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 Conscious Mind in the Physical World written by E.J Squires and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have seen remarkable progress in our detailed understanding of the physical world, from the smallest constituents of atoms to the remotest distances seen by telescopes. However, we have yet to explore the phenomenon of consciousness. Can physical things be conscious or is consciousness something else, forever outside the range of physics? And how does consciousness interact with physical things? A lively account of quantum theory and its puzzles, Conscious Mind in the Physical World examines two developments in particular that have altered the context of discussions about consciousness. One is computer technology, which allows us to make machines that can calculate at speeds far greater than the human brain, while the other is the study of the microscopic world. The book explores philosophical issues such as idealism and free will and speculates on the relationship of consciousness to quantum mechanics. This resource will stimulate physicists with an interest in philosophy, philosophers interested in physics, and anyone fascinated about the waking state of the mind.
Download or read book Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World written by Terry Horgan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of new essays that develop themes from the work of the philosopher Jaegwon Kim.
Download or read book How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe written by John R. Anderson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University The argument John Anderson gives in this book was inspired by the passage above, from the last lecture by one of the pioneers of cognitive science. Newell describes what, for him, is the pivotal question of scientific inquiry, and Anderson gives an answer that is emerging from the study of brain and behavior. Humans share the same basic cognitive architecture with all primates, but they have evolved abilities to exercise abstract control over cognition and process more complex relational patterns. The human cognitive architecture consists of a set of largely independent modules associated with different brain regions. In this book, Anderson discusses in detail how these various modules can combine to produce behaviors as varied as driving a car and solving an algebraic equation, but focuses principally on two of the modules: the declarative and procedural. The declarative module involves a memory system that, moment by moment, attempts to give each person the most appropriate possible window into his or her past. The procedural module involves a central system that strives to develop a set of productions that will enable the most adaptive response from any state of the modules. Newell argued that the answer to his question must take the form of a cognitive architecture, and Anderson organizes his answer around the ACT-R architecture, but broadens it by bringing in research from all areas of cognitive science, including how recent work in brain imaging maps onto the cognitive architecture.
Download or read book Margins of Reality written by Robert G. Jahn and published by ICRL Press. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT HAS MODERN SCIENCE SWEPT UNDER THE RUG? This pioneering work, which sparked intense controversy when it was first published two decades ago, suggests that modern science, in the name of rigor and objectivity, has arbitrarily excluded the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality. Drawing on the results of their first decade of empirical experimentation and theoretical modeling in their Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, the authors reach provocative conclusions about the interaction of human consciousness with physical devices, information-gathering processes, and technological systems. The scientific, personal, and social implications of this revolutionary work are staggering. MARGINS OF REALITY is nothing less than a fundamental reevaluation of how the world really works.
Download or read book Physicalism or Something Near Enough written by Jaegwon Kim and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-03 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: What kind of (or "how much") physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness as the two principal challenges to contemporary physicalism. How can minds exercise their causal powers in a physical world? Is a physicalist account of consciousness possible? The book's starting point is the "supervenience" argument (sometimes called the "exclusion" argument), which Kim reformulates in an extended defense. This argument shows that the contemporary physicalist faces a stark choice between reductionism (the idea that mental phenomena are physically reducible) and epiphenomenalism (the view that mental phenomena are causally impotent). Along the way, Kim presents a novel argument showing that Cartesian substance dualism offers no help with mental causation. Mind-body reduction, therefore, is required to save mental causation. But are minds physically reducible? Kim argues that all but one type of mental phenomena are reducible, including intentional mental phenomena, such as beliefs and desires. The apparent exceptions are the intrinsic, felt qualities of conscious experiences ("qualia"). Kim argues, however, that certain relational properties of qualia, in particular their similarities and differences, are behaviorally manifest and hence in principle reducible, and that it is these relational properties of qualia that are central to their cognitive roles. The causal efficacy of qualia, therefore, is not entirely lost. According to Kim, then, while physicalism is not the whole truth, it is the truth near enough.
Download or read book Consciousness in the Physical World written by Torin Andrew Alter and published by Philosophy of Mind. This book was released on 2015 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Russellian monism, an alternative to the familiar theories in the philosophy of mind that combines attractive components of physicalism and dualism, matter has intrinsic properties that both constitute consciousness and serve as categorical bases for the dispositional properties described in physics. Consciousness in the Physical World collects various works on Russellian monism, including historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces. Most chapters are sympathetic with the view, but some are skeptical. Together, they constitute the first book-length treatment of the view itself, its relationship to other theories, its motivations, and its problems.
Download or read book The Nature of the Physical World written by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mathematics and the Physical World written by Morris Kline and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stimulating account of development of mathematics from arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry, to calculus, differential equations, and non-Euclidean geometries. Also describes how math is used in optics, astronomy, and other phenomena.
Download or read book The Human World in the Physical Universe written by Nicholas Maxwell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it possible for the world as we experience it to exist embedded in the physical universe? How can there be sensory qualities, consciousness, freedom, science and art, friendship, love, justice--all that which gives meaning and value to life--if the world really is more or less as modern science tells us it is? This is the problem that is tackled by this book. The solution proposed is that physics describes only a selected aspect of all that exists--that aspect which determines the way events unfold. Sensory qualities, inner experiences, consciousness, meaning and value, all these exist but lie beyond the scope of physics, and of that part of science that can be reduced to physics. Furthermore, these human features of the world are to be explained and understood, not scientifically, but "personalistically," a kind of understanding distinct from, and not reducible to, science. This view that the world is riddled with what may be called "double comprehensibility" leads to a proposed solution to the philosophical mind/body problem, and to the problem of free will; it leads to a reinterpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution, and to an account of the evolution of consciousness and free will. After a discussion of the location of consciousness in the brain, the book concludes with a proposal as to how academic inquiry might be changed so that it becomes a kind of inquiry rationally designed to help humanity create a more civilized human world in the physical universe.
Download or read book Mind and Cosmos written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Download or read book Making up the Mind written by Chris Frith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Making Up the Mind is the first accessible account of experimental studies showing how the brain creates our mental world. Uses evidence from brain imaging, psychological experiments and studies of patients to explore the relationship between the mind and the brain Demonstrates that our knowledge of both the mental and physical comes to us through models created by our brain Shows how the brain makes communication of ideas from one mind to another possible
Download or read book Supervenience and Mind written by Jaegwon Kim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-11-26 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays presents the core of the work of influential philosopher Jaegwon Kim.
Download or read book The Idea of the World written by Bernardo Kastrup and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous case for the primacy of mind in nature, from philosophy to neuroscience, psychology and physics. The Idea of the World offers a grounded alternative to the frenzy of unrestrained abstractions and unexamined assumptions in philosophy and science today. This book examines what can be learned about the nature of reality based on conceptual parsimony, straightforward logic and empirical evidence from fields as diverse as physics and neuroscience. It compiles an overarching case for idealism - the notion that reality is essentially mental - from ten original articles the author has previously published in leading academic journals. The case begins with an exposition of the logical fallacies and internal contradictions of the reigning physicalist ontology and its popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism. It then advances a compelling formulation of idealism that elegantly makes sense of - and reconciles - classical and quantum worlds. The main objections to idealism are systematically refuted and empirical evidence is reviewed that corroborates the formulation presented here. The book closes with an analysis of the hidden psychological motivations behind mainstream physicalism and the implications of idealism for the way we relate to the world.
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 Perception and the Physical World written by Dieter Heyer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2002-05-22 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perception is a subject of great current interest and one that is is likely to escalate over coming years. The focus of this book is on conceptual and philosophical issues of perception, including the classic notion of unconscious inferences in perception. The book consists of contributions from a group of international researchers who spent a year together as distinguished fellows at the German Centre for Advanced Study.
Download or read book The Disembodied Mind written by JAMES C. AUSTIN and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since classical times we have seen considerable progress in our understanding of the physical world through the disciplines of science. However, when it comes to the mind and its most palpable property, consciousness, we have difficulty attempting any kind of meaningful discussion. Can material things be conscious, or is the mind entirely separate from physics? If we insist on the latter, how does the mind relate to the physical world? Relying more on evidence rooted in the empirical sciences than on standard philosophical arguments, this book disseminates a persuasive and self-consistent model implying an objective mind completely unconnected with anything physical. Moreover it means that the mind has no effect on the physical domain, but, by free volition, is able to navigate its way through a myriad of configurations that constitute the world we experience.
