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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.
Sebastian Rödl undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. This profound work revives the thought that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself.
Timely and authoritative, this volume reviews the breadth of current knowledge on the self-conscious emotions and their role in psychological and social functioning. Leading investigators approach the subject from multiple levels of analysis, ranging from basic brain mechanisms to complex social processes. Chapters present compelling advances in research on the most fundamental self-conscious emotions: embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, pride, and shame. Addressed are neural and evolutionary mechanisms, developmental processes, cultural differences and similarities, and influences on a wide array of social behaviors and personality processes. A unique chapter on assessment describes and evaluates the full range of available measures.
Uriah Kriegel develops an objective theory of what it is for a mental state to be conscious. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental states differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they represent, they represent themselves in a very specific way.
According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.
The Nobel Prize-winning work of Roger Sperry revolutionized our understanding of human consciousness by proving that separate thinking and knowledge could exist in the left and right halves of the brain. Now, popular science writer Thomas Blakeslee - author of the highly acclaimed The Right Brain - takes us to a new level of understanding based on the theory of neural Darwinism by Gerald Edelman, another Nobel Prize winner. Blakeslee explains that our neurons spontaneously organize into hundreds of groups called modules that compete to respond to every situation in our lives - from reading this paragraph to falling in love. A vast preponderance of this activity operates outside of our conscious awareness.
The consequences of apparent moral failings in an individual are something that can be seen frequently in the media and in everyday life. One issue that is rarely addressed in public discussion about someone’s ‘lack of conscience’ is any thought as to how the conscience actually functions. In The Conscience and Self-Conscious Emotions in Adolescence, Frans Schalkwijk presents a new definition of the conscience as a psychic function in which self-conscious emotions and empathy are dominant. Schalkwijk combines current scientific research into empathy, shame and guilt as well as his rich clinical experience to create a wealth of information for clinicians working with children and adolescents. This book is a superb guide for operationalizing the diagnostics of the conscience, presenting a developmental approach to the theory and diagnostics of the conscience and integrating psychoanalytic, cognitive behavioural, social, psychological and neurobiological theories. Research has shown that human behaviours are often enacted well below our potential cognitive level. In this book, a balance is found between affective and cognitive aspects of the conscience. Accessibly written and incorporating case studies and detailed notation throughout, this is a highly practical work ideal for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, students and professionals working with children, adolescents and adults.
For the serious student of life here in the Earth School, this work may help you push your own boundaries of beliefs, perceptions and assumptions and lead you into a deeper course of inquiry within the heart and soul of you. It's in large part why you are here. So, I've gathered together three works that explore different aspects of consciousness with a small "c" and along with painting a different perspective of the big "C" in terms of the Cosmic Consciousness, Source or God, however it is you might like to reference it. It is my contribution towards helping to create that little instruction book we all could use. It is my greatest hope that you might find something of value, something to make you think or something that might give you pause to realize you are so much more than you've been taught by conventional religion and various courses of earliest teachings from elementary school and beyond.
It is impossible to hold patently contradictory beliefs in mind together at once. Why? Because we know that it is impossible for both to be true. This impossibility is a species of rational necessity, a phenomenon that uniquely characterizes the relation between one person's beliefs. Here, Eric Marcus argues that the unity of the rational mind--what makes it one mind--is what explains why, given what we already believe, we can't believe certain things and must believe certain others in this special sense. What explains this is that beliefs, and the inferences by which we acquire them, are constituted by a particular kind of endorsement of those very states and acts. This, in turn, entails that belief and inference are essentially self-conscious: to hold a belief or to make an inference is at the same time to know that one does. An examination of the nature of belief and inference, in light of the phenomenon of rational necessity, reveals how the unity of the rational mind is a function of our knowledge of ourselves as bound to believe the true. Rational self-consciousness is the form of mental togetherness.
In this book, Jos� Luis Berm�dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Berm�dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox of self-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer.