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Author: Susan Pockett
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 373
ISBN-13: 0262512572
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Continuing the debate over whether consciousness causes behaviour or plays no functional role in it, leading scholars discuss the question in terms of neuroscience, philosophy, law, and public policy.
Author: Stanislas Dehaene
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2014-01-30
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 0698151402
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →WINNER OF THE 2014 BRAIN PRIZE From the acclaimed author of Reading in the Brain and How We Learn, a breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness.
Author: Benjamin Wallace
Publisher: Allyn & Bacon
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780205277018
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →New edition of a textbook for a course on consciousness or a related topic. Covers the physiology of consciousness, consciousness-altering drugs, meditation, biofeedback, sleep and dreams, sensory deprivation, and parapsychology. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Author: Daniel M. Wegner
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2003-08-11
Total Pages: 725
ISBN-13: 0262290553
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: James Thomas Culbertson
Publisher:
Published: 1950
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Martin Carrier
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 1991
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 9783110128765
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: John R. Searle
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 1990-01-01
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9780940322066
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Richard Wilton
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This study puts forward a theory of human behaviour in which consciousness plays a role in the production of behaviour. The assumption that behaviour is to be explained solely by reference to causal process is rejected, and instead it is supposed that human beings adaptively exercise free will.
Author: Thomas R. Blakeslee
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2013-11-11
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 1489945334
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Nobel Prize-winning work of Roger Sperry revolutionized our understanding of human consciousness by proving that separate thinking and knowledge could exist in the left and right halves of the brain. Now, popular science writer Thomas Blakeslee - author of the highly acclaimed The Right Brain - takes us to a new level of understanding based on the theory of neural Darwinism by Gerald Edelman, another Nobel Prize winner. Blakeslee explains that our neurons spontaneously organize into hundreds of groups called modules that compete to respond to every situation in our lives - from reading this paragraph to falling in love. A vast preponderance of this activity operates outside of our conscious awareness.
