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: 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 : Philosophy
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: Joseph Benton Howell, Ph.D.
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 1452557152
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
Did you know that you are not your personality? Beneath your outer layers of self is an authentic, beautiful being exactly as it came from heaven. Discover this wonderful, real you and draw from its miraculous power in Becoming Conscious. Learn from clinical psychologist and spiritual teacher Dr. Joseph Howell how to: - Find the root causes of your suffering and unhappiness. - Free yourself of the traps that seduce your ego. - Be renewed with a sense of inner knowing, childlike joy, and wonder. - Stop being driven by what others expect of you. - Increase your tolerance and understanding of friends, spouse, children, and co-workers. - Relate to others on deep, meaningful levels. - Grow in consciousness of your specific divine purpose and your connection to the planet. - Understand your repeated, self-defeating patterns and learn clear ways to stop them. - Become consciously present. Reach your full potential as Dr. Howell explains the powerful and deeply spiritual Enneagram and relates it to your life. Whatever your beliefs may be, Becoming Conscious is a life-changing journey.
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: 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: Stephen Grossberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190070552
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 771
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Book Description
How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.
Author: Helmut Wautischer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262232596
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 669
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Book Description
Scholars from many different disciplines examine consciousness through the lens of intellectual approaches and cultures ranging from cosmology research and cell biophysics laboratories to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Tibetan Tantric Buddhism in a volume that extends consciousness studies beyond the limits of current neuroscience research. The "hard problem" of today's consciousness studies is subjective experience: understanding why some brain processing is accompanied by an experienced inner life. Recent scientific advances offer insights for understanding the physiological and chemical phenomenology of consciousness. But by leaving aside the internal experiential nature of consciousness in favor of mapping neural activity, such science leaves many questions unanswered. In Ontology of Consciousness, scholars from a range of disciplines—from neurophysiology to parapsychology, from mathematics to anthropology and indigenous non-Western modes of thought—go beyond these limits of current neuroscience research to explore insights offered by other intellectual approaches to consciousness. These scholars focus their attention on such philosophical approaches to consciousness as Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, North American Indian insights, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization, and the Byzantine Empire. Some draw on artifacts and ethnographic data to make their point. Others translate cultural concepts of consciousness into modern scientific language using models and mathematical mappings. Many consider individual experiences of sentience and existence, as seen in African communalism, Hindi psychology, Zen Buddhism, Indian vibhuti phenomena, existentialism, philosophical realism, and modern psychiatry. Some reveal current views and conundrums in neurobiology to comprehend sentient intellection. Contributors Karim Akerma, Matthijs Cornelissen, Antoine Courban, Mario Crocco, Christian de Quincey, Thomas B. Fowler, Erlendur Haraldsson, David. J. Hufford, Pavel B. Ivanov, Heinz Kimmerle, Stanley Krippner, Armand J. Labbé, James Maffie, Hubert Markl, Graham Parkes, Michael Polemis, E Richard Sorenson, Mircea Steriade, Thomas Szasz, Mariela Szirko, Robert A.F. Thurman, Edith L.B. Turner, Julia Watkin, Helmut Wautischer
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: Fred Kofman
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1427098182
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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Book Description
Presents techniques for organizational success that involve embracing such qualities as integrity, authenticity, accountability, and honesty.
