Sizing Up Consciousness

Download or read book Sizing Up Consciousness written by Marcello Massimini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how we can measure consciousness. It clarifies what consciousness is, how it can be generated from a physical system, and how it can be measured. It also shows how conscious states can be expressed mathematically and how precise predictions can be made using data from neurophysiological studies.

Download or read book Sizing up Consciousness written by Marcello Massimini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone knows what consciousness is: it is what vanishes when we fall into dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or when we dream. However, we become less and less confident when we are called to answer fundamental questions about the relationships between consciousness and the physical world. Why is the cerebral cortex associated with consciousness, but not the liver, the heart, the cerebellum or other neural structures? Why does consciousness fade during deep sleep, while cortical neurons remain active? Can unresponsive patients with an island of active cortex surrounded by widespread damage be conscious? Is an artificial system that outperforms people at driving, recognizing faces and objects, and answering difficult questions conscious? Using the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a guiding principle, Sizing up Consciousness explores these questions, taking the reader along a fascinating journey from the cerebral cortex to the cerebellum, from wakefulness to sleep, anesthesia, and coma, supercomputers, octopuses, dolphins, and much more besides. By translating theoretical principles into practical measurements, the book outlines a preliminary attempt to identify a general rule to size up the capacity for consciousness within the human skull and beyond. Sizing up Consciousness is a short, accessible book, spanning neuronal activity to existential considerations and is essential reading for anyone interested in awareness and cognition.

Download or read book The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness written by Mark Solms and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime’s quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain’s obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience.

Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Phi written by Giulio Tononi and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is printed in full color throughout. From one of the most original and influential neuroscientists at work today, here is an exploration of consciousness unlike any other—as told by Galileo, who opened the way for the objectivity of science and is now intent on making subjective experience a part of science as well. Galileo’s journey has three parts, each with a different guide. In the first, accompanied by a scientist who resembles Francis Crick, he learns why certain parts of the brain are important and not others, and why consciousness fades with sleep. In the second part, when his companion seems to be named Alturi (Galileo is hard of hearing; his companion’s name is actually Alan Turing), he sees how the facts assembled in the first part can be unified and understood through a scientific theory—a theory that links consciousness to the notion of integrated information (also known as phi). In the third part, accompanied by a bearded man who can only be Charles Darwin, he meditates on how consciousness is an evolving, developing, ever-deepening awareness of ourselves in history and culture—that it is everything we have and everything we are. Not since Gödel, Escher, Bach has there been a book that interweaves science, art, and the imagination with such originality. This beautiful and arresting narrative will transform the way we think of ourselves and the world.

Download or read book Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness written by Bernard J. Baars and published by Bradford Book. This book was released on 2003 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current thinking and research on consciousness and the brain.

Download or read book Soul Dust written by Nicholas Humphrey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically new view of the nature and purpose of consciousness How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? And why do we value it so highly? In Soul Dust, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, a leading figure in consciousness research, proposes a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the "soul niche." Tightly argued, intellectually gripping, and a joy to read, Soul Dust provides answers to the deepest questions. It shows how the problem of consciousness merges with questions that obsess us all—how life should be lived and the fear of death. Resting firmly on neuroscience and evolutionary theory, and drawing a wealth of insights from philosophy and literature, Soul Dust is an uncompromising yet life-affirming work—one that never loses sight of the majesty and wonder of consciousness.