Download or read book Consciousness Explained written by Daniel C. Dennett and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Dennett's "brilliant" exploration of human consciousness — named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times — is a masterpiece beloved by both scientific experts and general readers (New York Times Book Review). Consciousness Explained is a full-scale exploration of human consciousness. In this landmark book, Daniel Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Our current theories about conscious life — of people, animal, even robots — are transformed by the new perspectives found in this book. "Dennett is a witty and gifted scientific raconteur, and the book is full of fascinating information about humans, animals, and machines. The result is highly digestible and a useful tour of the field." —Wall Street Journal

Download or read book Consciousness Explained written by Daniel C. Dennett and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1993-06-24 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett reveals the secrets of one of the last remaining mysteries of the universe: the human brain. Daniel C. Dennett's now-classic book blends philosophy, psychology and neuroscience - with the aid of numerous examples and thought-experiments - to explore how consciousness has evolved, and how a modern understanding of the human mind is radically different from conventional explanations of consciousness. What people think of as the stream of consciousness is not a single, unified sequence, the author argues, but 'multiple drafts' of reality composed by a computer-like 'virtual machine'. Dennett explains how science has exploded the classic mysteries of consciousness: the nature of introspection, the self or ego and its relation to thoughts and sensations, the problems posed by qualia, and the level of consciousness of non-human creatures. 'Brilliant ... a torrent of stimulating thought' Richard Dawkins 'Revolutionary ... one of the most mentally agile, intellectually resourceful books you are likely to read' Guardian 'A masterful tapestry of deep insights ... Dennett has written a profound and important book that is also clear, exciting and witty' Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach

Download or read book Consciousness Explained written by Daniel Clement Dennett and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1993-06-24 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revises the traditional view of consciousness by claiming that Cartesianism and Descartes' dualism of mind and body should be replaced with theories from the realms of neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence. What people think of as the stream of consciousness is not a single, unified sequence, the author argues, but "multiple drafts" of reality composed by a computer-like "virtual machine". Dennett considers how consciousness could have evolved in human beings and confronts the classic mysteries of consciousness: the nature of introspection, the self or ego and its relation to thoughts and sensations, and the level of consciousness of non-human creatures.

Download or read book Explaining Consciousness written by Jonathan Shear and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-01-22 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why doesn't all this cognitive processing go on "in the dark," without any consciousness at all? In this book philosophers, physicists, psychologists, neurophysiologists, computer scientists, and others address this central topic in the growing discipline of consciousness studies. At the 1994 landmark conference "Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness", philosopher David Chalmers distinguished between the "easy" problems and the "hard" problem of consciousness research. According to Chalmers, the easy problems are to explain cognitive functions such as discrimination, integration, and the control of behavior; the hard problem is to explain why these functions should be associated with phenomenal experience. Why doesnt all this cognitive processing go on "in the dark", without any consciousness at all? In this book, philosophers, physicists, psychologists, neurophysiologists, computer scientists, and others address this central topic in the growing discipline of consciousness studies. Some take issue with Chalmers' distinction, arguing that the hard problem is a non-problem, or that the explanatory gap is too wide to be bridged. Others offer alternative suggestions as to how the problem might be solved, whether through cognitive science, fundamental physics, empirical phenomenology, or with theories that take consciousness as irreducible. Contributors Bernard J. Baars, Douglas J. Bilodeau, David Chalmers, Patricia S. Churchland, Thomas Clark, C. J. S. Clarke, Francis Crick, Daniel C. Dennett, Stuart Hameroff, Valerie Hardcastle, David Hodgson, Piet Hut, Christof Koch, Benjamin Libet, E. J. Lowe, Bruce MacLennan, Colin McGinn, Eugene Mills, Kieron OHara, Roger Penrose, Mark C. Price, William S. Robinson, Gregg Rosenberg, Tom Scott, William Seager, Jonathan Shear, Roger N. Shepard, Henry Stapp, Francisco J. Varela, Max Velmans, Richard Warner

Download or read book The Mystery of Consciousness written by John R. Searle and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.

Download or read book The Map of Consciousness Explained written by David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible exploration of best-selling author's most famous work, The Map of Consciousness, that helps readers experience healing and transcendence. We are all born with a level of consciousness, an energetic frequency within the vast field of consciousness. And with The Map of Consciousness, we can truly understand the total spectrum of human consciousness. Using a unique muscle-testing method, Dr. David R. Hawkins conducted more than 250,000 calibrations during 20 years of research to define a range of values, attitudes, and emotions that correspond to levels of consciousness. This range of values-along with a logarithmic scale of 1 to 1,000-became the Map of Consciousness, which Dr. Hawkins first wrote about in his best-selling book, Power vs. Force. With the Map, Dr. David R. Hawkins laid out the entire spectrum of consciousness, from the lower levels of Shame, Guilt, Apathy, Fear, Anger, and Pride; to Courage, Acceptance, and Reason; all the way up to the more expanded levels of Love, Ecstasy, Peace, and Enlightenment. These "higher" energy fields are a carrier wave of immense life energy. An essential primer on the late Dr. David R. Hawkins's teachings on human consciousness and their associated energy fields, The Map of Consciousness Explained offers readers an introduction and deeper understanding of the Map, with visual charts and practical applications to help them heal, recover, and evolve to higher levels of consciousness and energy. This book is a light unto the path of any individual who wants to become more effective in any area of life.

Download or read book Content and Consciousness Revisited written by Carlos Muñoz-Suárez and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the grounds for the distinction between the mental and the physical? What is it the relation between ascribing mental states to an organism and understanding its behavior? Are animals and complex systems vehicles of inner evolutionary environments? Is there a difference between personal and sub-personal level processes in the brain? Answers to these and other questions were developed in Daniel Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness (1969), where he sketched a unified theoretical framework for views that are now considered foundational in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Content and Consciousness Revisited is devoted to reconsider the ideas and ideals introduced in Dennett’s seminal book, by covering its fundamental concepts, hypotheses and approaches and taking into account the findings and progress which have taken place during more than four decades. This book includes original and critical contributions about the relations between science and philosophy, the personal/sub-personal level distinction, intelligence, learning, intentionality, rationality, propositional attitudes, among other issues of scientific and philosophical interest. Each chapter embraces an updated approach to several disciplines, like cognitive science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive psychiatry.

Download or read book Consciousness Explained Better written by Allan Combs and published by Paragon House. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness Explained Better is a unique contribution. This compact volume represents thousands of years of humanity's struggle to understand consciousness from a wide variety of perspectives. It is an up-to-date digest of the search in bite-sized chapters. Allan Combs has managed to encapsulate and synthesize vast bodies of thought and research without dilution. He has made even the most mind-twisting arguments and questions comprehensible, and he has brought forward scholarship and rigorous inquiry in language that speaks to the heart as well as the head. This book satisfies with its comprehensiveness yet intrigues with all that still remains enigmatic. It brings forward the yearning, the brilliance, the awe, and the outrageous audacity of our search to understand conscious. It reminds us that, in a world where much of our lives on a mundane basis has been reduced to the trivial, the logistical, and the manageable, everything about that world and about ourselves is still completely beyond our grasp. We still live and move in the Great Mystery. --From the Foreword by Jenny Wade, author of Changes of Mind and Transcendent Sex

Download or read book Being You written by Anil Seth and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of 2021—Bloomberg Businessweek; A Best Science Book of 2021—The Guardian; A Best Science Book of 2021—Financial Times; A Best Philosophy Book of 2021—Five Books; A Best Book of 2021—The Economist Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science. What does it mean to “be you”—that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood. Now, internationally renowned neuroscience professor, researcher, and author Anil Seth is offers a window into our consciousness in BEING YOU: A New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is both a leading expert on the neuroscience of consciousness and one of most prominent spokespeople for this relatively new field of science. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness. Seth has been interviewed for documentaries aired on the BBC, Netflix, and Amazon and podcasts by Sam Harris, Russell Brand, and Chris Anderson, and his 2017 TED Talk on the topic has been viewed over 11 million times, a testament to his uncanny ability to make unimaginably complex science accessible and entertaining.

Download or read book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking written by Daniel C. Dennett and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments. Includes 77 of Dennett's most successful "imagination-extenders and focus-holders.O

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 Brainstorms written by Daniel Clement Dennett and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will. Using careful arguments and ingenious thought-experiments, the author exposes familiar preconceptions and hobbling institutions. This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will. Using careful arguments and ingenious thought-experiments, the author exposes familiar preconceptions and hobbling institutions. The essays are grouped into four sections: Intentional Explanation and Attributions of Mentality; The Nature of Theory in Psychology; Objects of Consciousness and the Nature of Experience; and Free Will and Personhood.

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 Sweet Dreams written by Daniel C. Dennett and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-09-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years since Daniel Dennett's influential Consciousness Explained was published in 1991, scientific research on consciousness has been a hotly contested battleground of rival theories—"so rambunctious," Dennett observes, "that several people are writing books just about the tumult." With Sweet Dreams, Dennett returns to the subject for "revision and renewal" of his theory of consciousness, taking into account major empirical advances in the field since 1991 as well as recent theoretical challenges. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett proposed to replace the ubiquitous but bankrupt Cartesian Theater model (which posits a privileged place in the brain where "it all comes together" for the magic show of consciousness) with the Multiple Drafts Model. Drawing on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, he asserted that human consciousness is essentially the mental software that reorganizes the functional architecture of the brain. In Sweet Dreams, he recasts the Multiple Drafts Model as the "fame in the brain" model, as a background against which to examine the philosophical issues that "continue to bedevil the field." With his usual clarity and brio, Dennett enlivens his arguments with a variety of vivid examples. He isolates the "Zombic Hunch" that distorts much of the theorizing of both philosophers and scientists, and defends heterophenomenology, his "third-person" approach to the science of consciousness, against persistent misinterpretations and objections. The old challenge of Frank Jackson's thought experiment about Mary the color scientist is given a new rebuttal in the form of "RoboMary," while his discussion of a famous card trick, "The Tuned Deck," is designed to show that David Chalmers's Hard Problem is probably just a figment of theorists' misexploited imagination. In the final essay, the "intrinsic" nature of "qualia" is compared with the naively imagined "intrinsic value" of a dollar in "Consciousness—How Much is That in Real Money?"

Download or read book Galileo s Error written by Philip Goff and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2019 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a leading philosopher of the mind comes this lucid, provocative argument that offers a radically new picture of human consciousness--panpsychism, an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward.ward.

Download or read book From Bacteria to Bach and Back The Evolution of Minds written by Daniel C. Dennett and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work." —Nature How did we come to have minds? For centuries, poets, philosophers, psychologists, and physicists have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled abilities. Disciples of Darwin have explained how natural selection produced plants, but what about the human mind? In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett builds on recent discoveries from biology and computer science to show, step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. A crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Competition among memes produced thinking tools powerful enough that our minds don’t just perceive and react, they create and comprehend. An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers and scientists, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain all those curious about how the mind works.

Download or read book Mind and Cognition written by William G. Lycan and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2008-02-11 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, this text provides the reader with an overview of the complex, sophisticated and sometimes conflicting developments in theories of mind that have taken place over the last 40 years.