Download or read book Consciousness In Four Dimensions Biological Relativity and the Origins of Thought written by Richard M. Pico and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2001-11-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book that will profoundly alter the modern discourse on mind and influence the practice of neuromedicine, neurobiologist/neuropsychiatrist, Richard M. Pico unveils a revolutionary new approach to understanding consciousness that pinpoints its origins in the brain. Called “Biological Relativity,” the approach combines the laws of physics—especially Einstein’s laws of relativity—to the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience, molecular biology, and computational theory to create a coherent four-dimensional model for explaining the origins of life and the emergence of complex biological systems—from the living cell to the thinking brain.In a fascinating, ambitious narrative that draws upon a lifetime of experimental and clinical work, Dr. Pico tells a riveting story that begins in the imponderably distant past, with the first proto-cell that endured long enough to become its own frame of reference—both structurally and temporally—and culminates with the most complex biological referent system known to science, the human brain. He then elaborates his groundbreaking theory through discussions of such things as the origins of language, music, and mathematics. He explains why he believes consciousness is uniquely human, and explores the causes and potential treatments for a variety of thought disorders.
Download or read book Towards a History of Consciousness written by Vwadek P. Marciniak and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards a History of Consciousness: Space, Time, and Death offers a cogent and compelling discussion of the neglected topic of the history of consciousness. An analysis of our postmodern ontology reveals deep but neglected roots. What are those roots and how did they grow? Is there a self without consciousness? What is the relation of the self to the individual? Does the recognition of death contribute to the growth of consciousness? As a survey of western history, this work pushes the boundaries of the understanding of consciousness in intriguing and sometimes provocative directions. This integrative study is intended for the serious, curious student and thinker.
Download or read book Evolution in Four Dimensions revised edition written by Eva Jablonka and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-03-21 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering proposal for a pluralistic extension of evolutionary theory, now updated to reflect the most recent research. This new edition of the widely read Evolution in Four Dimensions has been revised to reflect the spate of new discoveries in biology since the book was first published in 2005, offering corrections, an updated bibliography, and a substantial new chapter. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb's pioneering argument proposes that there is more to heredity than genes. They describe four “dimensions” in heredity—four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic (or non-DNA cellular transmission of traits), behavioral, and symbolic (transmission through language and other forms of symbolic communication). These systems, they argue, can all provide variations on which natural selection can act. Jablonka and Lamb present a richer, more complex view of evolution than that offered by the gene-based Modern Synthesis, arguing that induced and acquired changes also play a role. Their lucid and accessible text is accompanied by artist-physician Anna Zeligowski's lively drawings, which humorously and effectively illustrate the authors' points. Each chapter ends with a dialogue in which the authors refine their arguments against the vigorous skepticism of the fictional “I.M.” (for Ipcha Mistabra—Aramaic for “the opposite conjecture”). The extensive new chapter, presented engagingly as a dialogue with I.M., updates the information on each of the four dimensions—with special attention to the epigenetic, where there has been an explosion of new research. Praise for the first edition “With courage and verve, and in a style accessible to general readers, Jablonka and Lamb lay out some of the exciting new pathways of Darwinian evolution that have been uncovered by contemporary research.” —Evelyn Fox Keller, MIT, author of Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines “In their beautifully written and impressively argued new book, Jablonka and Lamb show that the evidence from more than fifty years of molecular, behavioral and linguistic studies forces us to reevaluate our inherited understanding of evolution.” —Oren Harman, The New Republic “It is not only an enjoyable read, replete with ideas and facts of interest but it does the most valuable thing a book can do—it makes you think and reexamine your premises and long-held conclusions.” —Adam Wilkins, BioEssays
Download or read book Concepts written by Paul Dehn Carleton and published by Paul Dehn Carleton. This book was released on 2004 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Concepts" is a search for theism's roots - coined prototheism - a science of religion. Its notion is: Belief in God is a misconception of the Life Urge emerging from deep in human nature. "Concepts" traces Life's trajectory - from Earth's origin, to consciousness, to today's runaway material culture.
Download or read book When We Are No More written by Abby Smith Rumsey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our memory gives the human species a unique evolutionary advantage. Our stories, ideas, and innovations--in a word, our "culture"--can be recorded and passed on to future generations. Our enduring culture and restless curiosity have enabled us to invent powerful information technologies that give us invaluable perspective on our past and define our future. Today, we stand at the very edge of a vast, uncharted digital landscape, where our collective memory is stored in ephemeral bits and bytes and lives in air-conditioned server rooms. What sources will historians turn to in 100, let alone 1,000 years to understand our own time if all of our memory lives in digital codes that may no longer be decipherable? In When We Are No More Abby Smith Rumsey explores human memory from pre-history to the present to shed light on the grand challenge facing our world--the abundance of information and scarcity of human attention. Tracing the story from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls, to movable type, books, and the birth of the Library of Congress, Rumsey weaves a compelling narrative that explores how humans have dealt with the problem of too much information throughout our history, and indeed how we might begin solve the same problem for our digital future. Serving as a call to consciousness, When We Are No More explains why data storage is not memory; why forgetting is the first step towards remembering; and above all, why memory is about the future, not the past. "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create? We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it." --Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist at Google, at a press conference in February, 2015.
Download or read book Body Electronics written by Thomas Chavez and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2005-05-26 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body electronics is a self-healing system that utilizes nutrient saturation through diet and supplementation. Thomas Chavez learned this discipline under its developer, Dr. John Whitman Ray, and in Body Electronics, Chavez expands it to cover every imaginable trauma and illness. The basis for the approach is the melting of melanin protein complexes (crystals) in the body that develop through years of poor diet, insufficient water, poor bowel ecology, and other factors. The book addresses such topics as how to achieve appropriate levels of nutrient saturation with the right combination of enzymes and minerals; how much water to drink and why it's important; how eating cooked food can be a damaging addiction; and how to achieve a healthy relationship with bacterial flora for intestinal health. In addition to physical wellness, the book addresses spiritual and psychological well being. The results of body electronics have been called miraculous; this book shows why.
Download or read book Preparing to Teach Writing written by James D. Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preparing to Teach Writing, Fourth Edition is a comprehensive survey of theories, research, and methods associated with teaching composition successfully at the middle, secondary, and college levels. Research and theory are examined with the aim of informing teaching. Practicing and prospective writing teachers need the information and strategies this text provides to be effective and well prepared for the many challenges they will face in the classroom. Features Current—combines discussions and references to foundational studies that helped define the field of rhetoric and composition, with updated research, theories, and applications Research based—thorough examination of relevant research in education, literacy, cognition, linguistics, and grammar Steadfast adherence to best practices based on how students learn and on how to provide the most effective writing instruction A Companion Website provides sample assignments and student papers that can be analyzed using the research and theory presented in the text.
Download or read book New Scientist and Science Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Healing Power of Spirituality written by J. Harold Ellens and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-12-30 with total page 1033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume set addresses how the role of spirituality and its constructive expressions in various religions—and outside of formal religion—enhances human personality and experience. Theologian and acclaimed scholar J. Harold Ellens now offers a breakthrough work on the positive impact of faith. In The Healing Power of Spirituality and Religion, an extraordinary group of scholars discuss the latest scientific research into the connection between belief and psychological and physical well-being. Each volume of The Healing Power of Spirituality focuses on a specific aspect of the scientific exploration of faith and well being: volume one examines the healing power of personal spiritualities like I Ching and Transcendentalism; volume two looks at the subject in the context of Christianity, Judaism, and other world faiths; and volume three explores the psychodynamics of healing spirituality and religion, including the role of biochemical and chemical reactions in heightening psychospiritual apperception.
Download or read book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul written by Simona Ginsburg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition from organisms that lacked consciousness to those with consciousness—to minimal subjective experiencing, or, as Aristotle described it, “the sensitive soul”? In this book, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka propose a new theory about the origin of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the transition to basic consciousness. Using a methodology similar to that used by scientists when they identified the transition from non-life to life, Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest a set of criteria, identify a marker for the transition to minimal consciousness, and explore the far-reaching biological, psychological, and philosophical implications. After presenting the historical, neurobiological, and philosophical foundations of their analysis, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose that the evolutionary marker of basic or minimal consciousness is a complex form of associative learning, which they term unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL enables an organism to ascribe motivational value to a novel, compound, non-reflex-inducing stimulus or action, and use it as the basis for future learning. Associative learning, Ginsburg and Jablonka argue, drove the Cambrian explosion and its massive diversification of organisms. Finally, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose symbolic language as a similar type of marker for the evolutionary transition to human rationality—to Aristotle's “rational soul.”
Download or read book New Scientist written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Brain Mind and the Structure of Reality written by Paul L. Nunez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does the brain create the mind, or is some external entity involved? This book synthesizes ideas borrowed from philosophy, religion, and science. Topics range widely from brain imagining of thought processes to quantum mechanics and the essential role of information in brains and physical systems.
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 Biocentrism written by Robert Lanza and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world a US News and World Report cover story called him a genius and a renegade thinker, even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe. Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, toward doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universes genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around. In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe our own from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the readers ideas of life--time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal. The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.
Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Download or read book A New Kind of Science written by Stephen Wolfram and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 1197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public. Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments---illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics---Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe. Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science: from the origin of the Second Law of thermodynamics, to the development of complexity in biology, the computational limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, and the interplay between free will and determinism.
Download or read book Matter and Mind written by Mario Bunge and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses two of the oldest and hardest problems in both science and philosophy: What is matter?, and What is mind? A reason for tackling both problems in a single book is that two of the most influential views in modern philosophy are that the universe is mental (idealism), and that the everything real is material (materialism). Most of the thinkers who espouse a materialist view of mind have obsolete ideas about matter, whereas those who claim that science supports idealism have not explained how the universe could have existed before humans emerged. Besides, both groups tend to ignore the other levels of existence—chemical, biological, social, and technological. If such levels and the concomitant emergence processes are ignored, the physicalism/spiritualism dilemma remains unsolved, whereas if they are included, the alleged mysteries are shown to be problems that science is treating successfully.
