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Consciousness

Author: Andrea Eugenio Cavanna

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-09-30

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 3662440881

This book reviews some of the most important scientific and philosophical theories concerning the nature of mind and consciousness. Current theories on the mind-body problem and the neural correlates of consciousness are presented through a series of biographical sketches of the most influential thinkers across the fields of philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. The book is divided into two parts: the first is dedicated to philosophers of mind and the second, to neuroscientists/experimental psychologists. Each part comprises twenty short chapters, with each chapter being dedicated to one author. A brief introduction is given on his or her life and most important works and influences. The most influential theory/ies developed by each author are then carefully explained and examined with the aim of scrutinizing the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches to the nature of consciousness.

Neuroscience and Philosophy

Author: Felipe De Brigard

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-02-01

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0262045435

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Philosophers and neuroscientists address central issues in both fields, including morality, action, mental illness, consciousness, perception, and memory. Philosophers and neuroscientists grapple with the same profound questions involving consciousness, perception, behavior, and moral judgment, but only recently have the two disciplines begun to work together. This volume offers fourteen original chapters that address these issues, each written by a team that includes at least one philosopher and one neuroscientist who integrate disciplinary perspectives and reflect the latest research in both fields. Topics include morality, empathy, agency, the self, mental illness, neuroprediction, optogenetics, pain, vision, consciousness, memory, concepts, mind wandering, and the neural basis of psychological categories. The chapters first address basic issues about our social and moral lives: how we decide to act and ought to act toward each other, how we understand each other’s mental states and selves, and how we deal with pressing social problems regarding crime and mental or brain health. The following chapters consider basic issues about our mental lives: how we classify and recall what we experience, how we see and feel objects in the world, how we ponder plans and alternatives, and how our brains make us conscious and create specific mental states.

Philosophy, Neuroscience and Consciousness

Author: Rex Welshon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-17

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1315478757

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Explaining consciousness is one of the last great unanswered scientific and philosophical problems. Immediately known, familiar and obvious, consciousness is also baffling, opaque and strange. This introduction to the problems posed by consciousness discusses the most important work of cognitive science, neurophysiology and philosophy of mind of the past thirty years and presents an up to date assessment of the issues and debates. The reader is first introduced to the way that consciousness has been thought about in the history of philosophy and psychology. The author then presents an informal and largely non-technical account of the properties of consciousness that are thought to be the most paradigmatic and problematic. Recent scientific work on consciousness, from neurophysiological studies of the brain and evolutionary studies of the development of consciousness to computational theories of the mind are then examined and the philosophical problems that these accounts raise are systematically introduced. The final chapters of the book consider more practical matters by addressing self-deception, neuroses, the unconscious and notions of the self, before concluding with an assessment of the future for psychology and the philosophy of mind.

Neuroscience and Philosophy

Author: M. R. Bennett

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780231140447

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Three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist engage in a lively, often contentious debate about cognitive neuroscience and philosophy and the relationships among brain, mind, and person.

Consciousness in Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience

Author: Antti Revonsuo

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1134783094

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Consciousness seems to be an enigmatic phenomenon: it is difficult to imagine how our perceptions of the world and our inner thoughts, sensations and feelings could be related to the immensely complicated biological organ we call the brain. This volume presents the thoughts of some of the leading philosophers and cognitive scientists who have recently participated in the discussion of the status of consciousness in science. The focus of inquiry is the question: "Is it possible to incorporate consciousness into science?" Philosophers have suggested different alternatives -- some think that consciousness should be altogether eliminated from science because it is not a real phenomenon, others that consciousness is a real, higher-level physical or neurobiological phenomenon, and still others that consciousness is fundamentally mysterious and beyond the reach of science. At the same time, however, several models or theories of the role of conscious processing in the brain have been developed in the more empirical cognitive sciences. It has been suggested that non-conscious processes must be sharply separated from conscious ones, and that the necessity of this distinction is manifested in the curious behavior of certain brain-damaged patients. This book demonstrates the dialogue between philosophical and empirical points of view. The writers present alternative solutions to the brain-consciousness problem and they discuss how the unification of biological and psychological sciences could thus become feasible. Covering a large ground, this book shows how the philosophical and empirical problems are closely interconnected. From this interdisciplinary exploration emerges the conviction that consciousness can and should be a natural part of our scientific world view.

Matter and Consciousness

Author: Paul M. Churchland

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780262530743

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In "Matter and Consciousness," Paul Churchland clearly presents the advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical issues. Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism. "A Bradford Book"

Waking, Dreaming, Being

Author: Evan Thompson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-11-18

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0231538316

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A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate—either in the waking state or in a lucid dream—we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.

Being You

Author: Anil Seth

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-10-19

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1524742880

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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.

Philosophy and Neuroscience

Author: J. Bickle

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-07

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 9401002371

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Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account is the first book-length treatment of philosophical issues and implications in current cellular and molecular neuroscience. John Bickle articulates a philosophical justification for investigating "lower level" neuroscientific research and describes a set of experimental details that have recently yielded the reduction of memory consolidation to the molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation (LTP). These empirical details suggest answers to recent philosophical disputes over the nature and possibility of psycho-neural scientific reduction, including the multiple realization challenge, mental causation, and relations across explanatory levels. Bickle concludes by examining recent work in cellular neuroscience pertaining to features of conscious experience, including the cellular basis of working memory, the effects of explicit selective attention on single-cell activity in visual cortex, and sensory experiences induced by cortical microstimulation.

Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience

Author: M. R. Bennett

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-03-14

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 1119530970

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The second edition of the seminal work in the field—revised, updated, and extended In Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker outline and address the conceptual confusions encountered in various neuroscientific and psychological theories. The result of a collaboration between an esteemed philosopher and a distinguished neuroscientist, this remarkable volume presents an interdisciplinary critique of many of the neuroscientific and psychological foundations of modern cognitive neuroscience. The authors point out conceptual entanglements in a broad range of major neuroscientific and psychological theories—including those of such neuroscientists as Blakemore, Crick, Damasio, Dehaene, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Kandel, Kosslyn, LeDoux, Libet, Penrose, Posner, Raichle and Tononi, as well as psychologists such as Baar, Frith, Glynn, Gregory, William James, Weiskrantz, and biologists such as Dawkins, Humphreys, and Young. Confusions arising from the work of philosophers such as Dennett, Chalmers, Churchland, Nagel and Searle are subjected to detailed criticism. These criticisms are complemented by constructive analyses of the major cognitive, cogitative, emotional and volitional attributes that lie at the heart of cognitive neuroscientific research. Now in its second edition, this groundbreaking work has been exhaustively revised and updated to address current issues and critiques. New discussions offer insight into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the notions of information and representation, conflict monitoring and the executive, minimal states of consciousness, integrated information theory and global workspace theory. The authors also reply to criticisms of the fundamental arguments posed in the first edition, defending their conclusions regarding mereological fallacy, the necessity of distinguishing between empirical and conceptual questions, the mind-body problem, and more. Essential as both a comprehensive reference work and as an up-to-date critical review of cognitive neuroscience, this landmark volume: Provides a scientifically and philosophically informed survey of the conceptual problems in a wide variety of neuroscientific theories Offers a clear and accessible presentation of the subject, minimizing the use of complex philosophical and scientific jargon Discusses how the ways the brain relates to the mind affect the intelligibility of neuroscientific research Includes fresh insights on mind-body and mind-brain relations, and on the relation between the notion of person and human being Features more than 100 new pages and a wealth of additional diagrams, charts, and tables Continuing to challenge and educate readers like no other book on the subject, the second edition of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience is required reading not only for neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, but also for academics, researchers, and students involved in the study of the mind and consciousness.