Being You
Being You

Author: Anil Seth

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-10-19

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1524742880

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of 2021—Bloomberg Businessweek; A Best Science Book of 2021—The Guardian; A Best Science Book of 2021—Financial Times; A Best Philosophy Book of 2021—Five Books; A Best Book of 2021—The Economist Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science. What does it mean to “be you”—that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood. Now, internationally renowned neuroscience professor, researcher, and author Anil Seth is offers a window into our consciousness in BEING YOU: A New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is both a leading expert on the neuroscience of consciousness and one of most prominent spokespeople for this relatively new field of science. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness. Seth has been interviewed for documentaries aired on the BBC, Netflix, and Amazon and podcasts by Sam Harris, Russell Brand, and Chris Anderson, and his 2017 TED Talk on the topic has been viewed over 11 million times, a testament to his uncanny ability to make unimaginably complex science accessible and entertaining.

The New Science of Consciousness
The New Science of Consciousness

Author: Paul L. Nunez

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1633882195

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This book explains in laypersons' terms a new approach to studying consciousness based on a partnership between neuroscientists and complexity scientists. The author, a physicist turned neuroscientist, outlines essential features of this partnership. The new science goes well beyond traditional cognitive science and simple neural networks, which are often the focus in artificial intelligence research. It involves many fields including neuroscience, artificial intelligence, physics, cognitive science, and psychiatry. What causes autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease? How does our unconscious influence our actions? As the author shows, these important questions can be viewed in a new light when neuroscientists and complexity scientists work together. This cross-disciplinary approach also offers fresh insights into the major unsolved challenge of our age- the origin of self-awareness. Do minds emerge from brains? Or is something more involved? Using human social networks as a metaphor, the author explains how brain behavior can be compared with the collective behavior of large-scale global systems. Emergent global systems that interact and form relationships with lower levels of organization and the surrounding environment provide useful models for complex brain functions. By blending lucid explanations with illuminating analogies, this book offers the general reader a window into the latest exciting developments in brain research.

Stairway to the Mind
Stairway to the Mind

Author: Alwyn Scott

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1461225108

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Human consciousness has perplexed philosophers, artists and scientists for centuries. Some hold it to be purely physical, while others believe it transcends the material world. Now comes a book that offers a new perspective - based entirely on evidence from the natural sciences - whereby materialism and dualism co-exist. The author - a distinguished pioneer of nonlinear dynamics - bases his argument on a hierarchical view of mental organization; a stairway. Atoms give rise to molecules, neurons form the brain and individual consciousness leads to shared culture. All steps are needed to complete the picture and each level derives from the previous one. The book shows specialists how each of their fields adds to the overall picture, while providing general readers with an introduction to this investigation.

The New Science of Consciousness Survival and the Metaparadigm Shift to a Conscious Universe
The New Science of Consciousness Survival and the Metaparadigm Shift to a Conscious Universe

Author: Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot

Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing

Published: 2016-06-30

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1457546949

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"Alan Hugenot" lectures on “the Leading-Edge Science of the Afterlife,… he concluded that the entire universe is conscious and that this explains both near-death experiences and certain paradoxes of quantum theory…. As someone with a physics degree, I know that Hugenot’s….basic idea of a conscious universe is neither crazy nor new…. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum physics, was an avid student of Hindu philosophy, and believed something similar." Gideon Lichfield, April 2015 Atlantic Monthly “The existence of a hidden field (Bohm’s implicate order) of non-physical consciousness, occupying as yet undiscerned additional dimensions, which are outside the visible reality (Bohm’s explicate order) as defined by 3-D plus time, has now been proven scientifically by the following collated data: Recent repeated replication of John Bell’s theory of non-locality, Studies of the Near-Death experience, and After-death communications demonstrated in triple blind laboratory experiments testing evidential mediumship This hidden field (implicate order) of non-physical consciousness, also provides the matrix upon which the explicate order of observed reality is continually manifested." Alan Hugenot “Our challenge is to discover, through careful science, how we can interface with this matrix of consciousness. Viewing psi phenomena as belonging to aspects of reality, about which we as yet simply know very little, is the only honest way for any scientist to proceed. Healthy scientific skepticism must be open to new discoveries; and so allow open examination of the scientific data developed by rigorous para-normal research. Honest, open minded inquiry will bring both new discoveries of truth and new laws of physics beyond the limits of the Newtonian paradigm. Alan Hugenot

Body Am I
Body Am I

Author: Moheb Costandi

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-10-04

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0262368706

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How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena. The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes. Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing on recent bodily awareness research, the new science of self-consciousness, and historical milestones in neurology, he describes a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia. Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, Body Am I (the title comes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra) offers new insight into self-consciousness by describing it in terms of bodily awareness.

The Science of Consciousness
The Science of Consciousness

Author: Trevor A. Harley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 1107125286

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An introduction to the psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience of consciousness, including sleep, dreaming, meditative, and altered states.

The Ravenous Brain
The Ravenous Brain

Author: Daniel Bor

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2012-08-28

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0465032966

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Consciousness is our gateway to experience: it enables us to recognize Van Gogh's starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven's Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine: philosophers have for centuries declared this mental entity so mysterious as to be impenetrable to science.In The Ravenous Brain, neuroscientist Daniel Bor departs sharply from this historical view, and builds on the latest research to propose a new model for how consciousness works. Bor argues that this brain-based faculty evolved as an accelerated knowledge gathering tool. Consciousness is effectively an idea factory -- that choice mental space dedicated to innovation, a key component of which is the discovery of deep structures within the contents of our awareness.This model explains our brains"; ravenous appetite for information -- and in particular, its constant search for patterns. Why, for instance, after all our physical needs have been met, do we recreationally solve crossword or Sudoku puzzles? Such behavior may appear biologically wasteful, but, according to Bor, this search for structure can yield immense evolutionary benefits -- it led our ancestors to discover fire and farming, pushed modern society to forge ahead in science and technology, and guides each one of us to understand and control the world around us. But the sheer innovative power of human consciousness carries with it the heavy cost of mental fragility.Bor discusses the medical implications of his theory of consciousness, and what it means for the origins and treatment of psychiatric ailments, including attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, manic depression, and autism. All mental illnesses, he argues, can be reformulated as disorders of consciousness -- a perspective that opens up new avenues of treatment for alleviating mental suffering.A controversial view of consciousness, The Ravenous Brain links cognition to creativity in an ingenious solution to one of science's biggest mysteries.

Shadows of the Mind
Shadows of the Mind

Author: Roger Penrose

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780195106466

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Presents the author's thesis that consciousness, in its manifestation in the human quality of understanding, is doing something that mere computation cannot; and attempts to understand how such non-computational action might arise within scientifically comprehensive physical laws.

Galileo's Error
Galileo's Error

Author: Philip Goff

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1524747963

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From a leading philosopher of the mind comes this lucid, provocative argument that offers a radically new picture of human consciousness--panpsychism, an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward.ward.

Mind Before Matter
Mind Before Matter

Author: Trish Pfeiffer

Publisher: Iff Books

Published: 2007-09

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9781846940576

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Materialism is the dominant worldview in the West today. But it is only one worldview, and it doesn't completely work, even, ironically, being gradually undermined by the science that gave rise to it. Containing the last unpublished writing of Pulitzer prize-winning author and scholar, the late John Mack, this anthology of essays from significant figures in the world of science and consciousness studies sketches the framework for a new model of realit--one based on the primacy of consciousness rather than of matter. It is a model we will need for survival on this planet. Mind Before Matter represents the first concerted salvo in a debate that could affect the worldview held by the modern, dominant culture.