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 The Conscious Closet written by Elizabeth L. Cline and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From journalist, fashionista, and clothing resale expert Elizabeth L. Cline, “the Michael Pollan of fashion,”* comes the definitive guide to building an ethical, sustainable wardrobe you'll love. Clothing is one of the most personal expressions of who we are. In her landmark investigation Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline first revealed fast fashion’s hidden toll on the environment, garment workers, and even our own satisfaction with our clothes. The Conscious Closet shows exactly what we can do about it. Whether your goal is to build an effortless capsule wardrobe, keep up with trends without harming the environment, buy better quality, seek out ethical brands, or all of the above, The Conscious Closet is packed with the vital tools you need. Elizabeth delves into fresh research on fashion’s impacts and shows how we can leverage our everyday fashion choices to change the world through style. Inspired by her own revelatory journey getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth shares exactly how to build a more ethical wardrobe, starting with a mindful closet clean-out and donating, swapping, or selling the clothes you don't love to make way for the closet of your dreams. The Conscious Closet is not just a style guide. It is a call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth—fashion—into a force for good. Readers will learn where our clothes are made and how they’re made, before connecting to a global and impassioned community of stylish fashion revolutionaries. In The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth shows us how we can start to truly love and understand our clothes again—without sacrificing the environment, our morals, or our style in the process. *Michelle Goldberg, Newsweek/The Daily Beast

Download or read book Conscious written by Annaka Harris and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "If you’ve ever wondered how you have the capacity to wonder, some fascinating insights await you in these pages.” --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience. What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we? In this wonderfully accessible book, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what might possess it. Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness—allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.

Download or read book The Conscious Brain written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of consciousness continues to be a subject of great debate in cognitive science. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz's account of consciousness makes two main claims: first consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and, second, consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access memory systems. Neurobiologically, this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience. Prinz also explores the limits of consciousness. We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allows for flexible behavior. Prinz concludes by discussing prevailing philosophical puzzles. He provides a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism, and argues that materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem. The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions, while also surveying, challenging, and extending philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. All readers interested in the nature of consciousness will find Prinz's work of great interest.

Download or read book The Conscious Mind written by Zoltan Torey and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-08-08 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech. How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary breakthrough that created the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent mind—a new (“off-line”) internal response system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's “awareness” became self-accessible and reflective—that is, how the human brain acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues, as free will. Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to emerge—because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired “quality,” “cosmic principle,” “circuitry arrangement,” or “epiphenomenon,” as others have argued, but an indispensable working component of the living system's manner of functioning.

Download or read book The Conscious Parent written by Shefali Tsabary and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Conscious parenting is about becoming mindful of your behaviour and engaging with your child as an individual. Dr Tsabary inspires parents to get back in touch with their emotions and shed the layers of baggage they have inherited during their own life and are unconsciously heaping on their children. As they become 'conscious' in their parenting, so parents can transform their relationship with their offspring and raise happy, well-adjusted children. The Conscious Parent is already transforming the way people are parenting through its sales in the US where it's spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Oprah described the book as 'The most profound book on parenting I've ever read' and Eckhart Tolle has said 'becoming a conscious parent is the greatest gift you can give your child.' The book features a foreword by His Holiness The Dalai Lama.

Download or read book The Conscious Creative written by Kelly Small and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An actionable guide to mindfulness and practical ethics for any creative professional who wants to make a living without selling their soul. It can be difficult to live according to our values in a complicated world. At a time when capitalism seems most unforgiving but the need for paying work remains high, it is important to learn how we can be more mindful and intentional about our impact — personal, social, economic, and environmental. As designer and creative director Kelly Small had to do to navigate a crisis of ethics and burnout in their career in advertising, we can admit our complicity in problematic systems and take on the responsibility of letting our own conscience guide our decisions. Start with one or many of these 100+ rigorously researched, ultra-practical action steps: Co-create and collaborate Get obsessed with accessibility Demand diverse teams Commit to self-care Make ethics a competitive edge Be mindful of privilege Create for empowerment, not exploitation With a humorous and irreverent tone, Small reveals how when we release unnecessary judgement and become action-oriented, we can clarify the complicated business of achieving an ethical practice in the creative industries. Discover the power of incremental, positive changes in our daily work-lives and the fulfillment of purposeful work.

Download or read book The Conscious Stream written by Denise Ingebo-Barth and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2000-12-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Conscious Stream describes a theory built on the idea that consciousness--a stream of separate conscious instants, like frames making up a reel of film--is formed as trajectories circulate around the nervous system circuitry. In this model, a trajectory is a series of neuron groups energized in turn. (Picture it as a sequence of lights flashing around a marquee or perhaps as a comet blazing through a linked series of packed neuron groups--through circuits of the nervous system.) When a trajectory passes through the thalamus--a central area of the brain--an instant of experience is inserted into our lifelong conscious stream. This instant of experience can be a sensation, thought, or feeling. The particular instant depends on the source of the trajectory. When a trajectory is initiated by sound waves to the ear, and passes through the thalamus, for example, a sensation (in this case, a sound) enters the conscious stream. As the description of this model progresses, we see how a trajectory from the thalamus to the cortex is recorded, and becomes a part of a network of records . . . and how, when concurrent trajectories in the cortical network converge and generate a trajectory back to the thalamus, a thought enters the conscious stream. In addition, as trajectories evolve--being repeated, prolonged, released or compounded-emotional feelings enter the conscious stream. Over time, patterns of invigoration and relaxation, stagnation and relief are generated, forming our life's emotional quality. Finally, the model shows how links of activity form a cycle . . . and how a pattern of cycles forms an "activity." Patterns of activities, in turn, form a lifestyle. In this model, then, the character of circulation in the nervous system reflects emotional fitness. Although designed primarily for students of neuroscience, this proposed model may also be evaluated by those having an interest in the physical processes underlying emotional fitness.

Download or read book The Conscious Cleanse written by Jo Schaalman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A simple, sensible 14-day plan for losing weight and healing your body If you're looking for relief from an ailment such as depression, chronic pain, or allergies or are looking to lose weight, but want a natural, flexible way of doing so, then The Conscious Cleanse is the perfect programme for you. In this easy-to-follow 14-day programme, you get a day-by-day plan to filter out harmful foods and guidance on what foods to avoid with optional yoga-based stretches and exercises to incorporate into your programme. Plus, tips to lose weight easily so there's no need to starve yourself as well as meal plans with shopping lists and over 100 delicious recipes. You'll also find techniques and inspiration for continuing a sustainable and vibrant conscious lifestyle after the cleanse is complete. Whether you're looking to shed excess weight or relieve any number of ailments, The Conscious Cleanse will provide a solution that will change your life for good.

Download or read book The Conscious Activist written by James O'Dea and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author James O'Dea has created a handbook for those interested in Sacred Activism, a fusing spiritual knowledge with radical action. O'Dea outlines the polarities between the inner path of spiritual growth and the outer path of social activism, concluding that the two must co-exist in equal weighting so that the human race can become a compassionate force for good. 'James O’Dea is a modern-day prophet who has journeyed further than anyone I know in the ways of peace' Lynne Twist 'The Conscious Activist is a major contribution to the most important movement of our time - one that fuses profound spiritual awareness with radical action. It is wise and passionate and superbly written, with the kind of graceful but pungent clarity that only long experience can engender' Andrew Harvey 'After reading The Conscious Activist, you will drop to your knees in heart-opening awe and then you will rise to your feet, inspired to act in a truly transformational way' Marianne Williamson An extraordinary and rousing manifesto from award-winning author James O’Dea, The Conscious Activist is both a compelling narrative and a deep reflection on the demands of mystical realization and effective activism. Throughout the book, O'Dea poses that an integration of the two has the power to permanently transform the social order and to wake up humanity from its course of rapid self-destruction. Divided into two parts, Part I offers parallel narratives of author James O’Dea’s training and spiritual development as both a mystic and an activist. The mystic, he explains, must move past petty ego concerns in order to experience oneness with each other and our divine source. The activist, on the other hand, explores the role of passion and conscience in activating social change. In Part II, O’Dea pursues this fascinating concept of a meeting ground between the two worlds, where spirituality and action unite to spark an accelerated transition towards our greater goal: a more evolved civilization. He asks us all to become conscious activists – to learn, collectively, how to move beyond our rigid conformity to beliefs of the past and its archaic structures of power and control.

Download or read book The Conscious Unconscious and Super conscious Mind written by Gurdip Hari and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Conscious Universe written by Menas Kafatos and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of the implications for philosophy of recent experimental results that confirm some counterintuitive aspects of the way matter behaves. The authors show that a generalised principle of complementarity is pervasive not only in physical theories such as cosmological models of the universe, but also in the construction of all human realities. They discuss in detail Bells inequalities for quantum mechanical measurements as well as recent experiments which imply that even remote parts of the universe are "entangled." They go on to suggest that consciousness can no longer be divorced from the way science operates, and conclude by claiming that this entails a new way of understanding the universe - one that could obviate much of the current conflict between science and religion while providing at the same time a basis for valuation that is better suited for co-ordinating all human experience. This second edition has been completely rewritten and brought up to date.

Download or read book The Conscious Parent s Guide to Gender Identity written by Darlene Tando and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Guide for parents about how to approach a child's gender expansiveness and help their child understand and transition to a new gender identity"--

Download or read book The Conscious Universe written by Menas Kafatos and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This discussion resulted from a dialogue which began some seven years ago between a physicist who specializes in astrophysics, general relativity, and the foundations of quantum theory, and a student of cultural history who had done post-doctoral work in the history and philosophy of science. Both of us at that time were awaiting the results of some experiments being conducted under the direction of the physicist Alain Aspect at the University of Paris-South. ! The experiments were the last in a series designed to test some predictions based on a mathematical 2 theorem published in 1964 by John Bell. There was no expectation that the results of these experiments would provide the basis for developing new technologies. The questions which the experiments were designed to answer concerned the relation ship between physical reality and physical theory in the branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. Like most questions raised by physicists which lead to startling new insights, they were disarmingly simple and direct. Is quantum physics, asked Bell, a self-consistent theory whose predictions would hold in a new class of experiments, or would the results reveal that the apparent challenges of quantum physics to the understanding in classical physics of the relationship between physical theory and physical reality were merely illusory? Answering this question in actual experiments could also, suggested Bell, lead to another, quite dramatic, result.

Download or read book The Awakened Family written by Shefali Tsabary, Ph.D. and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Parents . . . you will be wowed and awed by [Dr. Shefali]." —Oprah Winfrey As seen on Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday, a radically transformative plan that shows parents how to raise children to be their best, truest selves, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Conscious Parent. What if...? What if I told you that you can put an end to all of your parenting struggles? That you can learn to parent without fear or anxiety? That you can end conflict with your children? That you can create close and connected relationships within your family? …Would you accept this invitation to a revolution in parenting? We all have the capacity to raise children who are highly resilient and emotionally connected. However, many of us are unable to because we are blinded by modern misconceptions of parenting and our own inner limitations. In The Awakened Family, I show you how you can cultivate a relationship with your children so they can thrive; moreover, you can be transformed to a state of greater calm, compassion and wisdom as well. This book will take you on a journey to transcending your fears and illusions around parenting and help you become the parent you always wanted to be: fully present and conscious. It will arm you with practical, hands-on strategies and real-life examples from my experience as a parent and clinical psychologist that show the extraordinary power of being a conscious parent. Everyone in your family is ready to be awakened. Will you take this journey with me? —Shefali

Download or read book Thought in Action written by Barbara Gail Montero and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does thinking affect doing? It is widely held that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. But is this true? Barbara Gail Montero explores real-life examples and draws on psychology, neuroscience, and literature to develop a theory of expertise that emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action.

Download or read book The Conscious Caregiver written by Linda Abbit and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linda Abbit, founder of Tender Loving Eldercare and a veteran of the caregiving industry, shares her advice on taking care of an older parent or loved one and how to handle everything that goes along with this dramatic life change. Being a caregiver can be a difficult role. It requires patience, tenderness, selflessness, and hard work. Providing care for someone, whether it’s a parent, a loved one, or as a professional requires a high level of self-love and self-care. But while it may be a rewarding experience to care for a loved one, the emotional and physical stress of caregiving can lead to burnout and exhaustion—causing caregivers to put themselves and their own well-being in the background. How can you fulfill your role as a caregiver without losing yourself? Conscious Caregiver teaches you how to navigate caring for your loved one, whether it’s full-time in-house caregiving or hiring support from outside services. With information on how to talk to your loved ones about the situation, handle the emotional stress, stay financially secure, and take the time to care for yourself, this guide can help you care for your loved one and yourself at the same time.