NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "If you’ve ever wondered how you have the capacity to wonder, some fascinating insights await you in these pages.” --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience. What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we? In this wonderfully accessible book, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what might possess it. Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness—allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.
Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue.
The trademark was said to be a satanic symbol being used as a result of a pact with the devil to ensure the company's success. A company executive had supposedly confessed the truth on 60 Minutes or Donahue, depending on which version ...
In The Feeling of Life Itself, Christof Koch offers a straightforward definition of consciousness as any subjective experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted--the feeling of being alive.
The author argues that true conscious machines can be built, but rejects artificial intelligence and classical neural networks in favor of the emulation of the cognitive processes of the brain.
This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness.
Friedman-Hill, S. R., Robertson, L. C., Desimone, R. & Ungerleider, L. G. (2003). Posterior parietal cortex and the filtering of distractors. ... Itti, L. & Koch, C. (2000). A saliency-based search mechanism for overt and covert shifts ...
Journal of Parapsychology, 62, 297–308 Wiseman, R.and Schlitz,M. (1998) Experimenter effectsand the remote detectionof staring. Journal ofParapsychology, 61(3), 197– 208. Wiseman, R., Smith, M. andKornbrot, D. (1996) Exploring possible ...
While various scientists and philosophers approach the problem from their own unique perspectives and in the terms of their own respective fields, Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach attempts a consilience across disparate ...
Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience.
The papers in this volume of Consciousness & Emotion Book Series are organized around the theme of "enaction." Enactive emotional processes are not merely the recipients of information or the passive victims of input and learning.