Nineteen Ways Of Looking At Consciousness

A concise, elegant, and thought-provoking exploration of the mystery of consciousness and the functioning of the brain. Despite decades of research, remarkable imagery, and insights from a range of scientific and medical disciplines, the human brain remains largely unexplored. Consciousness has eluded explanation. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers a brilliant overview of the state of modern consciousness research in twenty brief, revealing chapters. Neuroscientist and author Patrick House describes complex concepts in accessible terms, weaving brain science, technology, gaming, analogy, and philosophy into a tapestry that illuminates how the brain works and what enables consciousness. This remarkable book fosters a sense of mystery and wonder about the strangeness of the relationship between our inner selves and our environment.

The world’s leading investigator of consciousness argues that by understanding what consciousness does—cause change in the world—we can understand its origins and its future In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book’s heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems. Enabled by such tools, Koch reveals when and where consciousness exists, and uses that knowledge to confront major social and scientific questions: When does a fetus first become self-aware? Can psychedelic and mystical experiences transform lives? What happens to consciousness in near-death experiences? Why will generative AI ultimately be able to do the very thing we can do, yet never feel any of it? And do our experiences reveal a single, objective reality? This is an essential book for anyone who seeks to understand ourselves and the future we are creating.

In the face of the anthropogenic threats to the singular planetary habitat we share with other human beings and non-human species, humanities scholars feel a renewed sense of urgency 1) to acknowledge the ways our species has funded particular histories of environmental exploitation, alienation, and collapse, 2) to unpack inherited assumptions that impact our views of nature and interspecies relations, and 3) to suggest ways of thinking and acting that seek to repair the damage and promote mutual flourishing for all of earth inhabitants. This volume brings together scholars in philosophy, theology, and religion who take up this urgent ethical task from a broad range of perspectives and locations.

The Mind of Consciousness The Mind of Consciousness is a book unfolding a new way, with new process methods to evaluate your existence. It is an experiential work written in textbook format that analytically delineates how and why consciousness and mind interface and function, exposing the inter-connective dependency of non-biological consciousness and the biologically created mind. Knowing how that interconnectivity interrelates provides avenues of exploration that reveal the fundamental nature of existence, unveiling an innate purpose and direction embedded within consciousness. This book works through all the major questions of existence, using reproducible and experiential logic, allowing everyone to experience the results of that exploration. Throughout your life you have two realities at war with one another: the primary ‘I am’ reality, formed from non-biological consciousness, and the secondary ‘I am this or that’ reality, formed by the biological mind. You may not be aware of, or even appreciate, the internal conflict these two inter-connective and inter-dependent realities create. However, you experience the resultant turmoil and confusion their subliminal battles establish by not having an experiential appreciation of how those realities are formed, function and potentially control your life. The text delineates causation for those ongoing internal battles and outlines processes to help overcome the sense of frustration, isolation and discord they generate. This experiential method of examination creates empirical processes that afford you the opportunity to make an informed choice, rather than a conditioned reaction: providing a more secure, productive, directional and enjoyable life. This book takes you into the core of your being, turning it inside out, exposing who and what you are by revealing a self-created shadow-world controlling your life without you being aware that control exists.

Understanding consciousness by taking the stream of consciousness seriously; a general characterization of experience and a detailed description of experience from within, drawing on theories of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, John Searle, and Gerald Edelman. In Onflow, Ralph Pred supplies an account of the nature of consciousness that grapples with "the raw unverbalized stream of experience." Unlike other recent philosophical accounts of consciousness, Pred's analysis deals with the elusive and commonly neglected continuities in the stream of consciousness. Pred offers a general characterization and analysis of experience as well as a highly detailed interpretation of experience from within. Determined to make "conceptual contact" with the immediacy of actual experience, Pred carries forward the radical empiricism pioneered by William James (who coined the term "stream of consciousness") and draws on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. To help readers apprehend the formation of conscious thoughts, the intertwining of perception and action, and the working of consciousness in onflowing experience, Pred applies methods of analysis developed in John Searle's theory of intentionality to James's views, thereby showing how intentional states are embedded in the stream of consciousness. Then, calling on Whitehead's treatment of lived moments as acts of experience, Pred provides an account of consciousness that at once deals with conscious thoughts as they emerge from and function in embodied, socialized experience and illustrates how language distorts our understanding of experience and subjectivity. Finally, he details striking parallels between this account and Gerald Edelman's biological theory of consciousness, and, in contrasting the two, argues for a revitalized version of the experiental monism originally formulated by James.

Presents a comparative study of the ninth-century Chinese poet and recluse Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and Gary Snyder, an American poet and environmental activist. This book explains how Chan Buddhism has the potential to be recognized as an important voice in contemporary ecopoetry.

Beauty of our societies worldwide Can we be One at last? As man is waking up out of his state of illusion to include even the lowliest among us, may we be blessed away from our indifference and into the waiting arms of love itself to all it matters at present. Harmony and Oneness permeates the theme so as to assist humanity to a spiritual awakening as such assistance is needed in our day and time. Love be of One.

For the last four centuries, science has tried to account for everything in terms of atoms and molecules and the physical laws they adhere to. Recently, this effort was extended to try to include the inner world of human beings. Gary Lachman argues that this view of consciousness is misguided and unfounded. He points to another approach to the study and exploration of consciousness that erupted into public awareness in the late 1800s. In this "secret history of consciousness," consciousness is seen not as a result of neurons and molecules, but as responsible for them; meaning is not imported from the outer world, but rather creates it. In this view, consciousness is a living, evolving presence whose development can be traced through different historical periods, and which evolves along a path to a broader, more expansive state. What that consciousness may be like and how it may be achieved is a major concern of this book . Lachman concentrates on the period since the late 1800s, when Madame Blavatsky first brought the secret history out into the open. As this history unfolds, we encounter the ideas of many modern thinkers, from esotericists like P. D. Ouspensky, Rudolf Steiner, and Colin Wilson to more mainstream philosophers like Henri Bergson, William James, Owen Barfield and the psychologist Andreas Mavromatis. Two little known but important thinkers play a major role in his synthesis--Jurij Moskvitin, who showed how our consciousness relates to the mechanisms of perception and to the external world, and Jean Gebser, who presented perhaps the most impressive case for the evolution of consciousness. An important contribution to the study of consciousness ... a must-read. Contents: Foreword by Colin Wilson Introduction: Consciousness Explained The Search for Cosmic Consciousness Esoteric Evolution The Archaeology of Consciousness Participatory Epistemology The Presence of Origin Last Words: Playing for Time Selected Bibliography "A marvelously exhilarating gallop through every important modern theory of consciousness, from Steiner to Maslow, from Bucke's 'cosmic consciousness' to Gebser's 'integral consciousness.'"--Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider and Access to Inner Worlds "Opens up vast vistas of possibility, suggesting that what we experience as the earth may, in itself, be inseparable from our state of mind, and that the evolution of human consciousness may be as fundamental a process as our development through genetics. A must-read for those seeking an escape from our contemporary culture's cul-de-sac."--Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head "Thinking outside the box, Lachman challenges many contemporary theories by reinserting a sense of the spiritual back into the discussion. Profoundly erudite, yet easy to read, this book is a provocative mind-stretcher."--Leonard Shlain author of Art & Physics, Alphabet versus the Goddess, and Sex, Time & Power.