Structuring Mind

Download or read book Structuring Mind written by Sebastian Watzl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective.

Download or read book Structuring Mind written by Sebastian Watzl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective.

Download or read book Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality written by Paul L. Nunez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does the brain create the mind, or is some external entity involved? This book synthesizes ideas borrowed from philosophy, religion, and science. Topics range widely from brain imagining of thought processes to quantum mechanics and the essential role of information in brains and physical systems.

Download or read book A Neurocomputational Perspective written by Paul M. Churchland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Bradford book."Includes index. Bibliography: p. [305]-313.

Download or read book Levi-Strauss on Religion written by Paul-Francois Tremlett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology', is one of the most influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century. His development of 'structuralism' - the identification of patterns of human cognition and behaviour - greatly influenced Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. -Levi-Strauss on Religion- presents one of the only examinations of the importance of Levi-Strauss' thought and work to the study of religion. The book examines his methodology as well as his contributions to the study of kinship, totemism, and myth. The issues raised by Levi-Strauss' anthropological, political and philosophical texts are placed alongside contemporary debates in religious studies and the student is introduced to the thinkers and theories that informed his writings. This book will be invaluable to students of the anthropology and phenomenology of religion.

Download or read book Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind written by William Jaworski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind is the first book to show how hylomorphism can be used to solve mind-body problems--persistent problems understanding how thought, feeling, perception, and other mental phenomena fit into the physical world described by our best science. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. Some individuals, paradigmatically living things, consist of materials that are structured or organized in various ways. Those structures are responsible for individuals being the kinds of things they are, and having the kinds of powers or capacities they have. From a hylomorphic perspective, mind-body problems are byproducts of a worldview that rejects structure. Hylomorphic structure carves out distinctive individuals from the otherwise undifferentiated sea of matter and energy described by our best physics, and it confers on those individuals distinctive powers, including the powers to think, feel, and perceive. A worldview that rejects hylomorphic structure lacks a basic principle which distinguishes the parts of the physical universe that can think, feel, and perceive from those that can't, and without such a principle, the existence of those powers in the physical world can start to look inexplicable and mysterious. But if mental phenomena are structural phenomena, as hylomorphism claims, then they are uncontroversially part of the physical world, for on the hylomorphic view, structure is uncontroversially part of the physical world. Hylomorphism thus provides an elegant way of solving mind-body problems.

Download or read book A Place for Consciousness written by Gregg Rosenberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rosenberg introduces a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism for thinking about what causation is, about the natural world, and about how to create a detailed model to go along with the new paradigm. Arguing that experience is part of the categorical foundations of causality, he shows that within this new paradigm there is a place for something essentially like consciousness in all its traditional mysterious respects."--BOOK JACKET.