K A Consciousness

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

A book of wisdom teachings and rituals that invoke ancient Egyptian deities to awaken human consciousness • Provides guided shamanic visualizations to invoke 26 of the most significant gods • Takes the reader through shamanic portals of death, rebirth, and illumination • Reconciles internal conflict through a sacred marriage of heart and mind In Shamanic Mysteries of Egypt, Nicki Scully and Linda Star Wolf renew humanity’s connection to the ancient gods of Egypt, the neteru. Voices from these divine ancestors remind us of the healing power of the heart, and call us to bring their consciousness into the present to help us remember our true nature as divine humans with sacred purpose. The authors provide rituals, meditations, and rites of passage to help us meet our personal and planetary challenges with grace, wisdom, and love. The shamanic initiations provided are invoked, directly experienced, and transformed into embodied wisdom that awakens consciousness and illumines the intelligence of the heart. Scully and Star Wolf focus their rituals on 26 of the primary divine entities that preside over the ancient mysteries whose roots are in Old Kingdom and pre-historic Egypt. This fresh interpretation of ancient mysteries unites the energies of Thoth and Anubis to guide us through the current cycle of Earth changes and to help us remember who we really are at heart. Through these passages, Anubis lives up to his ancient title as the Opener of the Way, and Thoth as the Architect of Higher Learning. Together they evoke their power to unite heart and mind in the sacred marriage that brings transformation, renewal, and the awakening of consciousness.

This interdisciplinary collection takes up themes from the philosophy of the influential philosopher of mind David Rosenthal.

The phenomenon of consciousness has always been a central question for philosophers and scientists. Emerging in the past decade are new approaches to the understanding of consciousness in a scientific light. This book presents a series of essays by leading thinkers giving an account of the current ideas prevalent in the scientific study of consciousness. The value of the book lies in the discussion of this interesting though complex subject from different points of view ranging from physics and computer science to the cognitive sciences. Reviews of controversial ideas related to the philosophy of mind from western and eastern sources including classical Indian first person methodologies provide a breadth of coverage that has seldom been attempted in a book before. Additionally, chapters relating to the new approaches in computational modeling of higher order cognitive function and consciousness are included. The book is of great value for established as well as young researchers from a wide cross-section of interdisciplinary scientific backgrounds, aiming to pursue research in this field, as well as an informed public. * Presents the latest developments in the scientific study of consciousness * Critically reviews different theoretical and philosophical explanations related to the subject * An important book for both students and researchers in designing research projects on consciousness

This collection of essays directly considers the reasons why philosophers have recently become deeply interested in romantic thought. Through historical and systematic reconstructions, the volume offers greater understanding of romanticism as a philosophical movement and deeper insight into the role that romantic thought plays - or can play - in contemporary philosophical debates.

Is there a theory that explains the essence of consciousness? Or is consciousness itself just an illusion? The 'last great mystery of science', consciousness is a topic that was banned from serious research for most of the last century, but is now an area of increasing popular interest, as well as a rapidly expanding area of study for students of psychology, philosophy and neuroscience. This ground-breaking textbook by best-selling author Susan Blackmore was the first of its kind to bring together all the major theories of consciousness studies, from those based on neuroscience to those based on quantum theory or Eastern philosophy. The book examines topics such as how subjective experiences arise from objective brain processes, the basic neuroscience of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, out of body and near death experiences and the effects of drugs, dreams and meditation. It also explores the nature of self, the possibility of artificial consciousness in robots, and the question of whether animals are conscious. The new edition has been fully revised to include the latest developments in neuroscience, brain scanning techniques, and artificial consciousness and robotics. The new website includes self-assessment exercises, advanced further reading, flashcards and MCQs. For all those intrigued by what it means to be, to exist, this book could radically transform your understanding of your own consciousness.

Although often used in everyday speech and in the scholarly literature, “selective attention” and “consciousness” lack clear, undisputed definitions. Partly because of this deficit there exists a lively debate on the relationship between the two. Nevertheless, attention has been studied scientifically for a long time, because a variety of tasks allow researchers to control several of its aspects (e.g. focused and feature-based attention). Consciousness as a scientific subject of study has emerged more recently, but is now rapidly gaining traction. Scientific studies of consciousness concern the state or level of consciousness (e.g., awake as opposed to in coma, dreamless sleep or under anaesthesia) as well as the contents of consciousness or the phenomenology of perception. With the increase in consciousness-focused research, there is a concomitant surge in research examining the relationship between attention and consciousness. This relationship between attention and consciousness is the topic of this Research Topic. Contributions related to or focused solely on attention or on consciousness will not be considered. It had long been assumed that attention and consciousness are inextricably intertwined: two sides of the same coin. However, recently substantial evidence has emerged that attention and consciousness are interacting, but separable processes. It is however debated how tight the interactions are, and what the exact nature of the relationship is. Therefore, we invite researchers from different “camps” to provide opinionated but balanced literature reviews. Different groups will interpret the same data in different ways. We feel that combining these views in one Research Topic is immensely valuable to researchers from different fields. Apart from reviews we also invite potential contributors to provide new and exciting evidence in the form of original contributions that may support any of the different views. Even though attention and consciousness are critical aspects of many different cognitive processes, they are mainly studied (though not exclusively) in the domain of visual perception. In other sensory modalities, e.g. olfaction or audition, it is currently not clear whether distinctions between attention and consciousness exist, which is even more true for other cognitive processes such as memory. Therefore, we specifically invite contributions covering the auditory, somatosensory, olfactory, and memory domain. We ask all contributors to provide discussions on the relationship between attention and consciousness, and focus on (1) the influence of attention on sensory processing; (2) the formation of conscious perception, (3) the evidence for unconscious processing and its modulation by attention; (4) potential indications for dissociations between attention and consciousness (e.g. does paying attention to a stimulus decrease performance on e.g. a discrimination task?); (5) neuroimaging and neurophysiology data pertaining to these questions. Often, one is caught in one’s own research field and lacks the time or the knowledge to delve into another field. This Research Topic should provide a great overview in great breadth of the current state of knowledge on the links between attention and consciousness, and their interactions, in several different sensory modalities.

Consciousness is one of the most significant scientific problems today. Renewed interest in the nature of consciousness - a phenomenon long considered not to be scientifically explorable, as well as increasingly widespread availability of multimodal functional brain imaging techniques (EEG, ERP, MEG, fMRI and PET), now offer the possibility of detailed, integrated exploration of the neural, behavioral, and computational correlates of consciousness. The present volume aims to confront the latest theoretical insights in the scientific study of human consciousness with the most recent behavioral, neuroimaging, electrophysiological, pharmacological and neuropathological data on brain function in altered states of consciousness such as: brain death, coma, vegetative state, minimally conscious state, locked-in syndrome, dementia, epilepsy, schizophrenia, hysteria, general anesthesia, sleep, hypnosis, and hallucinations. The interest of this is threefold. First, patients with altered states of consciousness continue to represent a major clinical problem in terms of clinical assessment of consciousness and daily management. Second, the exploration of brain function in altered states of consciousness represents a unique lesional approach to the scientific study of consciousness and adds to the worldwide effort to identify the "neural correlate of consciousness". Third, new scientific insights in this field have major ethical and social implications regarding our care for these patients.