Download or read book Human and Machine Consciousness written by David Gamez and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines. Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets out a bold interpretation of consciousness that neutralizes the philosophical problems and explains how we can make scientific predictions about the consciousness of animals, brain-damaged patients and machines. Gamez interprets the scientific study of consciousness as a search for mathematical theories that map between measurements of consciousness and measurements of the physical world. We can use artificial intelligence to discover these theories and they could make accurate predictions about the consciousness of humans, animals and artificial systems. Human and Machine Consciousness also provides original insights into unusual conscious experiences, such as hallucinations, religious experiences and out-of-body states, and demonstrates how ‘designer’ states of consciousness could be created in the future. Gamez explains difficult concepts in a clear way that closely engages with scientific research. His punchy, concise prose is packed with vivid examples, making it suitable for the educated general reader as well as philosophers and scientists. Problems are brought to life in colourful illustrations and a helpful summary is given at the end of each chapter. The endnotes provide detailed discussions of individual points and full references to the scientific and philosophical literature.
Download or read book Modifications of Consciousness written by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, et al. and published by Philaletheians UK. This book was released on 2019-03-10 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are dual, manifested, aspects of an ultimate state of Unconsciousness, the One and only Reality. The Secret Doctrine asserts that out of a Perfect, Unconditioned, Unmanifested Consciousness, myriads of short-lived, bundles of individualised consciousnesses keep emerging, like sparks of a fire. That is how Unknowable Causality evolves to omnipresent mind and life immanent in every atom, and keeps transferring informing principles from one planet to the other, from one eternity to another. Intelligent Law is an aspect of Cosmic Consciousness. It governs Universe, Man and All. Consciousness, Universe, and Karman are one and the same, inseparable and inter-dependent. The whole Universe is the sum total of multifarious states of Consciousness. The only Reality is Ultimate Unconsciousness within the bosom of Parabrahman. All else is maya-illusion. Cosmic Ideation and Cosmic Substance are inseparable, interdependent, and readily convertible into each other. The Fire of Unconsciousness unfolds from within without and differentiates to sparks of self-consciousness. Even our senses are progressive differentiations of That One Sense-Consciousness. Beware! Impulses of Psychic Force, act from without within. Noetic Force acts from within without. Spirit and Matter are illusionary aspects of the One Consciousness which underpins and sustains All. Spirit can only cognise Itself through the flesh or “matter.” Thus matter is an aggregate of objects of possible perception. Endless Worlds are set into motion by an unquenchable Desire for Self-Knowledge that burns silently in the bosom of Parabrahman. When “the last vibration of the Seventh Eternity thrills through Infinitude,” the Fire of Desire becomes Fohat, or Light of Logos. It differentiates primordial matter into atoms, seeds of manifold Life, ever-revealing latent, unmanifested, potentialities of Infinite Thought and Ideals to the perception of finite minds. Consciousness is septenary. It vibrates and illumines the seven brains of the heart as it does the seven divisions or rays around the pineal gland. For the heart is the abode of Spiritual Consciousness. The Higher Mind or Manas is Spiritual Self-Consciousness, itself; Divine Consciousness, when united with Buddhi. The Lower Mind with its seven gateways is the organ of animal or terrestrial consciousness. Every single cell in our body is gifted with a brain and a consciousness of its own. Thus Consciousness is the essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself “I,” a breath of Heaven. One day, when our true individuality is withdrawn in the Unconscious Immateriality of its Divine Counterpart, it mayregain the true happiness of Non-Being. But “the seed is not quickened, except it die.” Everything in the Universe, throughout its kingdoms, is conscious, i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind; a kind we do not always understand. Every World emanates from a single Unevolved Cause. And, like all else, our World has a Soul. Though eternal and changeless in Its inner essence, the Soul of the World alters during Its outer manifestations. This has been the subject of centuries of scholastic disputations. Consciousness is the One and only Capacity of Perception, ever analysing and reflecting upon Itself. Humanity is a periodic manifestation of Cosmic Consciousness. Spirit, Soul, and Matter are Consciousness’ three aspects integrated by Consciousness Itself. Universal Consciousness is unlimited and beyond space and time. While it can only be expressed through matter, it is not of matter, It is our Sensing Principle. Other considerations of the intrinsic Intelligence of Consciousness include the Unity of Spirit and Trinity of Nature. Personal, individualised, consciousness, ego and egoism, mind and mentality, self and selfishness, I-ness and me-ness, character and charisma, persona and personality, individualism and capitalism, they are all one and the same: they are the cause of separateness and all suffering in the world! Consciousness can neither imagine its own cessation nor its own beginning. Though Its contents are of a pseudo-infinite duration, It is the dream that never dies. Every plane of consciousness creates a different level of illusion. Everything is maya-illusion. Can we ever account for the origin of consciousness? Life and death are illusions, time is illusion. The illusion of time is produced by the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness. Time does not exist even in sleep! All things are real but only relatively real. The Infinite can only see Itself through the eyes of the finite. When the Infinite cannot conceive Itself by Itself, How can the finite ever perceive the Infinite? Such feats are beyond the boundary of human capability. That’s why the Infinite is, and will remain forever, Unknown and Unknowable. Only by abandoning personal thoughts and pursuits, the lower mind can begin to ascend toward its higher counterpart. Such an uplifting of consciousness can only be attained by self-devised but unselfish efforts, checked by Karman. Finally, Madame Blavatsky affirms three requisites for those who are after self-knowledge.
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 Thinking on the Other Side of Zero written by Alan Joseph Oliver and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever felt someone's eyes on the back of your head? Or perhaps you may have known who was on the phone, even before you lifted the receiver. Science calls these moments of knowing anomalies. If an anomaly cannot be measured it does not exist so far as science is concerned. I wonder how science measures a mind. Whenever I feel someone's eyes boring into the back of my head I ask myself if the brain can transmit information, and given the measurements carried out on the brain I have concluded that the answer lies elsewhere. All of the evidence points to mind being non-local, and what that means can be more than you have bargained for. For a start it means that mind exists outside of time and space, and points to the likelihood that conscious awareness can exist beyond the body: even beyond this particular life. And since mind exercises the faculty of memory, its content must also be outside of time and space. This last point was particularly helpful to the people who sought my assistance as a healer when they were facing death. My anomaly was always able to make some real contribution to them, and I hope it does the same for you.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness written by Philip David Zelazo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.
Download or read book Consciousness and Mental Life written by Daniel N. Robinson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Begins with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and continues through to René Descartes, David Hume, William James, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Derek Parfit. Approaching the issue from both a philosophical and a psychological perspective, Robinson identifies what makes the study of consciousness so problematic and asks whether cognitive neuroscience can truly reveal the origins of mental events, emotions, and preference, or if these occurrences are better understood by studying the whole person, not just the brain. He corrects many claims made about the success of brain science and provides a valuable historical context for the study of human consciousness. From publisher catalog.
Download or read book The River of Consciousness written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the best-selling author of Gratitude, On the Move, and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. Oliver Sacks, a scientist and a storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars) in which he introduced and explored many now familiar disorders--autism, Tourette's syndrome, face blindness, savant syndrome. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, Gratitude). Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
Download or read book The Conceptual Representation of Consciousness written by Thomas Natsoulas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-11 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness is familiar to us first hand, yet difficult to understand. This book concerns six basic concepts of consciousness exercised in ordinary English. The first is the interpersonal meaning and requires at least two people involved in relation to one another. The second is a personal meaning, having to do with one's own perspective on the kind of person one is and the life one is leading. The third meaning has reference simply to one being occurrently aware of something or as though of something. The fourth narrows the preceding sense to one having direct occurrent awareness of happenings in one's own experiential stream. The fifth is the unitive meaning of consciousness and has reference to those portions of one's stream that one self-appropriates to make up one's conscious being. The last is the general-state meaning and picks out the general operating mode in which we most often function.
Download or read book Mind written by and published by . This book was released on 1877 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues for 1896-1900 contain papers of the Aristotelian Society.
Download or read book Qualitative Consciousness written by Josh Weisberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary collection takes up themes from the philosophy of the influential philosopher of mind David Rosenthal.
Download or read book Consciousness Redux written by Martin H. Stein and published by Jason Aronson. This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a selection of the papers of a beloved teacher and mentor by several of his students and collaborators.
Download or read book Consciousness written by Ravi K. Puri Ph.D. and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness: The Ultimate Reality explores all aspects of consciousness. It is a well-written, well-researched work that I find unique in that it delves deep into the subject while still being easy to understand. That combination is difficult to accomplish and Dr. Puri has done an excellent job. I highly recommend this book; its well worth the readers time (Elizabeth Davis, Newspaper columnist and freelance editor, Boonville, MO). A very insightful perspective on consciousness. A marvelous explanation portraying the subtleties of consciousness that is comprehensive and very easy to understand. A reading for a soul-searching, hungry world (Cynthia Neff, Columbia, MO). Consciousness is a very complex subject and has always baffled me. The book is an eye opener for me. I am blown away by the expression of the author. Very simple, comprehensive, well written, amazing insight. A read that will stay with you a life time. A mind stretched can never go back to its original form. Captivating (Lisa McKinzie, President/CEO of McKinzie & Company, Osage Beach, MO). This thought-provoking, beautifully written book has deep, rich insights on higher truth and its relationship with consciousness. It serves as an inspiration for those ready to begin their quest on the path of self-knowledge. A fascinating and clearly annotated study. Not only is Dr. Puri a deep thinker but also a deep knower (Linda Castillon, Director of the Transcendental Meditation Program, Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa).
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 Truth Within written by Gavin Flood and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that there is a truth within the person linked to the discovery of a deeper, more fundamental, more authentic self, has been a common theme in many religions throughout history and an idea that is still with us today. This inwardness or interiority unique to me as an essential feature of who I am has been an aspect of culture and even a defining characteristic of human being; an authentic, private sphere to which we can retreat that is beyond the conflicts of the outer world. This inner world becomes more real than the outer, which is seen as but a pale reflection. Remarkably, the image of the truth within is found across cultures and this book presents an account of this idea in the pre-modern history of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Furthermore, in theistic religions, Christianity and some forms of Hinduism, the truth within is conflated with the idea of God within and in all cases this inner truth is thought to be not only the heart of the person, but also the heart of the universe itself. Gavin Flood examines the metaphor of inwardness and the idea of truth within, along with the methods developed in religions to attain it such as prayer and meditation. These views of inwardness that link the self to cosmology can be contrasted with a modern understanding of the person. In examining the truth within in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, Flood offers a hermeneutical phenomenology of inwardness and a defence of comparative religion.
Download or read book The Nature of Consciousness written by Ned Block and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997-09-10 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, this reader brings together most of the principal texts in philosophy (and a small set of related key works in neuropsychology) on consciousness through 1997, and includes some forthcoming articles. Its extensive coverage strikes a balance between seminal works of the past few decades and the leading edge of philosophical research on consciousness.As no other anthology currently does, The Nature of Consciousness provides a substantial introduction to the field, and imposes structure on a vast and complicated literature, with sections covering stream of consciousness, theoretical issues, consciousness and representation, the function of consciousness, subjectivity and the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, qualia, and monitoring conceptions of consciousness. Of the 49 contributions, 18 are either new or have been adapted from a previous publication.
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 Principles of Mental Physiology written by William Benjamin Carpenter and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 774 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansion of the author's Outline of psychology in the 1852 and 1855 eds. of his Principles of Human Physiology.