On the Evolution of Conscious Sensation, Conscious Imagination, and Consciousness of Self PDF Download

Author: Robert G. Kunzendorf
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780895039033
Category : Consciousness
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Author: Robert G. Kunzendorf
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027299935
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Individual Differences in Conscious Experience is intended for readers with philosophical, psychological, or clinical interests in subjective experience. It addresses some difficult but important issues in the study of consciousness, subconsciousness, and self-consciousness. The book’s fourteen chapters are written by renowned, pioneering researchers who, collectively, have published more than fifty books and more than one thousand journal articles. The editors’ introductory chapter frames the book’s subtext: that mind-brain theories embodying the constraints of individual differences in subjective experience should be given greater credence than nomothetic theories ignoring those constraints. The next five chapters describe research and theory pertaining to individual differences in conscious sensations — specifically, individual differences in pain perception, phantom limbs, gustatory sensations, and mental imagery. Then, two succeeding chapters focus on individual differences in subconsciousness. The final six chapters address individual differences in altered states of self-consciousness — dreams, hypnotic phenomena, and various clinical syndromes. (Series B)

Author: Robert G Kunzendorf
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351864084
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Philosophical 'thought experiments' invoking inverted spectra, zombies, et cetera suggest that conscious sensations have no function, and psychological studies finding no correlation between vivid visual imaging and visual problem solving suggest that conscious images have no function. Furthermore, both philosophical and psychological theories suggest that self-consciousness has no function. Countering such suggestions, the post-Darwinian double-aspect theory which Professor Robert Kunzendorf's introduces in the first chapter of his monograph On the Evolution of Conscious Sensation, Conscious Imagination, and Consciousness of Self points to evolutionary functions of certain sensations, youngling vivid images, and self-consciousness. Kunzendorf's second chapter presents evidence that the most primitive sensation-pain, the subjective aspect of free nerve endings or nociceptors-has a survival-promoting function. But as the pressure nociceptor mutates into a touch receptor, the heat nociceptor into temperature receptor, and the chemical nociceptor into a taste receptor, the painful qualia of these nociceptors evolve respectively into touch sensation, temperature sensation, or taste sensation-painless sensations that add no survival benefit to their receptor's physical aspect. Building on evidence that retinal receptors embodying visual qualia evolved from primitive eyespots responsive to injurious 'heat at a distance' or painful light, the third chapter presents evidence that visually imagined sensations are the subjective qualities of retinal receptors that are corticofugally innervated in warm-blooded animals-for the developmental purpose of testing cortically hypothesized sensory-motor rules that have greater survival value than cold-blooded stimulus-response associations. The fourth and final chapter focuses on self-conscious reality-testing and on visuo-spatial self-conceptualization, and presents evidence that such manifestations of self-awareness evolve only in those warm-blooded animals whose rule-developing youth lasts two years or longer-that is, those mammals and birds whose survival during the imaginal testing of rules is subjected to prolonged risk if self-consciousness that one is imaging sensations (rather than perceiving sensations) is absent.

Author: Antonio Damasio
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307379493
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious. Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.

Author: Antonio Damasio
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524747564
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.

Author: Lynn Margulis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262015390
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Scientists elucidate the astounding collective sensory capacity of Earth and its evolution through time.

Author: David J. Chalmers
Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780195117899
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Writing in a rigorous, thought-provoking style, the author takes us on a far-reaching tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness, offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.

Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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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

Author: Stanislas Dehaene
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698151402
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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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.

Author: National Academy of Sciences
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four or five such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Colloquia are organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and discussions with a hundred or more researchers with an interest in the topic. Colloquia presentations are recorded and posted on the National Academy of Sciences Sackler colloquia website and published on CD-ROM. These Colloquia are made possible by a generous gift from Mrs. Jill Sackler, in memory of her husband, Arthur M. Sackler.