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Author: Daniel M. Wegner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262290553
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 743
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Book Description
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: Daniel M. Wegner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262290553
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 743
Get Book Here
Book Description
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: Annaka Harris
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062906739
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 115
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "If you’ve ever wondered how you have the capacity to wonder, some fascinating insights await you in these pages.” --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience. What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we? In this wonderfully accessible book, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what might possess it. Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness—allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.
Author: Thomas Metzinger
Publisher: Imprint Academic
ISBN: 9780907845058
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
The contributions to this book are original articles, representing a cross-section of current philosophical work on consciousness and thereby allowing students and readers from other disciplines to acquaint themselves with the very latest debate, so that they can then pursue their own research interests more effectively. The volume includes a bibliography on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science and brain research, covering the last 25 years and consisting of over 1000 entries in 18 thematic sections, compiled by David Chalmers and Thomas Metzinger.
Author: John Mackey
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
ISBN: 1625271751
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
The bestselling book, now with a new preface by the authors At once a bold defense and reimagining of capitalism and a blueprint for a new system for doing business, Conscious Capitalism is for anyone hoping to build a more cooperative, humane, and positive future. Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue that both business and capitalism are inherently good, and they use some of today’s best-known and most successful companies to illustrate their point. From Southwest Airlines, UPS, and Tata to Costco, Panera, Google, the Container Store, and Amazon, today’s organizations are creating value for all stakeholders—including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment. Read this book and you’ll better understand how four specific tenets—higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management—can help build strong businesses, move capitalism closer to its highest potential, and foster a more positive environment for all of us.
Author: Clinton Callahan
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1942493002
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 490
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Book Description
This book is about feelings, and the ways that we, as individuals and as a culture, have numbed ourselves against them. It is about unleashing the possibility of conscious feelings to re-make our lives into what really matters to us. The Power of Conscious Feelings introduces readers to the concept of the "personal numbness bar"--a measure set high by modern culture as a way of keeping everything "cool," under control, and consequently out of touch. This book provides the insight and the means for lowering that numbness bar. "You can feel more," the author asserts. You can regain the intelligence and energy of your feelings, so long denied and dressed up to appear acceptable. "Being cool," Callahan states, "allows you to look the other way about torture, invasion, pollution and injustice," and to accept the generic malaise that characterizes so many relationships. The central framework of the book is built with the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling, including: * Learning the potent difference between thoughts and feelings, which most people confuse * Sorting out feelings (based in present) from emotions (based in the past or in somebody else's life) * Fully allowing that feelings are absolutely-neutral energy and information, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Each chapter is enriched with THOUGHTMAPS-clear diagrams of ways we presently think and ways we could possibly think-and supported by an abundance of practical experiments to try. The Power of Conscious Feelings is so much more than a book of self-help or inspiration. Ultimately, it is about our connection with and responsibility for the fate of the Earth. When we are no longer numb, we are freed from solitary confinement in our private world of thoughts and beliefs. We emerge, already connected with other human beings, connected in the world of feelings we all have in common. This book actually guides the reader through four distinct evolutionary stages: from Personal, to Relational, to Transformational, to Cultural, in showing us how to use our adult feelings as the fuel for living our destiny as creators of sustainable culture. Choosing numbness was probably unconscious for most of us. But, Callahan is committed to showing us, step by step, in this moment, how we can change the mind and learn to consciously feel.
Author: Antonio Damasio
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524747564
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understanding how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.
Author: Anil Gupta
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674987780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
A distinguished philosopher offers a novel account of experience and reason, and develops our understanding of conscious experience and its relationship to thought: a new reformed empiricism. The role of experience in cognition is a central and ancient philosophical concern. How, theorists ask, can our private experiences guide us to knowledge of a mind-independent reality? Exploring topics in logic, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, Conscious Experience proposes a new answer to this age-old question, explaining how conscious experience contributes to the rationality and content of empirical beliefs. According to Anil Gupta, this contribution cannot be determined independently of an agent’s conceptual scheme and prior beliefs, but that doesn’t mean it is entirely mind-dependent. While the rational contribution of an experience is not propositional—it does not, for example, provide direct knowledge of the world—it does authorize certain transitions from prior views to new views. In short, the rational contribution of an experience yields a rule for revising views. Gupta shows that this account provides theoretical freedom: it allows the observer to radically reconceive the world in light of empirical findings. Simultaneously, it grants empirical reason significant power to constrain, forcing particular conceptions of self and world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through novel treatments of presentation, appearances, and ostensive definitions. Collectively, Gupta’s arguments support an original theory: reformed empiricism. He abandons the idea that experience is a source of knowledge and justification. He also abandons the idea that concepts are derived from experience. But reformed empiricism preserves empiricism’s central insight: experience is the supreme epistemic authority. In the resolution of factual disagreements, experience trumps all.
Author: Richard Shusterman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139467778
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
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.
Author: Shefali Tsabary
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1473619394
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Conscious parenting is about becoming mindful of your behaviour and engaging with your child as an individual. Dr Tsabary inspires parents to get back in touch with their emotions and shed the layers of baggage they have inherited during their own life and are unconsciously heaping on their children. As they become 'conscious' in their parenting, so parents can transform their relationship with their offspring and raise happy, well-adjusted children. The Conscious Parent is already transforming the way people are parenting through its sales in the US where it's spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Oprah described the book as 'The most profound book on parenting I've ever read' and Eckhart Tolle has said 'becoming a conscious parent is the greatest gift you can give your child.' The book features a foreword by His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
Author: Jesse J. Prinz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019971813X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
The problem of consciousness continues to be a subject of great debate in cognitive science. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz's account of consciousness makes two main claims: first consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and, second, consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access memory systems. Neurobiologically, this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience. Prinz also explores the limits of consciousness. We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allows for flexible behavior. Prinz concludes by discussing prevailing philosophical puzzles. He provides a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism, and argues that materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem. The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions, while also surveying, challenging, and extending philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. All readers interested in the nature of consciousness will find Prinz's work of great interest.
