Essays on the contributions to historical and contemporary evolutionary theory of the Baldwin effect, which postulates the effects of learned behaviors on evolutionary change.
Neuroscientist Leslie Brothers argues that our understanding of the brain is determined by popular beliefs about the mind. She critiques "neuroism," which explains the mind in terms of individual brains, and shows that widely held assumptions about the promise of contemporary brain research are largely false. This book opens up new territory as it uncovers the real connections among human biology, human sociality, and the mind.
What are the grounds for the distinction between the mental and the physical? What is it the relation between ascribing mental states to an organism and understanding its behavior? Are animals and complex systems vehicles of inner evolutionary environments? Is there a difference between personal and sub-personal level processes in the brain? Answers to these and other questions were developed in Daniel Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness (1969), where he sketched a unified theoretical framework for views that are now considered foundational in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Content and Consciousness Revisited is devoted to reconsider the ideas and ideals introduced in Dennett’s seminal book, by covering its fundamental concepts, hypotheses and approaches and taking into account the findings and progress which have taken place during more than four decades. This book includes original and critical contributions about the relations between science and philosophy, the personal/sub-personal level distinction, intelligence, learning, intentionality, rationality, propositional attitudes, among other issues of scientific and philosophical interest. Each chapter embraces an updated approach to several disciplines, like cognitive science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive psychiatry.
Prominent philosophers explore themes in the work of Owen Flanagan, focusing on debates about the nature of mind, the self, and morality. Owen Flanagan's work offers a model for how to be a naturalistic and scientifically informed philosopher who writes beautifully and deeply about topics as varied as consciousness and Buddhism, moral psychology and dreaming, identity and addiction, literature and neuroscience. In this volume, leading philosophers--Flanagan's friends, colleagues, and former students--explore themes in his work, focusing on debates over the nature of mind, the self, and morality. Some contributors address Flanagan's work directly; others are inspired by his work or methodology. Their essays are variously penetrating and synoptic, cautious and speculative.
Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, this reader brings together most of the principal texts in philosophy (and a small set of related key works in neuropsychology) on consciousness through 1997, and includes some forthcoming articles. Its extensive coverage strikes a balance between seminal works of the past few decades and the leading edge of philosophical research on consciousness.As no other anthology currently does, The Nature of Consciousness provides a substantial introduction to the field, and imposes structure on a vast and complicated literature, with sections covering stream of consciousness, theoretical issues, consciousness and representation, the function of consciousness, subjectivity and the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, qualia, and monitoring conceptions of consciousness. Of the 49 contributions, 18 are either new or have been adapted from a previous publication.
Consciousness is perplexing: too familiar and intimate to ignore, too complex and elusive to understand. Although consciousness is embedded in all our experience and is considered basic to all our knowing, no one seems to know what exactly it is, and the concept is both widely used and much abused. For the better part of the twentieth century, the study of consciousness was viewed as unworthy of scholarly and scientific pursuit. Research has consequently suffered. This cross-cultural examination first explores the varieties of conscious experience and reflects on the attempts to understand and explain consciousness in the Western scholarly and scientific tradition. The next section deals with Eastern spiritual traditions and how they differ with and complement the Western viewpoints. In the final chapters the author reconciles the two traditions for a comprehensive understanding of what consciousness is, and considers how such an understanding may be helpful for a cross-cultural assessment of behavior, as well as for enhancing human abilities and wellness.
There are many ways to approach the understanding of consciousness. Questions about these ways have occupied philosophers and metaphysicians for centuries. During the early growth of cognitive science the problem of consciousness remained taboo, but an increasing number of studies have either implicitly or explicitly begun to bear on its nature. These have been inspired by a number of different different original questions, and focus on a variety of different empirical phenomena. Thus, studies of implicit memory, subliminal processing, strategic versus automatic processing, allocation of attention, and differences between information processes in the awake versus dreaming state all share a common assumption of a particular quality or state -- awakeness, awareness, alertness, namely consciousness -- that somehow can be distinguished from another type of state or states in which the subject is not aware of the information being processed. What distinguishes the cognitive psychological and cognitive neuroscience approach to the question of consciousness from that of philosophy and metaphysics is scientific methodology: a set of tools that permit the empirical study of a phenomenon in an objective and reproducible way. Recent developments in both the empirical and theoretical methodologies of these fields have made it possible to begin to study the phenomenon associated with -- if not directly underlying -- consciousness in a scientific fashion. This volume tries to resolve the difficulties associated with the scientific investigation of consciousness. The intent is to explore the extent to which consciousness can be the target of direct scientific inquiry, to get on the table some of the relevant work, and consider the degree to which this research can help inform our understanding of consciousness. It brings together a group of cognitive and neuroscientists to share relevant recent research in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience and to determine whether any new strategies for the scientific pursuit of this question can be developed. A long-term goal is the development of a unified understanding of consciousness, scientific as well as philosophical perspectives. This volume takes the first step toward building the necessary local bridges.