Download or read book Mind Body World written by Michael R. W. Dawson and published by Athabasca University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field's immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science. Examples, cases, and research findings taken from the wide range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists effectively explain and explore the relationship among the three perspectives. Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.
Download or read book The Spontaneous Brain written by Georg Northoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument for a Copernican revolution in our consideration of mental features—a shift in which the world-brain problem supersedes the mind-body problem. Philosophers have long debated the mind-body problem—whether to attribute such mental features as consciousness to mind or to body. Meanwhile, neuroscientists search for empirical answers, seeking neural correlates for consciousness, self, and free will. In this book, Georg Northoff does not propose new solutions to the mind-body problem; instead, he questions the problem itself, arguing that it is an empirically, ontologically, and conceptually implausible way to address the existence and reality of mental features. We are better off, he contends, by addressing consciousness and other mental features in terms of the relationship between world and brain; philosophers should consider the world-brain problem rather than the mind-body problem. This calls for a Copernican shift in vantage point—from within the mind or brain to beyond the brain—in our consideration of mental features. Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, explains that empirical evidence suggests that the brain's spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure are central to aligning and integrating the brain within the world. This spatiotemporal structure allows the brain to extend beyond itself into body and world, creating the “world-brain relation” that is central to mental features. Northoff makes his argument in empirical, ontological, and epistemic-methodological terms. He discusses current models of the brain and applies these models to recent data on neuronal features underlying consciousness and proposes the world-brain relation as the ontological predisposition for consciousness.
Download or read book Mind in a Physical World written by Jaegwon Kim and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. Kim construes the mind-body problem as that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical. Among other points, he redefines the roles of supervenience and emergence in the discussion of the mind-body problem. Arguing that various contemporary accounts of mental causation are inadequate, he offers his own partially reductionist solution on the basis of a novel model of reduction. Retaining the informal tone of the lecture format, the book is clear yet sophisticated.
Download or read book The Mind Body Problem written by Jonathan Westphal and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the mind–body problem, covering all the proposed solutions and offering a powerful new one. Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the mind is physical, we cannot see how. If we cannot see how the mind is physical, we cannot see how it can interact with the body. And if the mind is not physical, it cannot interact with the body. Or so it seems. In this book the philosopher Jonathan Westphal examines the mind-body problem in detail, laying out the reasoning behind the solutions that have been offered in the past and presenting his own proposal. The sharp focus on the mind-body problem, a problem that is not about the self, or consciousness, or the soul, or anything other than the mind and the body, helps clarify both problem and solutions. Westphal outlines the history of the mind-body problem, beginning with Descartes. He describes mind-body dualism, which claims that the mind and the body are two different and separate things, nonphysical and physical, and he also examines physicalist theories of mind; antimaterialism, which proposes limits to physicalism and introduces the idea of qualia; and scientific theories of consciousness. Finally, Westphal examines the largely forgotten neutral monist theories of mind and body, held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which attempt neither to extract mind from matter nor to dissolve matter into mind. Westphal proposes his own version of neutral monism. This version is unique among neutral monist theories in offering an account of mind-body interaction.
Download or read book Mind Ecologies written by Matthew Crippen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatism—a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and embodied cognitive science—is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists reject as too narrow. Matthew Crippen, a philosopher of mind, and Jay Schulkin, a behavioral neuroscientist, offer an innovative interdisciplinary theory of mind. They argue that pragmatism in combination with phenomenology is not only able to give an unusually persuasive rendering of how we think, feel, experience, and act in the world but also provides the account most consistent with current evidence from cognitive science and neurobiology. Crippen and Schulkin contend that cognition, emotion, and perception are incomplete without action, and in action they fuse together. Not only are we embodied subjects whose thoughts, emotions, and capacities comprise one integrated system; we are living ecologies inseparable from our surroundings, our cultures, and our world. Ranging from social coordination to the role of gut bacteria and visceral organs in mental activity, and touching upon fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and plant cognition, Crippen and Schulkin stress the role of aesthetics, emotions, interests, and moods in the ongoing enactment of experience. Synthesizing philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, and the history of science, Mind Ecologies offers a broad and deep exploration of evidence for the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of mind.
Download or read book Being There written by Andy Clark and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998-01-23 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.
Download or read book How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body written by David R. Hamilton, PHD and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘This book will teach you that healing by thought alone is not only possible, but it is a reality.’ - Dr Joe Dispenza, New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Supernatural There is no longer any doubt that the way we think affects our bodies: countless scientific studies have shown this to be true. For former pharmaceutical scientist Dr David Hamilton, the testing of new drugs highlighted how profoundly the mind and body are connected. Time and time again, the control group of patients in drug trials improved at similar rates to those who actually received the medicines. Astounded, Dr Hamilton decided to change the direction of his work to explore the relationship between the mind and the body. This bestselling acclaimed book was first published 10 years ago. In it, Dr Hamilton explores the effect of visualization, belief and positive thinking on the body, and shows how using our imagination and mental processes can stimulate our own defences and healing systems to combat disease, pain and illness. In this new edition, Dr Hamilton has added four new chapters to discuss the latest cutting-edge information and extraordinary new techniques. These include using imagery to stimulate the immune system - a method that can benefit cancer patients undergoing conventional treatment - effectively using the mind to speed up rehabilitation from stroke, and powerful visualization strategies to help facilitate recovery from injury and illness.
Download or read book How the Body Shapes the Way We Think written by Rolf Pfeifer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-10-27 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of embodied intelligence and its implications points toward a theory of intelligence in general; with case studies of intelligent systems in ubiquitous computing, business and management, human memory, and robotics. How could the body influence our thinking when it seems obvious that the brain controls the body? In How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard demonstrate that thought is not independent of the body but is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it. They argue that the kinds of thoughts we are capable of have their foundation in our embodiment—in our morphology and the material properties of our bodies. This crucial notion of embodiment underlies fundamental changes in the field of artificial intelligence over the past two decades, and Pfeifer and Bongard use the basic methodology of artificial intelligence—"understanding by building"—to describe their insights. If we understand how to design and build intelligent systems, they reason, we will better understand intelligence in general. In accessible, nontechnical language, and using many examples, they introduce the basic concepts by building on recent developments in robotics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology to outline a possible theory of intelligence. They illustrate applications of such a theory in ubiquitous computing, business and management, and the psychology of human memory. Embodied intelligence, as described by Pfeifer and Bongard, has important implications for our understanding of both natural and artificial intelligence.
Download or read book The Biological Mind written by Alan Jasanoff and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering neuroscientist argues that we are more than our brains To many, the brain is the seat of personal identity and autonomy. But the way we talk about the brain is often rooted more in mystical conceptions of the soul than in scientific fact. This blinds us to the physical realities of mental function. We ignore bodily influences on our psychology, from chemicals in the blood to bacteria in the gut, and overlook the ways that the environment affects our behavior, via factors varying from subconscious sights and sounds to the weather. As a result, we alternately overestimate our capacity for free will or equate brains to inorganic machines like computers. But a brain is neither a soul nor an electrical network: it is a bodily organ, and it cannot be separated from its surroundings. Our selves aren't just inside our heads -- they're spread throughout our bodies and beyond. Only once we come to terms with this can we grasp the true nature of our humanity.
Download or read book Learning With the Body in Mind written by Eric Jensen and published by Corwin. This book was released on 2000-02-16 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalize on the high energy that is natural to young learners! Research suggests that movement activities are an integral part of the learning process. From role plays to relays, learning is better activated when the body gets involved. Whether you're a primary school teacher or a secondary maths teacher, you'll discover how to use movement to increase intrinsic motivation, improve attitudes, strengthen memory, and boost achievement in your classroom. This highly readable book offers a valuable compendium of practical strategies backed by clinical and classroom research for engaging students at all levels.
Download or read book The Body Keeps the Score written by Bessel A. Van der Kolk and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.
Download or read book How the Body Knows Its Mind written by Sian Beilock and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Takes you inside the amazing science of how the body affects the mind, and shows how to use that wisdom to live smarter and maximize what your body teaches your mind"--
Download or read book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own written by Sandra Blakeslee and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-09-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling, cutting-edge book, two generations of science writers explore the exciting science of “body maps” in the brain–and how startling new discoveries about the mind-body connection can change and improve our lives. Why do you still feel fat after losing weight? What makes video games so addictive? How can “practicing” your favorite sport in your imagination improve your game? The answers can be found in body maps. Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self, inside and out. In concert, they create your physical and emotional awareness and your sense of being a whole, feeling self in a larger social world. Moreover, your body maps are profoundly elastic. Your self doesn’t begin and end with your physical body but extends into the space around you. This space morphs every time you put on or take off clothes, ride a bike, or wield a tool. When you drive a car, your personal body space grows to envelop it. When you play a video game, your body maps automatically track and emulate the actions of your character onscreen. When you watch a scary movie, your body maps put dread in your stomach and send chills down your spine. If your body maps fall out of sync, you may have an out-of-body experience or see auras around other people. The Body Has a Mind of Its Own explains how you can tap into the power of body maps to do almost anything better–whether it is playing tennis, strumming a guitar, riding a horse, dancing a waltz, empathizing with a friend, raising children, or coping with stress. The story of body maps goes even further, providing a fresh look at the causes of anorexia, bulimia, obsessive plastic surgery, and the notorious golfer’s curse “the yips.” It lends insights into culture, language, music, parenting, emotions, chronic pain, and more. Filled with illustrations, wonderful anecdotes, and even parlor tricks that you can use to reconfigure your body sense, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own will change the way you think–about the way you think. “The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be.” –Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain “Through a stream of fascinating and entertaining examples, Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee illustrate how our perception of ourselves, and indeed the world, is not fixed but is surprisingly fluid and easily modified. They have created the best book ever written about how our sense of ‘self’ emerges from the motley collection of neurons we call the brain.” –Jeff Hawkins, co-author of On Intelligence “The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be.” –Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain “A marvelous book. In the last ten years there has been a paradigm shift in understanding the brain and how its various specialized regions respond to environmental challenges. In addition to providing a brilliant overview of recent revolutionary discoveries on body image and brain plasticity, the book is sprinkled with numerous insights.” –V. S. Ramachandran, M.D., director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego
Download or read book Sex between Body and Mind written by Katie Sutton and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas about human sexuality and sexual development changed dramatically across the first half of the 20th century. As scholars such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll, and Karen Horney in Berlin and Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, and Helene Deutsch in Vienna were recognized as leaders in their fields, the German-speaking world quickly became the international center of medical-scientific sex research—and the birthplace of two new and distinct professional disciplines, sexology and psychoanalysis. This is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries. Although psychoanalysis was often considered part of a broader “sexual science,” sexologists increasingly distanced themselves from its mysterious concepts and clinical methods. Instead, they turned to more pragmatic, interventionist therapies—in particular, to the burgeoning field of hormone research, which they saw as crucial to establishing their own professional relevance. As sexology and psychoanalysis diverged, heated debates arose around concerns such as the sexual life of the child, the origins and treatment of homosexuality and transgender phenomena, and female frigidity. This new story of the emergence of two separate approaches to the study of sex demonstrates that the distinctions between them were always part of a dialogic and competitive process. It fundamentally revises our understanding of the production of modern sexual subjects.
Download or read book Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind written by William Jaworski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind is the first book to show how hylomorphism can be used to solve mind-body problems--persistent problems understanding how thought, feeling, perception, and other mental phenomena fit into the physical world described by our best science. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. Some individuals, paradigmatically living things, consist of materials that are structured or organized in various ways. Those structures are responsible for individuals being the kinds of things they are, and having the kinds of powers or capacities they have. From a hylomorphic perspective, mind-body problems are byproducts of a worldview that rejects structure. Hylomorphic structure carves out distinctive individuals from the otherwise undifferentiated sea of matter and energy described by our best physics, and it confers on those individuals distinctive powers, including the powers to think, feel, and perceive. A worldview that rejects hylomorphic structure lacks a basic principle which distinguishes the parts of the physical universe that can think, feel, and perceive from those that can't, and without such a principle, the existence of those powers in the physical world can start to look inexplicable and mysterious. But if mental phenomena are structural phenomena, as hylomorphism claims, then they are uncontroversially part of the physical world, for on the hylomorphic view, structure is uncontroversially part of the physical world. Hylomorphism thus provides an elegant way of solving mind-body problems.
Download or read book The Body written by Yasuo Yuasa and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1987-07-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores mind-body philosophy from an Asian perspective. It sheds new light on a problem central in modern Western thought. Yuasa shows that Eastern philosophy has generally formulated its view of mind-body unity as an achievement a state to be acquired—rather than as essential or innate. Depending on the individual's own developmental state, the mind-body connection can vary from near dissociation to almost perfect integration. Whereas Western mind-body theories have typically asked what the mind-body is, Yuasa asks how the mind-body relation varies on a spectrum from the psychotic to the yogi, from the debilitated to the athletic, from the awkward novice to the master musician. Yuasa first examines various Asian texts dealing with Buddhist meditation, kundalini yoga, acupuncture, ethics, and epistemology, developing a concept of the "dark consciousness" (not identical with the psychoanalytic unconscious) as a vehicle for explaining their basic view. He shows that the mind-body image found in those texts has a striking correlation to themes in contemporary French phenomenology, Jungian psychoanalysis, psychomatic medicine, and neurophysiology. The book clears the ground for a provocative meeting between East and West, establishing a philosophical region on which science and religion can be mutually illuminating.
Download or read book Winning the War in Your Mind written by Craig Groeschel and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MORE THAN 500,000 COPIES SOLD! Are your thoughts out of control--just like your life? Do you long to break free from the spiral of destructive thinking? Let God's truth become your battle plan to win the war in your mind! We've all tried to think our way out of bad habits and unhealthy thought patterns, only to find ourselves stuck with an out-of-control mind and off-track daily life. Pastor and New York Times bestselling author Craig Groeschel understands deeply this daily battle against self-doubt and negative thinking, and in this powerful new book he reveals the strategies he's discovered to change your mind and your life for the long-term. Drawing upon Scripture and the latest findings of brain science, Groeschel lays out practical strategies that will free you from the grip of harmful, destructive thinking and enable you to live the life of joy and peace that God intends you to live. Winning the War in Your Mind will help you: Learn how your brain works and see how to rewire it Identify the lies your enemy wants you to believe Recognize and short-circuit your mental triggers for destructive thinking See how prayer and praise will transform your mind Develop practices that allow God's thoughts to become your thoughts God has something better for your life than your old ways of thinking. It's time to change your mind so God can change your life.
