The Ingenious Mind of Nature
The Ingenious Mind of Nature

Author: George M. Hall

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-11-11

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1489960201

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At large, the miracle of life on earth, or our own thought processes as we contemplate and unlock the mysteries around us. This evocative perspective on nature offers food for thought to general readers and scientists alike by illuminating the ingenious patterns that influence the course of humanity and the universe.

The Ingenious Dr. Franklin
The Ingenious Dr. Franklin

Author: Nathan G. Goodman

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-06-03

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0812205618

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An outstanding collection of Benjamin Franklin's scientific correspondence, The Ingenious Dr. Franklin has long been unavailable yet deserves a place beside his Autobiography as essential reading for everyone interested in history, wit, and invention. Portioned into three sections, "Practical Schemes and Suggestions," "Diverse Experiments and Observations," and "Scientific Deductions and Conjectures," these letters discuss an extraordinary range of topics, including the art of procuring pleasant dreams, choosing eye glasses, the first human flight, the character of clouds, the behavior of oil and water, smallpox and cancer, the cause of colds, charting the Gulf Stream, and prehistoric animals of the Ohio. Culled from ponderous volumes of collected works or private collections, these engaging and unabridged letters were assembled to allow readers to discover for themselves Benjamin Franklin's vigorous personality, his humanity, and his penetrating intelligence.

Mind and Cosmos
Mind and Cosmos

Author: Thomas Nagel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-11-22

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 0199919755

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The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

Mind and Nature
Mind and Nature

Author: Gregory Bateson

Publisher: Hampton Press (NJ)

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781572734340

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A re-issue of Gregory Bateson's classic work. It summarizes Bateson's thinking on the subject of the patterns that connect living beings to each other and to their environment.

The Modeling of Nature
The Modeling of Nature

Author: William A Wallace

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0813208602

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The Modeling of Nature provides an excellent introduction to the fundamentals of natural philosophy, psychology, logic, and epistemology.

The Mind and its Place in Nature
The Mind and its Place in Nature

Author: C.D. Broad

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 685

ISBN-13: 1317833996

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This is Volume III of eight in a collection on the Philosophy of the Mind and Language. Originally published in 1925, this text looks at alternative theories of life and mind at the level of enlightened common-sense; the Mind's knowledge of Existents and the Unconscious.

Phantoms in the Brain
Phantoms in the Brain

Author: V. S. Ramachandran

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 1999-08-18

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0688172172

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Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity of his experiments -- using such low-tech tools as cotton swabs, glasses of water and dime-store mirrors. In Phantoms in the Brain, Dr. Ramachandran recounts how his work with patients who have bizarre neurological disorders has shed new light on the deep architecture of the brain, and what these findings tell us about who we are, how we construct our body image, why we laugh or become depressed, why we may believe in God, how we make decisions, deceive ourselves and dream, perhaps even why we're so clever at philosophy, music and art. Some of his most notable cases: A woman paralyzed on the left side of her body who believes she is lifting a tray of drinks with both hands offers a unique opportunity to test Freud's theory of denial. A man who insists he is talking with God challenges us to ask: Could we be "wired" for religious experience? A woman who hallucinates cartoon characters illustrates how, in a sense, we are all hallucinating, all the time. Dr. Ramachandran's inspired medical detective work pushes the boundaries of medicine's last great frontier -- the human mind -- yielding new and provocative insights into the "big questions" about consciousness and the self.