Culture Consciousness And Beyond

As issues of history, memory, and identity collide with increasing frequency and intensity in the classroom and society, the timing is ideal to investigate the impact of these forces on twenty-first-century students. Relying on the theory of historical consciousness, this book presents the results of a comprehensive study conducted with over 600 French Canadian students that examines their narrative views of the collective past. The authors offer new evidence on how young citizens from various regions and ethnocultural groups in Quebec and Ontario think about their national history and what impact education, historical culture, and the “real-life” curriculum of meaningful experiences have on the formation of narration, identity, and historical consciousness.

The current discourse of globalization is overwhelmingly centred upon the interconnectedness, or connectivity, of the contemporary world; to the great neglect of the issues of global culture and global consciousness. With contemporary worldwide culture increasingly characterized by such themes as astronomy, cosmology, space travel and exploration, there is an increasing disjuncture between academic concern with connectivity, on the one hand, and culture and consciousness of the place of planet earth in the cosmos as a whole, on the other. This book addresses this deficiency from a variety of closely related perspectives, presenting studies of religion, science, sport, international organizations, global resistance movements and migrations and developments in East Asia. It brings together the latest theoretical empirical work from scholars in the US, UK, Australia, Japan, China and Israel on the significance of culture and global consciousness. As such, Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity will be of great interest to scholars across and beyond the social sciences working in the areas of global studies, cultural studies, social theory, the sociology of religion and related issues.

“Andrew Smart deftly shows why it’s time for us to think deeply about thinking machines before they begin thinking deeply about us.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author, Escaping the Growth Trap,Present Shock, and Program or Be Programmed “Provocative and cool.” —Cory Doctorow “Forget the Turing test—will the supersmart AIs that we hear so much about these days pass the acid test? In this playful, informative, and prescient book, Andrew Smart brings psychedelics into dialogue with neuroscience in order to challenge the whiz-bang computational views of human and machine sentience that dominate the headlines. Giving robots LSD sounds like a joke, but Smart is dead serious in his critique of the hidden and sometimes dangerous biases that underlie both popular and scientific fantasies of digital minds.” —Erik Davis, host of “Expanding Mind” and author, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information “Philosophy, psychedelics, robots, and the future; consciousness and intelligence, what else do you desire? Here you will see why those machines that reach singularity will be smarter than us and take over the world—and shall need to be conscious…and maybe they can only be conscious if they are human enough. The thesis of the book, and the path shown us by Smart, leads to a great trip, of imagination and philosophy, of maths and neuroscience.” —Dr. Tristan Bekinschtein, Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge Can we build a robot that trips on acid? This is not a frivolous question, according to neuroscientist Andrew Smart. If we can’t, he argues, we haven’t really created artificial intelligence. In an exposition reminiscent of crossover works such as Gödel, Escher, Bach and Fermat’s Last Theorem, Andrew Smart weaves together Mangarevan binary numbers, the discovery of LSD, Leibniz, computer programming, and much more to connect the vast but largely forgotten world of psychedelic research with the resurgent field of AI and the attempt to build conscious robots. A book that draws on the history of mathematics, philosophy, and digital technology, Beyond Zero and One challenges fundamental assumptions underlying artificial intelligence. Is the human brain based on computation? Can information alone explain human consciousness and intelligence? Smart convincingly makes the case that true intelligence, and artificial intelligence, requires an appreciation of what is beyond the computational.

This book is a multi-faceted exploration and critique of the human condition as it is presently manifested. It addresses science and philosophy, explores the underlying nature of reality, the state of our society and culture, the influence of the mainstream media, the nature of free will and a number of other topics. Each of these examinations contributes an angle to an emerging idea gestalt that challenges present mainstream views and behaviors and offers a sane alternative. The book is organized as a series of short and self-contained essays, most of which can be read in under one hour.

An integrative approach to human cognition that encompasses the domains of language, consciousness, action, social cognition, and theory of mind that will foster cross-disciplinary conversation among linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture represents a breakthrough in developing an integrated theory of human cognition. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of cognitive scientists, including linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Jackendoff argues that linguistics has become isolated from the other cognitive sciences at least partly because of the syntax-based architecture assumed by mainstream generative grammar. He proposes an alternative parallel architecture for the language faculty that permits a greater internal integration of the components of language and connects far more naturally to such larger issues in cognitive neuroscience as language processing, the connection of language to vision, and the evolution of language. Extending this approach beyond the language capacity, Jackendoff proposes sharper criteria for a satisfactory theory of consciousness, examines the structure of complex everyday actions, and investigates the concepts involved in an individual's grasp of society and culture. Each of these domains is used to reflect back on the question of what is unique about human language and what follows from more general properties of the mind. Language, Consciousness, Culture extends Jackendoff's pioneering theory of conceptual semantics to two of the most important domains of human thought: social cognition and theory of mind. Jackendoff's formal framework allows him to draw new connections among a large variety of literatures and to uncover new distinctions and generalizations not previously recognized. The breadth of the approach will foster cross-disciplinary conversation; the vision is to develop a richer understanding of human nature.

This book offers the first ever comparative study of historical consciousness among young citizens from different regions, provinces, identities, and first languages.

Haney demonstrates that the debates in theory surrounding the questions of identity, truth, and language, which have so far eluded the mind or reason, cannot be resolved without recourse to the structure of consciousness and intersubjectivity - an interaction mediated by language and resulting in mutual agreement. Chapters four to eight apply the notion of intersubjectivity to the reading of specific works."--Jacket.