Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Consciousness And The Self

This book brings together ancient spiritual wisdom and modern science and philosophy to address age-old questions regarding our existence, free will and the nature of conscious awareness. Stuart Hameroff MD Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona This book presents a rich, broad-ranging overview of contemporary research and scholarship into consciousness and the self.... It is ... to their credit that the editors have assembled a highly stimulating set of scholars whose expertise cover all the relevant areas. I strongly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in understanding the directions in which contemporary thinking about the nature of consciousness is headed. B. Les Lancaster Emeritus Professor of Transpersonal Psychology Liverpool John Moores University, UK This volume is a collection of 23 essays that contribute to the emerging discipline of consciousness studies with particular focus on the concept of the self. The essays together argue that to understand consciousness is to understand the self that beholds consciousness. Two broad issues are addressed in the volume: the place of the self in the lives of humans and nonhuman primates; and the interrelations between the self and consciousness, which contribute to the understanding of cognitive functions, awareness, free will, nature of reality, and the complex experiential and behavioural attributes of consciousness. The book presents cutting-edge and original work from well-known authors and scholars of philosophy, psychiatry, behavioural sciences and physics. This is a pioneering attempt to present to the reader multiple ways of conceptualizing and thus understanding the relation between consciousness and self in a nuanced manner.

Researching the Self originated in a conference held at the University of Amsterdam in 2005, where scholars from various academic backgrounds presented their current theories and research. One central theme that emerged from the conference is the need for interdisciplinarity in the study of self. The present volume tries to meet this need, as it covers fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, sociology, and computer science. Additionally, the authors have contributed interdisciplinary reflections, in which they contemplate the other contributions to the present volume, and consider integrating this work with their own. •What are the neural correlates of self? •Can individuals have multiple selves? •How do selves depend on other people? •Will engineers ever construct artificial selves? •What is the problem of self we are trying to solve? •What does the future hold for the self? •Do selves really exist? “As I read the other entries in the current volume I was struck by the implications that the many different perspectives on the self had for each other” (Gillihan, this volume). “We must continue to keep in mind what we know, what we don’t know, and what we only think we know in order to successfully conquer this interdisciplinary problem of the self” (Gorman and Keenan, this volume).

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Self-consciousness is a topic of considerable importance to a variety of empirical and theoretical disciplines such as developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This volume presents essays on self-consciousness by prominent psychologists, cognitive neurologists, and philosophers. Some of the topics included are the infants’ sense of self and others, theory of mind, phenomenology of embodiment, neural mechanisms of action attribution, and hermeneutics of the self. A number of these essays argue in turn that empirical findings in developmental psychology, phenomenological analyses of embodiment, or studies of pathological self-experiences point to the existence of a type of self-consciousness that does not require any explicit I —thought or self-observation, but is more adequately described as a pre-reflective, embodied form of self-familiarity. The different contributions in the volume amply demonstrate that self-consciousness is a complex multifaceted phenomenon that calls for an integration of different complementary interdisciplinary perspectives. (Series B)

This volume brings together the primary challenges for 21st century cognitive sciences and cultural neuroscience in responding to the nature of human identity, self, and evolution of life itself. Through chapters devoted to intricate but focused models, empirical findings, theories, and experiential data, the contributors reflect upon the most exciting possibilities, and debate upon the fundamental aspects of consciousness and self in the context of cultural, philosophical, and multidisciplinary divergences and convergences. Such an understanding and the ensuing insights lie in the cusp of philosophy, neurosciences, psychiatry, and medical humanities. In this volume, the editors and contributors explore the foundations of human thinking and being and discuss both evolutionary/cultural embeddedness, and the self-orientation, of consciousness, keeping in mind questions that bring in the interdisciplinary complexity of issues such as the emergence of consciousness, relation between healing and agency, models of altered self, how cognition impacts the social self, experiential primacy as the hallmark of consciousness, and alternate epistemologies to understand these interdisciplinary puzzles.

The Incorporated Self demonstrates that although embodiment has long been a central concern of the theoretical humanities, embodiment's potential to alter epistemology and open up new areas of non-dualistic inquiry has not been pursued far enough. This anthology collects the works of scholars from a broad range of disciplines, each examining the nature of the body and the necessity of embodiment to the human experience--for our self awareness, sense of identity, and the workings of the mind. The essays offer a sustained attack on Cartesian dualism and methodological positivism. The Incorporated Self is suitable for undergraduate and graduate seminars on mind-body relations, the psychology of perception, the nature of thought, and questions of social, political, and individual identity. This interdisciplinary book is an important work for philosophers, literary theorists, historians, sociologists and psychologists.

This book brings together diverse aspects of animate nature, diverse not only in terms of animate nature itself, but in terms of areas of study. Indeed, the book lives up to the word "interdisciplinary" in its title. It brings together diverse academic perspectives within each chapter and across chapters, showing in each instance that scientific understandings of animate nature are ? or can be ? complementary to philosophical understandings. Thus insides and outsides, typically viewed as subjective vs objective, mind vs body, and self vs other, are shown to be woven together in complex and subtle ways in the complexities and subtleties of animate life itself. There are and ever have been only two essential models of government: minority rule of all types (labelled "oligocracy") and regimes in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual (labelled "monocracy"). Vaunted democracies are in reality either oligocracies or monocracies. The present-day "democracies" of Britain and the United States are in reality composite oligocracies made up of several disparate elements. Oligocracies are by definition regimes with a high degree of inequality, but with variable levels of liberty. Oligocracy and inequality are the "default" features of human society. Equality is unattainable except by a radical monocracy like Fidel Castro's Cuba, and then only with difficulty and at the expense of liberty and probably of lives as well. Equality of opportunity must not be equated with equality. Equality of opportunity means an equal opportunity to become unequal. Paradoxically, however, for genuine equality of opportunity to exist there has to be equality ? which is practically unattainable. For genuine freedom of expression to exist there also needs to be equality, because the little man standing on his soap-box and shouting his lungs out at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park cannot compete with the media moguls ? which is why genuine freedom of expression is rare. Once these truths are recognised, it becomes clear that for one state to attempt regime change in a foreign country is likely to be futile.