This volume provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the emerging concept of the evolution of consciousness. It presents an overarching model that moves us to a new level of meaning and understanding of our place in the world.
The Evolution of Consciousness brings together interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science to explain consciousness in terms of the biological function that grounds it in the physical world. Drawing on the novel analogy of a house of cards, Paula Droege pieces together various conceptual questions and shows how they rest on each other to form a coherent, structured argument. She asserts that the mind is composed of unconscious sensory and cognitive representations, which become conscious when they are selected and coordinated into a representation of the present moment. This temporal representation theory deftly bridges the gap between mind and body by highlighting that physical systems are conscious when they can respond flexibly to actions in the present. With examples from evolution, animal cognition, introspection and the free will debate, this is a compelling and animated account of the possible explanations of consciousness, offering answers to the conceptual question of how consciousness can be considered a cognitive process.
From the alpha to the omega, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin offers an evolution-of-consciousness paradigm of the universe and a triumphant vision of humankind and its future. Guided by a creative process that motivated Teilhard, Vincent Frank Bedogne aims to unite matter with consciousness, science with spirituality. He looks beyond Darwin and the big bang; beyond traditional ideas of God, religion, and the human role in existence. As he does, we realize that the universe is crossing the most profound threshold in its evolution since the dawn of reflective thought a thousand lifetimes ago; and, like the threshold to reflection, this blossom of transcendence is unfolding within us. The book philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would have written had he lived another fifty years.
When Alice stepped through the looking-glass, she encountered a peculiar world where she meets animated chess pieces, characters from nursery rhymes, and talking animals. Everything there is inside out and upside down: so it is with consciousness. Reflecting on the inception of consciousness, it is natural to suppose that there are just two alternatives. Either consciousness appeared in living beings suddenly, like a light switch turning on, or it appeared gradually, like the biological development of life itself, through borderline cases which became the collective experience over time. For the former theory, consciousness is an on/off matter, but once it was there it became richer over time, like a beam of light becoming brighter and broader in its sweep. For the latter theory this is not the case, and there are shades of grey in how consciousness develops. Unfortunately, both alternatives face deep problems. The solution to these problems lies in the realization, strange as it may be, that a key element of consciousness itself was always here, as a fundamental feature of micro-reality. Varying conscious states were not, however: they appeared gradually. In Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness, Michael Tye addresses the questions that this raises. Where in the brain is consciousness located? How can consciousness be casually efficacious with respect to behaviour? What is the extent of consciousness in the animal world? How can all of this be so?
How does the water of the brain yield the wine of conscious experience? What is the link between bodily activity and our inner feeling of what its like to be ourselves? The problem of qualia-the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness-has intrigued philosophers, for generations, and remains the greatest challenge to contemporary science. In this path-breaking book, Nicholas Humphrey examines the issues in the fight of evolutionary history and proposes a solution very different from any previously offered. He suggests that instead of focusing on second-order mental faculties, or "thoughts about thoughts," we need to look at the raw sensations themselves that are central to all conscious states. He takes the reader on an exhilarating journey through little-known areas of biology, psychology, and philosophy, to discover the origins of all forms of self-awareness in the primitive pain and pleasure responses of our distant ancestors. Packed with psychological information and ingenious speculation, A History of the Mind not only recasts the debate about the nature of conscious experience but provides fascinating insights into many other topics along the way. Already a classic, this book is as informative and entertaining as it is profound.
The history of philosophy has been studied as if it were a long discussion between participants of differing opinions living in different ages, but all in the same world. Though Heraclitus and Descartes can no longer respond to new questions or current attacks on their positions, nevertheless, to the degree that we are all human, and all live in the same world, such questions and attacks are reasonably fair. Until recently. In the last 50 years, the significance of the qualifier "to the degree that" has changed radically. What if it turns out that, as far as living in the same world goes, we today actually have very little in common with Heraclitus, or even Descartes? Then we are attempting to carry on discussions with participants who are not our contemporaries, and the world they were speculating about is not the same world we today are speculating about. Then the nature of the discussion - the history of philosophy - takes on a very different character. Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness takes talk of "alternative conceptual schemes" current in philosophy today and applies it in the very place most likely to warrant the change: the history of philosophy itself.
This book gives the reader an understanding of what consciousness is about, and of how to make conscious experiences more pleasant. It expands on a new theory that describes the evolutionary trajectory leading to conscious life forms. In short, the evidence suggests that consciousness first evolved some 300 million years ago as a consequence of the introduction of feelings. Feelings offer a strategy for making behavioural decisions. Besides playing a crucial role in the evolution of the human mind, they are a key factor in regard to mental health and quality of life. Fortunately, the human brain is plastic. By exploiting available options for modulating the mind, it is therefore possible to impact on what sort of experiences the brain serves. More specifically, you can strengthen the capacity for positive feelings and reduce the sway of negative feelings. The text covers biological, neurological, psychological, and philosophical aspects of the mind.
The “Natural Problem of Consciousness” is the problem of understanding why there are presently conscious beings at all. Given a non-reductive naturalist framework taking consciousness as an ontologically subjective biological phenomenon, how can we rationally explain the fact that the actual world has turned out to be one where there are presently living beings that can feel, rather than having developed as a zombie-world in which there would be no conscious experiences of any kind? This book introduces the Natural Problem by relating it to central problems in the philosophy of mind (metaphysical mind-body problem, Hard Problem of consciousness) and emphasizing the distinctive interest of its diachronic dimension. Ranging from philosophy to biology and neuroscience, it offers a thorough analysis aimed at better understanding what could explain why phenomenal consciousness has been preserved throughout evolution by natural selection. This is an original, engaging, and thought provoking philosophical study of a neglected but fundamental question regarding the nature and origin of consciousness.
What, if anything, do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise--"unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys"? With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. And in Dreaming Souls he provides both an accessible survey of the latest research on sleep and dreams and a compelling new theory about the nature and function of dreaming. Flanagan argues that while sleep has a clear biological function and adaptive value, dreams are merely side effects, "free riders," irrelevant from an evolutionary point of view. But dreams are hardly unimportant. Indeed, Flanagan argues that dreams are self-expressive, the result of our need to find or to create meaning, even when we're sleeping. Rejecting Freud's theory of manifest and latent content--of repressed wishes appearing in disguised form--Flanagan shows how brainstem activity during sleep generates a jumbled profusion of memories, images, thoughts, emotions, and desires, which the cerebral cortex then attempts to shape into a more or less coherent story. Such dream-narratives range from the relatively mundane worries of non REM sleep to the fantastic confabulations of deep REM that resemble psychotic episodes in their strangeness. But however bizarre these narratives may be, they can shed light on our mental life, our well being, and our sense of self. Written with clarity, lively wit, and remarkable insight, Dreaming Souls offers a fascinating new way of apprehending one of the oldest mysteries of mental life.
A textbook for third year undergraduates and postgraduates. In a challenging philosophic investigation of the origin of consciousness and human culture, Dewart (religion, emeritus, U. of Toronto) proposes a theory to explain the origin of all specifically human traits. Complementing the theory of evolution through natural selection, it explains the emergence and those the continuing evolution of characterstics through the interaction of experience and speech. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This book tackles the problem of how we can understand our human world embedded in the physical universe in such a way that justice is done both to the richness, meaning and value of human life on the one hand, and what modern science tells us about the physical universe on the other hand. It includes discussion of consciousness, free will and evolution.
Accessible to psychology students, philosophy students and non-specialists, this book will appeal particularly to readers with an interest in consciousness in animals. It draws implications for the nature of mind from contemporary evidence.
