Philosophers of Consciousness

Philosophers of Consciousness
Author: Eugene Webb
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780295994376

Philosophers of Consciousness is both an expository study of the thought of the six figures it focuses on and an original exploration of the themes they address. In addition, as Eugene Webb states, "it does not hesitate to probe the more problematic areas of the thought of each thinker and to suggest what to some of their advocates will probably seem rather bold and controversial interpreations of their ideas." The book reveals some deep differences that set the six off against one another in what is basically a clash between the intellectual emphasis of Lonergan and the more existential approaches of the other thinkers in this study. Readers of Kierkegaard may find much of Webb's interpretation surprising and perhaps disturbing.

Philosophers on Consciousness

Philosophers on Consciousness
Author: Jack Symes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2022-02-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350190446

We know, more intimately than anything else, what it's like to undergo a rich world of experiences: agonizing pains, dizzying pleasures, heady rage and existential doubts. But, despite the incredible advances of physical science, it seems that we're no closer to an explanation of how this inner world of experiences comes about. No matter how detailed our description of the physical brain, perhaps we'll always be left with this same question: how and why does the brain produce consciousness? This book is a short, accessible and engaging guide to the mystery of consciousness. Featuring remastered interviews and original essays from the world's leading thinkers, Philosophers on Consciousness sheds new light on the most promising theories in philosophy and science. Beyond understanding the mind, this is a journey into personal identity, the origin of meaning, the nature of morality and the fundamental structure of reality. Contributors include: Miri Albahari, Susan Blackmore, David Chalmers, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish, Philip Goff, Frank Jackson, Casey Logue, Gregory Miller, Michelle Montague, Massimo Pigliucci and Galen Strawson.

Matter and Consciousness

Matter and Consciousness
Author: Paul M. Churchland
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1988
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780262530743

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"

Consciousness and the Great Philosophers

Consciousness and the Great Philosophers
Author: Stephen Leach
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317389948

Consciousness and the Great Philosophers addresses the question of how the great philosophers of the past might have reacted to the contemporary problem of consciousness. Each of the thirty-two chapters within this edited collection focuses on a major philosophical figure from the history of philosophy, from Anscombe to Xuanzang, and imaginatively engages with the problem from their perspective. Written by leading experts in the field, this exciting and engaging book explores the relevance of the history of philosophy to contemporary debates and therefore is essential reading for students and scholars studying the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness, or both.

A Place for Consciousness

A Place for Consciousness
Author: Gregg Rosenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2004-11-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195168143

"Rosenberg introduces a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism for thinking about what causation is, about the natural world, and about how to create a detailed model to go along with the new paradigm. Arguing that experience is part of the categorical foundations of causality, he shows that within this new paradigm there is a place for something essentially like consciousness in all its traditional mysterious respects."--BOOK JACKET.

Body Consciousness

Body Consciousness
Author: Richard Shusterman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2008-01-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139467778

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.

Consciousness

Consciousness
Author: Andrea Eugenio Cavanna
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2014-09-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 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

Neuroscience and Philosophy
Author: Felipe De Brigard
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262045435

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.

Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams
Author: Daniel C. Dennett
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2006-09-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262250721

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?"

Human and Machine Consciousness

Human and Machine Consciousness
Author: David Gamez
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2018-03-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1783743018

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.