In Consciousness We Trust

In Consciousness We Trust is a synthesis of Hakwan Lau's 20-year research programme exploring the neuroscience of consciousness. Discussing studies from his own laboratory, Lau uses various neuroscience techniques to address challenging philosophical questions about the nature of our subjective experience. Considering the qualitative nature of subjective experience, the book reviews the current cognitive neuroscience literature on conscious perception, attention, and metacognition and puts forward a mechanistic account of experience through the context of personal journey. Chapters cover different major theoretical positions, to relate the nature of consciousness to relevant phenomena such as attention, metacognition, rational control, emotion, and sense of agency. This is a must-read for graduate students and researchers in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, and an important contribution to the consciousness literature. This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence.

This book brings together Donald S. Sweeneys lifetime experiences, coupled with his natural(innate) desire to know and understand the facts and truth of situations that affect his life and the lives of others. He has searched out the thoughts of many prominent and highly respectedthough often at opposite ends of the beliefwriters and thinkers for ways to resolve the conflicting beliefs about God between those who; 1. Are atheistic, and those who hold to a faith and trust in God; 2, Are of different monotheistic theologies, 3, Are believers that the creation of the universe started 13.73 billion years ago, and those who believe that the biblical version of the six- day creation is literally true. The conclusion that is reached by In God We Trust is that the conflicting views about existence or non-existence of God can, in fact, be compatible with each other, but that those of opposing viewpoints must give up some of their erroneous ideas..

What politicians and the media don't want you to know. Millions of Americans at both ends of the political spectrum are angry and fed up with being lied to by politicians and the media. The emergence of “outsider” presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is proof that people are sick and tired of Washington’s culture of deception. Thumbing his nose at political correctness, negotiation expert and political commentator Ed Brodow exposes the outrageous lies that have been disseminated about the most important issues of our time. He tells the uncensored truth about the threat of Islamic extremism, global warming, the welfare entitlement system, Obamacare, racial tension and other important things that our elected representatives don’t want you to know. If you vote in national elections, the candor of In Lies We Trust will help you make decisions based on facts instead of misinformation.

Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty: about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned to Whitman—and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how Walt Whitman can save America’s life, too. Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman’s life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you’re unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

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

The Rise and Fall of Scottish Common Sense Realism examines the ways in which five Scottish philosophers - Lord Kames (1696-1782), Thomas Reid (1710-1796), Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), and James Frederick Ferrier (1808-1864) - tackled a problem which has haunted Western philosophy ever since Descartes: that of determining whether any form of perceptual realism is defensible, or whether the very idea of a material world existing independently of perception and thought is more trouble than it is worth. This century-long conversation about the relation between mind and world led these five Scots to think uncommonly hard about a host of challenging issues in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and meta-philosophy. In order to present each philosopher's views in a fair and reasonably charitable light, Douglas McDermid has tried to identify the main problems each was attempting to solve, to relate his work to that of his predecessors where possible, to describe the mistakes (real or perceived) he was particularly anxious to correct, to explain the internal logic of his position, and to discuss some of the main objections which he anticipated and tried to rebut. McDermid's hope is that even seasoned students of the realism controversy may learn something new and valuable from this exercise, if only because he has chosen to focus not on the usual suspects - Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant - but on a fresh and undervalued cast of characters.

Intertwined with Rosemary McCarthys personal journey of shifting from an angry, frustrated person blaming others for her unhappiness, to someone who now lives content with herself and in harmony with others, Your Journey to Peace brings the esoteric to the practical and maps out how to become your Best Self and feel empowered in all areas of your life. It also explains: Why we are the way we are individually and collectively; and how we got this way. How we find peace within ourselves by making peace in our relationships and all situations. That God does not allow for suffering! We create it by upholding dualistic concepts of me-and-you and us-and-them that we embraced at our beginnings and before form. The precursor to the Big Bang was the need for form to play out those dualistic concepts we chose at our beginnings: all our issues stem from those original concepts based on ideas of separation rather than unity. That understanding time makes the seven-day creation model valid. What are the extraterrestrials origins? How we can reconcile the growing evidence of our past association with the ETs and our scriptures and beliefs. Our need to embrace the Indigenous peoples connection to Gaia. That we chose to be here at this time of the Shift to bring about our personal and Gaias Ascensions.