impenetrable problems in the field. Distinctive in its accessibility, authority, and its depth of coverage, the book is a groundbreaking and influential addition to the consciousness literature.
