Download or read book Conscious Experience written by Thomas Metzinger and published by Imprint Academic. This book was released on 1995 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to this book are original articles, representing a cross-section of current philosophical work on consciousness and thereby allowing students and readers from other disciplines to acquaint themselves with the very latest debate, so that they can then pursue their own research interests more effectively. The volume includes a bibliography on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science and brain research, covering the last 25 years and consisting of over 1000 entries in 18 thematic sections, compiled by David Chalmers and Thomas Metzinger.
Download or read book Individual Differences in Conscious Experience written by Robert G. Kunzendorf and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-02-15 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individual Differences in Conscious Experience is intended for readers with philosophical, psychological, or clinical interests in subjective experience. It addresses some difficult but important issues in the study of consciousness, subconsciousness, and self-consciousness. The book’s fourteen chapters are written by renowned, pioneering researchers who, collectively, have published more than fifty books and more than one thousand journal articles. The editors’ introductory chapter frames the book’s subtext: that mind-brain theories embodying the constraints of individual differences in subjective experience should be given greater credence than nomothetic theories ignoring those constraints. The next five chapters describe research and theory pertaining to individual differences in conscious sensations — specifically, individual differences in pain perception, phantom limbs, gustatory sensations, and mental imagery. Then, two succeeding chapters focus on individual differences in subconsciousness. The final six chapters address individual differences in altered states of self-consciousness — dreams, hypnotic phenomena, and various clinical syndromes. (Series B)
Download or read book Consciousness and Experience written by William G. Lycan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sequel to Lycan's Consciousness (1987) continues the elaboration of his general functionalist theory of consciousness, answers the critics of his earlier work, and expands the range of discussion to deal with the many new issues and arguments that have arisen in the intervening years--an extraordinarily fertile period for the philosophical investigation of consciousness. Lycan not only uses the numerous arguments against materialism, and functionalist theories of mind in particular, to gain a more detailed positive view of the structure of the mind, he also targets the set of really hard problems at the center of the theory of consciousness: subjectivity, qualia, and the felt aspect of experience. The key to his own enlarged and fairly argued position, which he calls the "hegemony of representation," is that there is no more to mind or consciousness than can be accounted for in terms of intentionality, functional organization, and in particular, second-order representation of one's own mental states. A Bradford Book
Download or read book Super Consciousness written by Colin Stanley and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending existential and occult thought, a highly acclaimed philosopher explains how we can find profound meaning and joy by inducing states of extreme awareness and emotion Throughout history there have been references and examples in literature, art and philosophy of an increased awareness of life while under the influence of extreme emotions. These have become known as Peak Experiences. Soon after Colin Wilson became aware of this phenomenon in the 1960s, he wondered about its history and how its power could be harnessed, and began a forty-year investigation. In Super Consciousness, we see how such luminaries as Yeats, Blake, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Robert Graves were affected by Peak Experiences, and how it has long been noted that we are least insightful when we are at our lowest ebb. By looking in detail through the different areas where this phenomenon has occurred—and by offering anecdotes and examples of how many people in history (as well as himself) were affected—Wilson reveals a pattern of insight with emotions. He ends the book with an instructional section on achieving power consciousness for yourself.
Download or read book Optimal Experience written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-07-31 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive survey of study on the 'flow' experience, a desirable or optimal state of consciousness that enhances the psychic state.
Download or read book Conscious Experience written by Anil Gupta and published by . This book was released on 2019-02 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to offer an account of conscious experience and of concepts that help us understand empirical reasoning and empirical dialectic. The account offered possesses, it is claimed, two virtues. First, it provides great theoretical freedom. It allows the theoretician freedom to radically reconceive the world. The theoretician may, for example, begin with the conception that colors are genuine qualities of physical bodies and may, in light of empirical findings, shift to the conception that colors are not genuine qualities at all. Second, the account grants empirical reason a great power to constrain: empirical reason can force a particular conception of the self and the world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through a novel treatment of presentation and appearances in the account offered of conscious experience and a novel treatment of ostensive definitions in the account offered of concepts. The argument of the book is buttressed by a critical study of the principal approaches to experience and reason found in the philosophical literature.--
Download or read book In Consciousness we Trust written by Hakwan Lau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Consciousness We Trust is a synthesis of Hakwan Lau's 20-year research programme exploring the neuroscience of consciousness. Discussing studies from his own laboratory, Lau uses various neuroscience techniques to address challenging philosophical questions about the nature of our subjective experience. Considering the qualitative nature of subjective experience, the book reviews the current cognitive neuroscience literature on conscious perception, attention, and metacognition and puts forward a mechanistic account of experience through the context of personal journey. Chapters cover different major theoretical positions, to relate the nature of consciousness to relevant phenomena such as attention, metacognition, rational control, emotion, and sense of agency. This is a must-read for graduate students and researchers in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, and an important contribution to the consciousness literature. This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence.
Download or read book Rethinking Consciousness A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience written by Michael S A Graziano and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A first-class intellectual adventure.” —Brian Greene, author of Until the End of Time Illuminating his groundbreaking theory of consciousness, known as the attention schema theory, Michael S. A. Graziano traces the evolution of the mind over millions of years, with examples from the natural world, to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention and then to construct awareness of the external world and of the self. His theory has fascinating implications for the future: it may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially, and even someday taking the natural consciousness of a person and uploading it into a machine for a digital afterlife.
Download or read book The Conscious Brain written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of consciousness continues to be a subject of great debate in cognitive science. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz's account of consciousness makes two main claims: first consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and, second, consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access memory systems. Neurobiologically, this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience. Prinz also explores the limits of consciousness. We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allows for flexible behavior. Prinz concludes by discussing prevailing philosophical puzzles. He provides a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism, and argues that materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem. The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions, while also surveying, challenging, and extending philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. All readers interested in the nature of consciousness will find Prinz's work of great interest.
Download or read book Dimensions of Conscious Experience written by Paavo Pylkkänen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-12-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is by now commonly agreed that the proper study of consciousness requires a multidisciplinary approach which focuses on the varieties and dimensions of conscious experience from different angles. This book, which is based on a workshop held at the University of Skövde, Sweden, provides a microcosm of the emerging discipline of consciousness studies and focuses on some important but neglected aspects of consciousness. The book brings together philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive and computer science, biology, physics, art and the new media. It contains critical studies of subjectivity vs objectivity, nonconceptuality vs conceptuality, language, evolutionary aspects, neural correlates, microphysical level, creativity, visual arts and dreams. It is suitable as a text-book for a third-year undergraduate or a graduate seminar on consciousness studies. (Series A)
Download or read book The Experience of God written by David Bentley Hart and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the most revered scholars of religion, an incisive explanation of how the word "God" functions in the world's great faiths Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion--God--frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word "God" functions in the world's great theistic faiths. Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity's knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical "moments"--being, consciousness, and bliss--the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points. Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity's experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.
Download or read book The Nature of Experience written by W. H. Sparks and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-11-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study identifies the structures and processes that create consciousness and the conscious experience. The expression of perceptions, memories, dreams, and emotions develop and are enhanced in intrafusal muscle spindles. These expressions, in many cases, are common to us all. We experience the environment as reality in the form of sensations: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, to use the common and traditional identifications. Consciousness is experienced in the intrafusal muscle spindles. The fundamental purpose of the spindles is to control the muscular system. The process of control is the detection of the energy by a second set of receptors, the spindle receptors. The second set of receptors is critical to an explanation of the theory and serves to explain what heretofore has been the unknown factor in conscious experience: the experience of consciousness. The spindle receptor detection is analogous to the detection of the environment by sensory receptors. The difference, of course, is that we are the intrafusal spindles detected by the spindle receptors. It is the efferent impulse activity from the congenitally and experientially configured synaptic activity that enhances the energies developed in the spindles as experience. This process is necessary for the experience of consciousness and the effective control of behavior. For centuries, man has reflected upon the conscious nature of the human species. The Nature of Experience offers a new perspective on this eternal question.
Download or read book The Ancient Origins of Consciousness written by Todd E. Feinberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed, and why all vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates are conscious. How is consciousness created? When did it first appear on Earth, and how did it evolve? What constitutes consciousness, and which animals can be said to be sentient? In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt draw on recent scientific findings to answer these questions—and to tackle the most fundamental question about the nature of consciousness: how does the material brain create subjective experience? After assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem responsible for consciousness, and considering the fossil record of evolution, Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed. About 520 to 560 million years ago, they explain, the great “Cambrian explosion” of animal diversity produced the first complex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of consciousness; simple reflexive behaviors evolved into a unified inner world of subjective experiences. From this they deduce that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and bird. Considering invertebrates, they find that arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and cephalopods (including the octopus) meet many of the criteria for consciousness. The obvious and conventional wisdom–shattering implication is that consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago. Combining evolutionary, neurobiological, and philosophical approaches allows Feinberg and Mallatt to offer an original solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Download or read book Altered States of Consciousness written by Marc Wittmann and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness. During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann shows how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness. Wittmann explains that the relationship between consciousness of time and consciousness of self is close; in extreme circumstances, the experiences of space and self intensify and weaken together. He considers the emergence of the self in waking life and dreams; how our sense of time is distorted by extreme situations ranging from terror to mystical enlightenment; the experience of the moment; and the loss of time and self in such disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Dostoyevsky reported godly bliss during epileptic seizures; neurologists are now investigating the phenomenon of the epileptic aura. Wittmann describes new studies of psychedelics that show how the brain builds consciousness of self and time, and discusses pilot programs that use hallucinogens to treat severe depression, anxiety, and addiction. If we want to understand our consciousness, our subjectivity, Wittmann argues, we must not be afraid to break new ground. Studying altered states of consciousness leads us directly to the heart of the matter: time and self, the foundations of consciousness.
Download or read book The Human Touch written by Michael Frayn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls "the oldest mystery": the world is what we make of it.
Download or read book Stream of Consciousness written by Barry Dainton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth investigation into the phenomenology of conscious experience - the nature of awareness; introspection; phenomenal space and time consciousness. A fascinating and probing study.
Download or read book The Structure of Conscious Experience written by Lee Roy Beach and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There must exist a point at which the molecular and electro-chemical processes that comprise brain function are transformed into rich, orderly conscious experience which seamlessly blends the present moment, what led up to it, and what will follow it. This is the stuff of our everyday lives, and it raises questions about its organization and how that organization facilitates engagement with the world at large. In short, what is the structure of conscious experience and what is gained by it being structured that way? This book argues that the structure is what is familiarly known as narrative form and that the gain is the ability to communicate about one’s experience with oneself and others, as well as to make informed predictions about what will happen in the fundamentally unknowable and potentially dangerous future. In the latter case, because the essence of narrative form is time and causality, structuring events from memory (the past) and from perception (the present) in narrative form causally implies future events (expectations). The potential threat (the bad or the absence of good) of these expected future events can be assessed, and, if required, action can be taken to prevent their occurrence or to diminish their impact. The implications about thinking and action, and about who we are as individuals, are also discussed here.
