From Sensing to Sentience

From Sensing to Sentience PDF Author: Todd E. Feinberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026238146X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain. Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain. Emergent properties are broadly defined as features of a complex system that are not present in the parts of a system when they are considered in isolation but may emerge as a system feature of those parts and their interactions. Tracing a journey of billions of years of evolution from life to the basic sensing capabilities of single-celled organisms up to the sentience of animals with advanced nervous systems, including all vertebrates (for instance, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals), arthropods (insects and crabs), and cephalopods such as the octopus, Feinberg argues that sentience gradually but eventually emerged along diverse evolutionary lines with the evolution of sufficiently neurobiologically complex brains during the Cambrian period over 520 million years ago. Ultimately, Feinberg argues that viewing sentience as an emergent process can explain both its neurobiological basis as well its perplexing personal nature, thus solving the historical philosophical problem of the apparent “explanatory gap” between the brain and experience.

From Sensing to Sentience

From Sensing to Sentience PDF Author: Todd E. Feinberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026238146X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain. Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain. Emergent properties are broadly defined as features of a complex system that are not present in the parts of a system when they are considered in isolation but may emerge as a system feature of those parts and their interactions. Tracing a journey of billions of years of evolution from life to the basic sensing capabilities of single-celled organisms up to the sentience of animals with advanced nervous systems, including all vertebrates (for instance, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals), arthropods (insects and crabs), and cephalopods such as the octopus, Feinberg argues that sentience gradually but eventually emerged along diverse evolutionary lines with the evolution of sufficiently neurobiologically complex brains during the Cambrian period over 520 million years ago. Ultimately, Feinberg argues that viewing sentience as an emergent process can explain both its neurobiological basis as well its perplexing personal nature, thus solving the historical philosophical problem of the apparent “explanatory gap” between the brain and experience.

A Theory of Sentience

A Theory of Sentience PDF Author: Austen Clark
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198238515
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.

Embodied Being

Embodied Being PDF Author: Jeffrey Maitland
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1623170265
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Embodied Being is unique among books on manual therapy, offering an "infrastructure for intuition," a philosophical approach to what is essentially a practical process of diagnosis and treatment with one's hands. Grounded in the author's decades of practice as a Rolfer and Zen meditator, the book offers a first-of-its-kind three-step method for training practitioners how to see holistically, given the enormously important role perception plays in assessing clients. By exposing many of the unconscious philosophical assumptions that occlude our understanding the depths of manual therapy, Embodied Being promises to illuminate the full scope of body-mind healing, from the point of view of both the practitioner and the person receiving the work. Embodied Being states the principles of intervention and shows practitioners how to use them to answer three fundamental questions common to all forms of therapy: What do I do first? What do I do next? and When am I finished? Perplexed that most practitioners are unable to answer these questions and simply rely on their intuition, Maitland sets out to define what makes a truly life-altering bodywork session, drawing on his understanding of Goethe, Merleau-Ponty, and other great thinkers. Maitland proposes that the holistic approach in bodywork is capable of creating new possibilities for the future by erasing the patterns that bind us to a dysfunctional past. Such sessions can so profoundly reshape the body that there is no longer any room for emotional torment--thus manual therapy can free bodies of physical pain, releasing the innate joy within the core of all human beings. Ultimately, giving and receiving manual therapy teaches both practitioners and clients how to move with grace, open their hearts, and touch the numinous.

Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness

Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness PDF Author: David Bennett
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026254573X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influences the processing of information from the other senses and how unified states of consciousness emerge from the bonds that tie conscious experiences together. Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness is the first book to address both of these topics, integrating scientific and philosophical concerns. A flood of recent work in both philosophy and perception science has challenged traditional conceptions of the sensory systems as operating in isolation. Contributors to the volume consider the ways in which perceptual contact with the world is or may be “multisensory,” discussing such subjects as the modeling of multisensory integration and philosophical aspects of sensory modalities. Recent years have seen a similar surge of interest in unity of consciousness. Contributors explore a range of questions on this topic, including the nature of that unity, the degree to which conscious experiences are unified, and the relationship between unified consciousness and the self. Contributors Tim Bayne, David J. Bennett, Berit Brogaard, Barry Dainton, Ophelia Deroy, Frederique de Vignemont, Marc Ernst, Richard Held, Christopher S. Hill, Geoffrey Lee, Kristan Marlow, Farid Masrour, Jennifer Matey, Casey O'Callaghan, Cesare V. Parise, Kevin Rice, Elizabeth Schechter, Pawan Sinha, Julia Trommershaeuser, Loes C. J. van Dam, Jonathan Vogel, James Van Cleve, Robert Van Gulick, Jonas Wulff

Deconstructive Subjectivities

Deconstructive Subjectivities PDF Author: Simon Critchley
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438400071
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Explores the meanings of subjectivity in continental philosophy in the wake of post-structuralism and critical theory.

Questioning Ethics

Questioning Ethics PDF Author: Mark Dooley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134679246
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This major discussion takes a look at some of the most important ethical issues confronting us today by some of the world’s leading thinkers. Including essays from leading thinkers, such as Jurgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Julia Kristeva and Paul Ricoeur, the book’s highlight – an interview with Jacques Derrida - presents the most accessible insight into his thinking on ethics and politics for many years. Exploring topics ranging from history, memory, revisionism, and the self and responsibility to democracy, multiculturalism, feminism and the future of politics, the essays are grouped into five thematic sections: * hermeneutics * deconstruction * critical theory * psychoanalysis * applied ethics. Each section considers the challenges posed by ethics and how critical thinking has transformed philosophy today. Questioning Ethics affords an unsurpassed overview of the state of ethical thinking today by some of the world’s foremost philosophers.

Intelligence and Spirit

Intelligence and Spirit PDF Author: Reza Negarestani
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0997567406
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 591

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Book Description
A critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism that formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things. In Intelligence and Spirit Reza Negarestani formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things, a real movement capable of overcoming any state of affairs that, from the perspective of the present, may appear to be the complete totality of history. Intelligence pierces through what seems to be the totality or the inevitable outcome of its history, be it the manifest portrait of the human or technocapitalism as the alleged pilot of history. Building on Hegel's account of Geist as a multiagent conception of mind and on Kant's transcendental psychology as a functional analysis of the conditions of possibility of mind, Negarestani provides a critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism. The assumptions of the former are exposed by way of a critique of the transcendental structure of experience as a tissue of subjective or psychological dogmas; the claims of the latter regarding the ubiquity of mind or the inevitable advent of an unconstrained superintelligence are challenged as no more than ideological fixations which do not stand the test of systematic scrutiny. This remarkable fusion of continental philosophy in the form of a renewal of the speculative ambitions of German Idealism and analytic philosophy in the form of extended thought-experiments and a philosophy of artificial languages opens up new perspectives on the meaning of human intelligence and explores the real potential of posthuman intelligence and what it means for us to live in its prehistory.

The Stairway to Consciousness

The Stairway to Consciousness PDF Author: Dr. Thomas Stark
Publisher: Magus Books
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Come and discover the extraordinary story of how consciousness is born from the unconscious. This is the story of existence. This is the story of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Everything conscious has the unconscious for a mother. To exist is to live, to have a mind, and to think. As we see in our dreams, thinking can produce outer worlds, which we imagine are external to us but are just our own constructs. We are all part of a living cosmic organism, seeking to optimize itself, to perfect itself. The Cosmic Mind produces a Cosmic World in which Mind can contend with its own construct and come to consciousness via all the problems and struggles it encounters there. We are alienated from the world because we fail to understand that we unconsciously created it. Only consciousness can reveal the truth: that everything is made by us, that we have total control over it … if we put our mind to it. Minds and their thoughts are all that exist. There is nothing else.

Sensing Law

Sensing Law PDF Author: Sheryl Hamilton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317282043
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
A rich collection of interdisciplinary essays, this book explores the question: what is to be found at the intersection of the sensorium and law’s empire? Examining the problem of how legal rationalities try to grasp what can only be sensed through the body, these essays problematize the Cartesian framework that has long separated the mind from the body, reason from feeling and the human from the animal. In doing so, they consider how the sensorium can operate, variously, as a tool of power or as a means of countering the exercise of regulatory force. The senses, it is argued, operate as a vector for the implication of subjects in legal webs, but also as a powerful site of resistance to legal definition and determination. From the sensorium of animals to technologically mediated perception, the ways in which the law senses and the ways in which senses are brought before the law invite a questioning of the categories of liberal humanism. And, as this volume demonstrates, this questioning opens up the both interesting and important possibility of imagining other sensual subjectivities.

Consciousness Demystified

Consciousness Demystified PDF Author: Todd E. Feinberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038811
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Demystifying consciousness: how subjective experience can be explained by natural brain and evolutionary processes. Consciousness is often considered a mystery. How can the seemingly immaterial experience of consciousness be explained by the material neurons of the brain? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between understanding the brain as an objectively observed biological organ and accounting for the subjective experiences that come from the brain (and life processes). In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt attempt to demystify consciousness—to naturalize it, by explaining that the subjective, experiencing aspects of consciousness are created by natural brain processes that evolved in natural ways. Although subjective experience is unique in nature, they argue, it is not necessarily mysterious. We need not invoke the unknown or unknowable to explain its creation. Feinberg and Mallatt flesh out their theory of neurobiological naturalism (after John Searle's biological naturalism) that recognizes the many features that brains share with other living things, lists the neural features unique to conscious brains, and explains the subjective–objective barrier naturally. They investigate common neural features among the diverse groups of animals that have primary consciousness—the type of consciousness that experiences both sensations received from the world and affects such as emotions. They map the evolutionary development of consciousness and find an uninterrupted progression over time, without inserting any mysterious forces or exotic physics. Finally, bridging the previously unbridgeable, they show how subjective experience, although different from objective observation, can be naturally explained.