Donald (psychology, Queen's University, Canada) challenges the prevailing view that seeks to explain away human consciousness and presents a theory on the origins of the modern mind. He describes the cultural and neuronal forces that power human modes of awareness, and proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product of the interweaving of the brain with an invisible symbolic web of culture to form a "distributed" cognitive network. Using evidence from brain and behavioral studies of humans and animals, he explains how an expansion of consciousness transcends the limitations of the mammalian mind, and elaborates the foundations of self-evaluation and self-reflection. c. Book News Inc.
"Crook has an extensive range of interests and writes with authority on the whole sociobiological spectrum. He discusses the behavior of insects, birds, primates, and so forth, with impressive thoroughness and detail. He ... introduces an equally expert and apparently firsthand discussion of Eastern philosophy, especially Zen Buddhism. His purpose is to emphasize the duality, or perhaps multiplicity, of consciousness, and the importance of society's more objective facets. A scholarly work complete with excellent bibliographies, index, and references." --Choice
Drawing from the disciplines of cognitive science, Paleolithic anthropology, art history, and semiotics, Karen A. Haworth and Terry J. Prewitt offer a novel discussion of the origins of language, based primarily in the distinction of holistic versus analytical cognitive processing. Also, by employing a refined view of human symboling capacities grounded in the writings of C. S. Peirce, they provide a short but comprehensive explanation of what the artifacts and art of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods suggest about language origins. Their interpretation supports a semiotic argument that “iconic and indexical logical modeling” precedes human elaboration of experience by symbolic reference in words or propositions, and ultimately in what Peirce called “the argument.” Further, they suggest that the use of symbols to model the world developed rapidly between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, and has the effect of giving emphasis to analytic thought as the dominant mode of human consciousness. Rather than seeing symbols as the impetus for human logic, they argue for presymbolic elements of logic in Peirce’s sign categories shared widely by humans and other animals. Intended readers are scholars in philosophy, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and semiotics, as well as interested nonspecialists. The presentation is also complemented with brief personal narratives, intended to offer background that helps make a dense academic argument more accessible to the widest audience possible. The authors’ insights into the basis for language have ramifications for any number of other fields: education, psychology, philosophy, prehistory, and art, to name a few.
How do our unique conscious minds reflect and amplify nature’s vast evolutionary process? This book provides a scientifically informed, psychologically holistic approach to understanding and enhancing our future consciousness, serving as a guide for creating a realistic, constructive, and ethical future. Thomas Lombardo reveals how we can flourish in the flow of evolution and create a prosperous future for ourselves, human society and the planet.
This unconventional book is being written with the highest intention to awaken the consciousness of all humanity and that it will help us speed up in the path of human evolution. We are to include our feelings and our emotions and with open minds to be our guide in this process. All the information in this book needs to be approached in this manner! A sudden realization came that this book was there all along, and it was just waiting to be written when the highest awareness was there!
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
This book is a tour-de-force on how human consciousness may have evolved. From the "phantom pain" experienced by people who have lost their limbs to the uncanny faculty of "blindsight," Humphrey argues that raw sensations are central to all conscious states and that consciousness must have evolved, just like all other mental faculties, over time from our ancestors'bodily responses to pain and pleasure. "Humphrey is one of that growing band of scientists who beat literary folk at their own game"-RICHARD DAWKINS "A wonderful bookbrilliant, unsettling, and beautifully written. Humphrey cuts bravely through the currents of contemporary thinking, opening up new vistas on old problems offering a feast of provocative ideas." -DANIEL DENNETT
The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. The intermediate stages are projected in the universal myths of the World Creation, Great Mother, Separation of the World Parents, Birth of the Hero, Slaying of the Dragon, Rescue of the Captive, and Transformation and Deification of the Hero. Throughout the sequence, the Hero is the evolving ego consciousness. Featuring a foreword by Jung, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and enduring work.
