Download or read book Body Consciousness written by Richard Shusterman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-07 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.
Download or read book Consciousness and The Mind Body Problem written by Torin Alter and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-11-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideal for courses in consciousness and the philosophy of mind, Consciousness and The Mind-Body Problem: A Reader presents thirty-three classic and contemporary readings, organized into five sections that cover the major issues in this debate: the challenge for physicalism, physicalist responses, alternative responses, the significance of ignorance, and mental causation. Edited by Torin Alter and Robert J. Howell, the volume features work from such leading figures as Karen Bennett, Ned Block, David J. Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Colin McGinn, David Papineau, and many others.
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 Consciousness Healing written by Marilyn Schlitz and published by Churchill Livingstone. This book was released on 2005 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays from leaders in the emerging field of integral medicine and consciousness research promote a model of healing in which personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and belief systems are viewed as fundamental points of connection between body, mind, spirit, society, and nature.
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.
Download or read book Body Am I written by Moheb Costandi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena. The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes. Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing on recent bodily awareness research, the new science of self-consciousness, and historical milestones in neurology, he describes a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia. Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, Body Am I (the title comes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra) offers new insight into self-consciousness by describing it in terms of bodily awareness.
Download or read book The Embodied Mind written by Thomas R. Verny and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As groundbreaking synthesis that promises to shift our understanding of the mind-brain connection and its relationship with our bodies. We understand the workings of the human body as a series of interdependent physiological relationships: muscle interacts with bone as the heart responds to hormones secreted by the brain, all the way down to the inner workings of every cell. To make an organism function, no one component can work alone. In light of this, why is it that the accepted understanding that the physical phenomenon of the mind is attributed only to the brain? In The Embodied Mind, internationally renowned psychiatrist Dr. Thomas R. Verny sets out to redefine our concept of the mind and consciousness. He brilliantly compiles new research that points to the mind’s ties to every part of the body. The Embodied Mind collects disparate findings in physiology, genetics, and quantum physics in order to illustrate the mounting evidence that somatic cells, not just neural cells, store memory, inform genetic coding, and adapt to environmental changes—all behaviors that contribute to the mind and consciousness. Cellular memory, Verny shows, is not just an abstraction, but a well-documented scientific fact that will shift our understanding of memory. Verny describes single-celled organisms with no brains demonstrating memory, and points to the remarkable case of a French man who, despite having a brain just a fraction of the typical size, leads a normal life with a family and a job. The Embodied Mind shows how intelligence and consciousness—traits traditionally attributed to the brain alone—also permate our entire being. Bodily cells and tissues use the same molecular mechanisms for memory as our brain, making our mind more fluid and adaptable than we could have ever imaged.
Download or read book The Spontaneous Brain written by Georg Northoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 534 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 Integral Consciousness and Sport written by Scott Ford and published by Outskirts Press. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every so often, a rather remarkable disclosure reveals itself that can change our worldview. It can occur through contemplation, reverie, insight, revelation, reading, writing, or for many, actual physical practice. Scott Ford has had such a moment of practice, and his world has never been the same. After reading Scott’s book, perhaps our world will be permanently altered as well. In using his Parallel Mode Process, we are taken into one of the most revered and hallowed places in sports. Ford’s work allows us to abide in the living, breathing essence of the zone, dance in the flow state, and train into it. The book is both a technical as well as intuitive discussion of a new way of contextualizing one’s athletic experience, engaging both left and right brain consciousness, and resulting in nothing less than a satori experience. By engaging in the practice of living in ever-present moment-to-moment awareness, the author creates a non-local consciousness experience that is life-changing. Thus, through Scott’s highly refined work, we enter into the Witness state, a revered state of consciousness that is both unitive and integrated. Sport is the great Western metaphor, a potent medium that teaches us how to realize our sometimes dormant capacities, and at the same time translate the learning into everyday situations. The lessons learned from this book apply directly to all walks of life. Hence, Scott’s discoveries take us into the union of East and West, the spirit and the flesh, through tennis, sport and life. You may never look at a tennis ball in the same way. Barry Robbins, Vice President of ITP International- Senior Teacher and Lineage Holder of ITP (Integral Transformative Practice) Founding Member: Sports, Energy, and Consciousness Group
Download or read book The Mind written by E. Bruce Goldstein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and engaging account of the mind and its connection to the brain. The mind encompasses everything we experience, and these experiences are created by the brain--often without our awareness. Experience is private; we can't know the minds of others. But we also don't know what is happening in our own minds. In this book, E. Bruce Goldstein offers an accessible and engaging account of the mind and its connection to the brain. He takes as his starting point two central questions--what is the mind? and what is consciousness?--and leads readers through topics that range from conceptions of the mind in popular culture to the wiring system of the brain. Throughout, he draws on the latest research, explaining its significance and relevance.
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 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.
Download or read book The Feeling of what Happens written by Antonio R. Damasio and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1999 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of this book is an event in the making. All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic.
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 Dog Body Dog Mind written by Michael Fox and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With extraordinary insight and vision, veterinarian and animal behaviorist Dr. Fox explores the minds and hearts of dogs. Dogs, and all animals, have much to teach their human companions, if only humans knew how to listen. In Dog Body/Dog Mind, Fox seeks to enhance readers' understanding and communication with their canine companions. He helps readers become more fluent in “dog speak,” and to understand what dogs feel, think, and want, strengthening the dog-human bond. Better communication leads to happier dogs and people. Fox also offers a holistic approach to companion animal care and preventive medicine, as well as behavioral advice and training tips that will help guarantee a healthy and happy animal.
Download or read book The Spread Mind written by Riccardo Manzotti and published by . This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Italian philosopher, psychologist and robotics engineer, Manzotti presents an alternative and ecological hypothesis about how consciousness exists in the real world.
Download or read book The Human Being The Mind Consciousness Body And The Emotional Body written by J. Chambers and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For an IndividualSELF to experience life, there must be a Mind. All life experiences are a manifestation of this one basic substance from which all things created originated. || Effective application of a Mind is dependent on the method of thinking. Thinking forms beliefs and conclusions as living energies and vibrations within your IndividualSELF and the environment you participate within. || SOURCE definition of the purpose of the HigherSELF Mind is to create UNIVERSAL mental values of quality that have lasting worth aligned with UNIVERSAL TRUTH. || An IndividualSELF must understand the Physical Body is the result of vibration creation, which evolves from mental thoughts and emotion energies. || In presenting the content within the book, my IndividualSELF desire is to provide UNIVERSAL Creation Principles Of Life foundation knowledge from my Human life experiences and guidance from SOURCE. || www.IndividualSELF.com ||
