Mental Action And The Conscious Mind

Author : Michael Brent,Lisa Miracchi Titus
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2022-07-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780429666230

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Mental Action and the Conscious Mind by Michael Brent,Lisa Miracchi Titus Pdf

Mental action deserves a place among foundational topics in action theory and philosophy of mind. Recent accounts of human agency tend to overlook the role of conscious mental action in our daily lives, while contemporary accounts of the conscious mind often ignore the role of mental action and agency in shaping consciousness. This collection aims to establish the centrality of mental action for discussions of agency and mind. The thirteen original essays provide a wide-ranging vision of the various and nuanced philosophical issues at stake. Among the questions explored by the contributors are: Which aspects of our conscious mental lives are agential? Can mental action be reduced to and explained in terms of non-agential mental states, processes, or events? Must mental action be included among the ontological categories required for understanding and explaining the conscious mind more generally? Does mental action have implications for related topics, such as attention, self-knowledge, self-control, or the mind-body problem? By investigating the nature, scope, and explanation of mental action, the essays presented here aim to demonstrate the significance of conscious mental action for discussions of agency and mind. Mental Action and the Conscious Mind will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of agency, as well as to philosophically inclined cognitive scientists.

Author : Barbara Gail Montero
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199596775

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Thought in Action by Barbara Gail Montero Pdf

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view--both in academia and in the popular press--that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, it is believed that reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Experts, accordingly, don't need to try to do it; they just do it. But is this true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea that highly accomplished skills are automatic and effortless, Barbara Gail Montero develops a theory of expertise that emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. Along the way, she dispels various mythical accounts of experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action and analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control impedes well practiced skills. She also explores real-life examples of optimal performance--culled from sports, the performing arts, chess, nursing, medicine, the military and elsewhere--and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to create a picture of expertise according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective.

Author : Michael Brent,Lisa Miracchi Titus
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2022-07-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780429663512

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Mental Action and the Conscious Mind by Michael Brent,Lisa Miracchi Titus Pdf

Mental action deserves a place among foundational topics in action theory and philosophy of mind. Recent accounts of human agency tend to overlook the role of conscious mental action in our daily lives, while contemporary accounts of the conscious mind often ignore the role of mental action and agency in shaping consciousness. This collection aims to establish the centrality of mental action for discussions of agency and mind. The thirteen original essays provide a wide-ranging vision of the various and nuanced philosophical issues at stake. Among the questions explored by the contributors are: Which aspects of our conscious mental lives are agential? Can mental action be reduced to and explained in terms of non-agential mental states, processes, or events? Must mental action be included among the ontological categories required for understanding and explaining the conscious mind more generally? Does mental action have implications for related topics, such as attention, self-knowledge, self-control, or the mind-body problem? By investigating the nature, scope, and explanation of mental action, the essays presented here aim to demonstrate the significance of conscious mental action for discussions of agency and mind. Mental Action and the Conscious Mind will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of agency, as well as to philosophically inclined cognitive scientists.

Author : Lucy O'Brien,Matthew Soteriou
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 422 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2009-06-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191607721

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Mental Actions by Lucy O'Brien,Matthew Soteriou Pdf

This volume investigates the neglected topic of mental action, and shows its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. Twelve specially written essays address such questions as the following: Which phenomena should we count as mental actions — imagining, remembering, judging, for instance? How should we explain our knowledge of our mental actions, and what light does that throw on self-knowledge in general? What contributions do mental actions make to our consciousness? What is the relationship between the voluntary and the active, in the mental sphere? What are the similarities and differences between mental and physical action, and what can we learn about each from the other?

Author : Alfred Taylor Schofield
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 462 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1898
Category : Psychophysiology
ISBN : HARVARD:32044058232760

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The Unconscious Mind by Alfred Taylor Schofield Pdf

Author : Matthew Soteriou
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2013-08-29
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191667879

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The Mind's Construction by Matthew Soteriou Pdf

Philosophers working on the ontology of mind have highlighted various distinctions that can be drawn between the ways in which different aspects of our minds fill time. For example, they note that whereas some elements of our mental lives obtain over time, others unfold over time, and some continue to occur throughout intervals of time. Matthew Soteriou explores ways in which such distinctions can be put to work in helping to inform philosophical accounts of both sensory and cognitive aspects of consciousness. Part One of The Mind's Construction argues that work in the ontology of mind that focuses on distinctions of temporal character has much to contribute to philosophical accounts of the phenomenology of various elements of sensory consciousness—e.g. the phenomenology of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, and perceptual imagination. Part Two argues that these ontological considerations can inform our understanding of conscious thinking, and the form of self-conscious consciousness that we have as subjects capable of engaging in such activity, by helping to account for and explain the respect in which agency is exercised in conscious thinking. This in turn, it is argued, can illuminate the more general issue of the place and role of mental action in an account of the metaphysics of mind.

Author : Alfred Taylor Schofield
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 1908
Category : Consciousness
ISBN : MINN:31951000953475U

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The Unconscious Mind by Alfred Taylor Schofield Pdf

Author : Sebastian Watzl
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-09
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191633003

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Structuring Mind by Sebastian Watzl Pdf

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective.

Author : Thomas R. Blakeslee
Publisher : Springer
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2013-11-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781489945334

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Beyond the Conscious Mind by Thomas R. Blakeslee Pdf

The Nobel Prize-winning work of Roger Sperry revolutionized our understanding of human consciousness by proving that separate thinking and knowledge could exist in the left and right halves of the brain. Now, popular science writer Thomas Blakeslee - author of the highly acclaimed The Right Brain - takes us to a new level of understanding based on the theory of neural Darwinism by Gerald Edelman, another Nobel Prize winner. Blakeslee explains that our neurons spontaneously organize into hundreds of groups called modules that compete to respond to every situation in our lives - from reading this paragraph to falling in love. A vast preponderance of this activity operates outside of our conscious awareness.

Author : Jesse Prinz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012-09-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780195314595

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The Conscious Brain by Jesse Prinz Pdf

Synthesizing decades of research, this book advances a theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz argues that consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and that consciousness depends on attention.

Author : Susan L. Hurley
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 524 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0674007964

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Consciousness in Action by Susan L. Hurley Pdf

Hurley criticizes the standard view of consciousness, which conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. She considers how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level may emerge from the subpersonal level.

Author : Galen Strawson
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2009-10-09
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780262264471

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Mental Reality, second edition, with a new appendix by Galen Strawson Pdf

An argument against neobehaviorism and for "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples a wholly materialist approach to the mind with a fully realist attitude to the phenomena of conscious experience. In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious experience. Strawson describes an alternative position, "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with a fully realist account of the nature of conscious experience. Naturalized Cartesianism is an adductive (as opposed to reductive) form of materialism. Adductive materialists don't claim that conscious experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, in being wholly physical. They claim instead that the physical is something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, given that many of the wholly physical goings on in the brain constitute—literally are—conscious experiences as we ordinarily conceive them. Since naturalized Cartesianism downgrades the place of reference to nonmental and publicly observable phenomena in an adequate account of mental phenomena, Strawson considers in detail the question of what part such reference still has to play. He argues that it is a mistake to think that all behavioral phenomena are publicly observable phenomena.This revised and expanded edition of Mental Reality includes a new appendix, which thoroughly revises the account of intentionality given in chapter 7.

Author : Julian Jaynes
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 580 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2000-08-15
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780547527543

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The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes Pdf

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

Author : Daniel M. Wegner
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 725 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2003-08-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262290555

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The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner Pdf

A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Author : David J. Chalmers
Publisher : Oxford Paperbacks
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0195117891

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The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers Pdf

Writing in a rigorous, thought-provoking style, the author takes us on a far-reaching tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness, offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.