Download or read book Consciousness written by Christof Koch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the human brain that combines “the leading edge of consciousness science with surprisingly personal and philosophical reflection . . . shedding light on how scientists really think”—this is “science writing at its best” (Times Higher Education). In which a scientist searches for an empirical explanation for phenomenal experience, spurred by his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book—part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation—describes Koch’s search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest—his instinctual (if “romantic”) belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a “fringy” subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work—to uncover the roots of consciousness.
Download or read book Romantic Consciousness written by J. Beer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-06-22 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutionary thinking at the end of the Eighteenth century prompted major English writers to probe the riddle of human consciousness and the ways in which it might differ from 'Being' in a divine or universal sense. In the first of two studies, John Beer traces this question in writings by Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the impact of their ideas on successors such as Keats, De Quincey, Byron and the Shelleys. Relevance to later figures such as the Cambridge Apostles and Tennyson is also discussed.
Download or read book Romanticism and Consciousness written by Harold Bloom and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1970 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Romanticism and Consciousness' is a comprehensive collection of essays on Romanticism-its intellectual and political backgrounds, its place in literary history, its continued relevance to the present age, its relation to psychoanalysis and other modern trends of thought-and on the major English Romantic poets. The topics covered include the relations between nature and consciousness, nature and revolution, and nature and literary form; the principal poets studied are Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Download or read book The Romance of Reality written by Bobby Azarian and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table. According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science.” Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness. Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.
Download or read book Post Romantic Consciousness written by J. Beer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-06-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequel to his Romantic Consciousness, John Beer discusses further questionings of human consciousness; both the degree to which Dickens's conscious dramatizing differs from the subconscious workings of his psyche and the exploration of subliminal consciousness by nineteenth-century psychical researchers.
Download or read book Sincerity s Shadow written by Deborah FORBES and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a work of surprising range and authority, Deborah Forbes refocuses critical discussion of both Romantic and modern poetry. Sincerity's Shadow is a versatile conceptual toolkit for reading poetry. Ever since Wordsworth redefined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," poets in English have sought to represent a "sincere" self-consciousness through their work. Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed by staging its own failures. Self-representation never achieves final sincerity, but rather produces an array of "sincerity effects" that give form to poetry's exploration of self. In essays comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Forbes reveals unexpected convergences of poetic strategy. A lively and convincing dialectic is sustained through detailed readings of individual poems. By preserving the possible claims of sincerity longer than postmodern criticism has tended to, while understanding sincerity in the strictest sense possible, Forbes establishes a new vantage on the purposes of poetry. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. The Personal Universal Sincerity as Integrity in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Rich 2. Before and After Sincerity as Form in the Poetry of Wordsworth, Lowell, Rich, and Plath 3. Sincerity and the Staged Confession The Monologues of Browning, Eliot, Berryman, and Plath 4. The Drama of Breakdown and the Breakdown of Drama The Charismatic Poetry of Byron and Sexton 5. Agnostic Sincerity The Poet as Observer in the Work of Keats, Bishop, and Merrill Conclusion Notes Index From the Conclusion "In spite of modern experiments in communal authorship, writing poetry remains one of the most individual of acts, and yet, because it provides the ground upon which the paradoxes of self-consciousness can move most freely, one of the acts most skeptical about the authority of any individual claim to self-understanding. . . . In undertaking its experiments, poetry may separate itself from certain contexts (economic, political, historical), but is itself as local and concrete as these contexts, an experience as well as a meditation on our experiences. In its particularity, its flexibility, its sensual and sonic complexity, its consideration of the extra-rational experiences of pleasure and desire, and above all in the ways in which it speaks with both more and less authority, more and less presence than an actual human voice, poetry offers us the experience of the unknown at the core of proposed self-knowledge. This is lyric poetry's enduring -- though not sole -- claim on us."
Download or read book The Feeling of Life Itself written by Christof Koch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking argument that consciousness—more widespread than previously assumed—is the feeling of being alive, not a type of computation or a clever hack In The Feeling of Life Itself, Christof Koch offers a straightforward definition of consciousness as any subjective experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted—the feeling of being alive. Psychologists study which cognitive operations underpin a given conscious perception. Neuroscientists track the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the organ of the mind. But why the brain and not, say, the liver? How can the brain—three pounds of highly excitable matter, a piece of furniture in the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as any other piece—give rise to subjective experience? Koch argues that what is needed to answer these questions is a quantitative theory that starts with experience and proceeds to the brain. In The Feeling of Life Itself, Koch outlines such a theory, based on integrated information. Koch describes how the theory explains many facts about the neurology of consciousness and how it has been used to build a clinically useful consciousness meter. The theory predicts that many, and perhaps all, animals experience the sights and sounds of life; consciousness is much more widespread than conventionally assumed. Contrary to received wisdom, however, Koch argues that programmable computers will not have consciousness. Even a perfect software model of the brain is not conscious. Its simulation is fake consciousness. Consciousness is not a special type of computation—it is not a clever hack. Consciousness is about being.
Download or read book Image of the Sea written by Howard F. Isham and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the unprecedented surge or oceanic feeling in the aesthetic expression of the romantic century. As secular thought began to displace the certainties of a sacral universe, the oceans that give life to our planet offered a symbol of eternity, rooted in the experience of nature rather than Biblical tradition. Images of the sea permeated the minds of the early Romantics, became a significant ingredient of romantic expression, and continued to emerge in the language, literature, art, and music of the nineteenth century. These pages document the evidence for this oceanic consciousness in some of the most creative minds of that century.
Download or read book On Romantic Love written by Berit Brogaard and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic love presents some of life's most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? In On Romantic Love, Berit Brogaard attempts to get to the bottom of love's many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real life and accessible explanations of the neuroscience underlying our wildest passions. Against the grain, Brogaard argues that love is an emotion; that it can be, at turns, both rational and irrational; and that it can be manifested in degrees. We can love one person more than another and we can love a person a little or a lot or not at all. And love isn't even always something we consciously feel. However, love -- like other emotions, both conscious and not -- is subject to rational control, and falling in or out of it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.
Download or read book Emergence of Mind written by David Herman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology that traces the representation of consciousness and mind creation in English literature from 700 to the present.
Download or read book The Psychology of Romantic Love written by Robert A. Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1988-11 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By retelling the myth of Tristan and Iseult, the author provides an illuminating exploration of the origins and meaning of romantic love. From Romeo and Juliet to the latest romantic novel he offers both women and men insights into their inner selves and the forces at work when we are caught up in the experience of romantic love.
Download or read book Conscious Uncoupling written by Katherine Woodward Thomas and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: And Then They Lived Happily… We enter our romantic relationships with great love, hope, and excitement--we've found the 'one', so we plan and forge our futures together. But sometimes, for many different reasons, relationships come undone; they don't work out. Commonly, we view this as a personal failure, rather than an opportunity. And instead of honoring what we once meant to each other, we hoard bitterness and anger, stewing in shame and resentment. Sometimes even lashing out in destructive and hurtful ways, despite the fact that we’re good people at heart. That's natural: we're almost biologically primed to respond this way. Yet there is another path to the end of a relationship--one filled with mutual respect, kindness, and deep caring. Katherine Woodward Thomas's groundbreaking method, Conscious Uncoupling, provides the valuable skills and tools for you to travel this challenging terrain with these five thoughtful and thought-provoking steps: Step 1: Find Emotional Freedom Step 2: Reclaim Your Power and Your Life Step 3: Break the Pattern, Heal Your Heart Step 4: Become a Love Alchemist Step 5: Create Your Happy Even After Life This paradigm-shifting guide will steer you away from a bitter end and toward a new life that’s empowered and flourishing.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book The Roots of Romanticism written by Isaiah Berlin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".
Download or read book F Ck the System Make Love written by Liana Laga and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The things that are happening on planet Earth these days are more than unbearable. Everyone is aware of it, but no one knows what to do about it. This change needs to be individual. It is up to each of us, and it is our responsibility to make this world a better place. Because it is far from being OK, and there is no evidence more convincing than today's human. But he is free to choose whether he will continue his development on the conscious level or not. Life is a game, but it is hard to play with people who don’t know the rules. Just as each machine has its own instructions for use, it is the same with life and people. And they are actually very simple instructions. When each of us starts working individually, it will join us all together. This book was not written to be liked - it should be, above all, understood. God, Sex, Money, Ego, Morality, (mass)Media, Love, Meditation, Esotericism, Consciousness, Education, etc. - the real holistic view.
Download or read book Conscious Dating written by David Steele and published by Relationship Coaching Institute. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We want to be happy in relationships, but don't know how. The old way of dating and mating simply doesn't work anymore. The rules have changed and most of us don't know what the new rules are. In searching for love, most singles are using trial and error, flying by the seat of their pants, or following bad advice. Conscious Dating does not offer manipulative or deceptive practices that compromise who you are, in fact it helps singles celebrate who they are and see being single as an opportunity and not a disease. This is not just another dating book filled with tired ideas about how to get a man or woman. Conscious Dating provides relationship information and strategies proven and tested with thousands of singles worldwide from a pioneering leader in the field of relationships.
Download or read book We written by Robert A. Johnson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an illuminating explanation of the origins and meaning of romantic love and shows how a proper understanding of its psychological dynamics can revitalize our most important relationships.
