The Man in My Head Has Lost His Mind (What is Consciousness?)
The Man in My Head Has Lost His Mind (What is Consciousness?)

Author: Carter Blakelaw

Publisher: The Logic of Dreams

Published: 2023-01-02

Total Pages: 64

ISBN-13:

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The howl of the bedside clock-radio carves through your dreams like a buzz-saw through butter, and you are awake. In another place. Never mind the bright yellow sunlight that flecks your pillow and warms your face; you are rudely awake, and resent it. Gah! You roll onto your side, cantilever your legs over the side of the bed and plant your feet squarely on the carpet. You rub your face. Massage your neck. Oh, what it is to be alive!--and conscious--oh oh oh, indeed. But what is it to be alive, and conscious? Alive, we have some inkling of; you eat, you sleep, you exercise. You stay healthy and keep your body going as best you can. But conscious? What even is that? A good question is what that is, and a question for which this book has an answer. So in this text, first I set the scene: - Did our consciousness evolve? - Does consciousness give us free will? - Which animals do we think are conscious? - Where does consciousness go when we sleep? - How does consciousness deliver meaning? - What might a theory of consciousness look like? Then I propose: - A model for consciousness at the macro scale - A mechanism for consciousness at the micro scale Finally, I suggest some real world tests that science will one day be able to perform which will either corroborate or invalidate the theory I present here. This is a workable, testable theory. Science and philosophy demand nothing less. Table of Contents Introduction 1. A Poodle Ate My Homework 2. Life Is a Comic Strip 3. How Do You Explain Anything? 4. As Time Goes By (A Kiss Is Just a Kiss) 5. This See, Is the Conscious Bit 6. Qualia, the Possible and a Particular 7. Evolution and Free Will 8. The Good, the Bad and the Choosy 9. Finally, Making It All Work A must-read for the curious-minded, which you are, are you not? So read on...

The Mystery of Consciousness
The Mystery of Consciousness

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780940322066

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It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind

Author: Barbara K. Lipska

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1328787273

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In the tradition of My Stroke of Insight and Brain on Fire, this powerful memoir recounts Barbara Lipska's deadly brain cancer and explains its unforgettable lessons about the brain and mind. Neuroscientist Lipska was diagnosed early in 2015 with metastatic melanoma in her brain's frontal lobe. As the cancer progressed and was treated, she experienced behavioral and cognitive symptoms connected to a range of mental disorders, including dementia and her professional specialty, schizophrenia. Lipska's family and associates were alarmed by the changes in her behavior, which she failed to acknowledge herself. Gradually, after a course of immunotherapy, Lipska returned to normal functioning, amazingly recalled her experience, and through her knowledge of neuroscience identified the ways in which her brain changed during treatment. Lipska admits her condition was unusual; after recovery she was able to return to her research and resume her athletic training and compete in a triathalon. Most patients with similar brain cancers rarely survive to describe their ordeal. Lipska's memoir, coauthored with journalist Elaine McArdle, shows that strength and courage but also an encouraging support network are vital to recovery.

Consciousness and the Brain
Consciousness and the Brain

Author: Stanislas Dehaene

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-01-30

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0698151402

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WINNER OF THE 2014 BRAIN PRIZE From the acclaimed author of Reading in the Brain and How We Learn, a breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness.

Empty Ideas
Empty Ideas

Author: Peter Unger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 019069601X

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During the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers generally agreed that, by contrast with science, philosophy should offer no substantial thoughts about the general nature of concrete reality. Instead, philosophers offered conceptual truths. It is widely assumed that, since 1970, things have changed greatly. This book argues that's an illusion that prevails because of the failure to differentiate between "concretely substantial" and "concretely empty" ideas.

Sweet Dreams
Sweet Dreams

Author: Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006-09-08

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0262250721

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In the years since Daniel Dennett's influential Consciousness Explained was published in 1991, scientific research on consciousness has been a hotly contested battleground of rival theories—"so rambunctious," Dennett observes, "that several people are writing books just about the tumult." With Sweet Dreams, Dennett returns to the subject for "revision and renewal" of his theory of consciousness, taking into account major empirical advances in the field since 1991 as well as recent theoretical challenges. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett proposed to replace the ubiquitous but bankrupt Cartesian Theater model (which posits a privileged place in the brain where "it all comes together" for the magic show of consciousness) with the Multiple Drafts Model. Drawing on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, he asserted that human consciousness is essentially the mental software that reorganizes the functional architecture of the brain. In Sweet Dreams, he recasts the Multiple Drafts Model as the "fame in the brain" model, as a background against which to examine the philosophical issues that "continue to bedevil the field." With his usual clarity and brio, Dennett enlivens his arguments with a variety of vivid examples. He isolates the "Zombic Hunch" that distorts much of the theorizing of both philosophers and scientists, and defends heterophenomenology, his "third-person" approach to the science of consciousness, against persistent misinterpretations and objections. The old challenge of Frank Jackson's thought experiment about Mary the color scientist is given a new rebuttal in the form of "RoboMary," while his discussion of a famous card trick, "The Tuned Deck," is designed to show that David Chalmers's Hard Problem is probably just a figment of theorists' misexploited imagination. In the final essay, the "intrinsic" nature of "qualia" is compared with the naively imagined "intrinsic value" of a dollar in "Consciousness—How Much is That in Real Money?"

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2000-08-15

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 0547527543

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The Punch Escrow
The Punch Escrow

Author: Tal M. Klein

Publisher: Inkshares

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1942645589

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When he’s accidentally duplicated while teleporting, Joel Byram must outrun the most powerful corporation on the planet and find a way back to his wife in a world that now has two of him. Dubbed the “next Ready, Player One,” by former Warner Brothers President Greg Silverman, and now in film development at Lionsgate.

Das Gehirn meines Vaters
Das Gehirn meines Vaters

Author: Jonathan Franzen

Publisher: PONS

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9783125615472

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2-sprachiger Lektüreband mit einer Erzählung von Jonathan Frantzen und einer Audio-CD mit dem englischen Text; für Lernende mit guten Vorkenntnissen.

This Robot Brain Gets Life (Making AI Pseudo-Conscious)
This Robot Brain Gets Life (Making AI Pseudo-Conscious)

Author: Carter Blakelaw

Publisher: The Logic of Dreams

Published: 2023-04-23

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13:

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For those in a hurry, this: - To align an AI’s goals with our own, we must build-in alignment from the start. - To keep an AI honest, we must build-in honesty from the start. - To get an AI to understand anything, we must invest it with something of what it’s like to be conscious. In this book, a theory of consciousness is cast into an AI architecture that allows interventions in concept formation by design. For the rest of you, who enjoy reading and mulling things over, this: Can a computing device appreciate the smell of coffee on a Sunday morning, or contemplate the Earth as seen from the Moon, or worry about inflation and the price of fuel? Not without being conscious and understanding the world. And one can't be done without the other, surely? In this book, Carter Blakelaw uses a theory of what makes us conscious to present a machine that will genuinely think for itself. Not only that, but once he has his machine, he looks at how to ensure its interests align with our own, and how to keep it honest and true (alignment and hallucinations being two of the biggest issues in AI). Discover what he discovers about the machine, about our world, and about us.