The Significance Of Consciousness

Author : Charles Siewert
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 1998-07-27
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781400822720

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The Significance of Consciousness by Charles Siewert Pdf

Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.

Author : Charles P. Siewert
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1400813409

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The Significance of Consciousness by Charles P. Siewert Pdf

Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.

Author : Joshua Shepherd
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 150 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2018-05-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781315396323

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Consciousness and Moral Status by Joshua Shepherd Pdf

It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in Permanent Vegetative State (PVS); debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness; controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia; and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but also the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and humans with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

Author : Warner Fite
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 1974
Category : Consciousness
ISBN : OCLC:465363824

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The Living Mind by Warner Fite Pdf

Author : Robert M Haralick
Publisher : Torah Books
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2014-08-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0972227342

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God Consciousness by Robert M Haralick Pdf

There are a variety of signposts that are associated with living purposefully. They include spending productive time on activities that matter the most and living through those activities with authenticity and passion. People living purposefully feel content and have an inner peace. The way they live not only makes a difference for themselves, but it makes a meaningful difference for the others in their circle. They live in the moment, in the eternal present. They are ethical and they meet all their commitments. They live life with intention. They live honestly, decently, joyfully, and authentically. They carry out what they hold to be their calling in life. They find meaning, purpose and significance in the ordinary everyday activities: eating, reading, working, and loving. God Consciousness: Living With Meaning and Purpose describes how we can live with greater meaning and purpose by increasing our consciousness of the presence of God in our everyday activities. Our behavior becomes kinder, gentler, and more virtuous. Internally we are happy and uplifted. We live in two realities physical reality and spiritual reality. Different people who are in the same physical reality will sense the same external reality. But they may interpret it or receive it in different ways and thereby create different spiritual realities. In each moment, physical reality is the question God asks us. Spiritual reality is our answer. The carriers of the answer are our internal feelings and our external actions. The content of the answer is in the intention behind the action. The whole constitutes a song with two parts. In one part, God calls forth and asks: Am I here? The teachings in this book help us see the Holiness of God in all that we encounter so that we can answer I recognize You, You are here. With God Consciousness, we are able to be centered and sensitive, think clearly, and have a balanced excellence in our thoughts, speech, and action that moves us toward more virtuous behavior. Therefore we live with greater meaning and purpose.

Author : Declan Smithies
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2019-08-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199917679

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The Epistemic Role of Consciousness by Declan Smithies Pdf

What is the role of consciousness in our mental lives? Declan Smithies argues here that consciousness is essential to explaining how we can acquire knowledge and justified belief about ourselves and the world around us. On this view, unconscious beings cannot form justified beliefs and so they cannot know anything at all. Consciousness is the ultimate basis of all knowledge and epistemic justification. Smithies builds a sustained argument for the epistemic role of phenomenal consciousness which draws on a range of considerations in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. His position combines two key claims. The first is phenomenal mentalism, which says that epistemic justification is determined by the phenomenally individuated facts about your mental states. The second is accessibilism, which says that epistemic justification is luminously accessible in the sense that you're always in a position to know which beliefs you have epistemic justification to hold. Smithies integrates these two claims into a unified theory of epistemic justification, which he calls phenomenal accessibilism. The book is divided into two parts, which converge on this theory of epistemic justification from opposite directions. Part 1 argues from the bottom up by drawing on considerations in the philosophy of mind about the role of consciousness in mental representation, perception, cognition, and introspection. Part 2 argues from the top down by arguing from general principles in epistemology about the nature of epistemic justification. These mutually reinforcing arguments form the basis for a unified theory of the epistemic role of phenomenal consciousness, one that bridges the gap between epistemology and philosophy of mind.

Author : Julian Jaynes
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 580 pages
File Size : 41,9 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 : Andrew Lohrey
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0472108212

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The Meaning of Consciousness by Andrew Lohrey Pdf

Advances a bold new theory of consciousness and meaning by means of subjective, holistic analysis

Author : Warner Fite
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2008-06-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1436684676

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The Living Mind: Essays on the Significance of Consciousness by Warner Fite Pdf

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Author : Elizabeth Irvine
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2012-10-13
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789400751736

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Consciousness as a Scientific Concept by Elizabeth Irvine Pdf

The source of endless speculation and public curiosity, our scientific quest for the origins of human consciousness has expanded along with the technical capabilities of science itself and remains one of the key topics able to fire public as much as academic interest. Yet many problematic issues, identified in this important new book, remain unresolved. Focusing on a series of methodological difficulties swirling around consciousness research, the contributors to this volume suggest that ‘consciousness’ is, in fact, not a wholly viable scientific concept. Supporting this ‘eliminativist‘ stance are assessments of the current theories and methods of consciousness science in their own terms, as well as applications of good scientific practice criteria from the philosophy of science. For example, the work identifies the central problem of the misuse of qualitative difference and dissociation paradigms, often deployed to identify measures of consciousness. It also examines the difficulties that attend the wide range of experimental protocols used to operationalise consciousness—and the implications this has on the findings of integrative approaches across behavioural and neurophysiological research. The work also explores the significant mismatch between the common intuitions about the content of consciousness, that motivate much of the current science, and the actual properties of the neural processes underlying sensory and cognitive phenomena. Even as it makes the negative eliminativist case, the strong empirical grounding in this volume also allows positive characterisations to be made about the products of the current science of consciousness, facilitating a re-identification of target phenomena and valid research questions for the mind sciences.​

Author : Carl Gustaf Erickson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 1922
Category : Consciousness
ISBN : UOM:39015008371067

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The Meaning of Consciousness by Carl Gustaf Erickson Pdf

Author : Shelley Weinberg
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2016-01-07
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191065859

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Consciousness in Locke by Shelley Weinberg Pdf

Shelley Weinberg argues that the idea of consciousness as a form of non-evaluative self-awareness runs through and helps to solve some of the thorniest issues in Locke's philosophy: in his philosophical psychology and in his theories of knowledge, personal identity, and moral agency. Central to her account is that perceptions of ideas are complex mental states wherein consciousness is a constituent. Such an interpretation answers charges of inconsistency in Locke's model of the mind and lends coherence to a puzzling aspect of Locke's theory of knowledge: how we know individual things (particular ideas, ourselves, and external objects) when knowledge is defined as the perception of an agreement, or relation, of ideas. In each case, consciousness helps to forge the relation, resulting in a structurally integrated account of our knowledge of particulars fully consistent with the general definition. This model also explains how we achieve the unity of consciousness with past and future selves necessary for Locke's accounts of moral responsibility and moral motivation. And with help from other of his metaphysical commitments, consciousness so interpreted allows Locke's theory of personal identity to resist well-known accusations of circularity, failure of transitivity, and insufficiency for his theological and moral concerns. Although virtually every Locke scholar writes on at least some of these topics, the model of consciousness set forth here provides for an analysis all of these issues as bound together by a common thread.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2024-06-11
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780199277360

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Consciousness:essays P by Anonim Pdf

Author : Antonio Damasio
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2021-10-26
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781524747565

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Feeling & Knowing by Antonio Damasio Pdf

From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.

Author : Timothy Chan,Anders Nes
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2019-12-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781351366748

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Inference and Consciousness by Timothy Chan,Anders Nes Pdf

Inference has long been a central concern in epistemology, as an essential means by which we extend our knowledge and test our beliefs. Inference is also a key notion in influential psychological accounts of mental capacities, ranging from problem-solving to perception. Consciousness, on the other hand, has arguably been the defining interest of philosophy of mind over recent decades. Comparatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the significance of consciousness for the proper understanding of the nature and role of inference. It is commonly suggested that inference may be either conscious or unconscious. Yet how unified are these various supposed instances of inference? Does either enjoy explanatory priority in relation to the other? In what way, or ways, can an inference be conscious, or fail to be conscious, and how does this matter? This book brings together original essays from established scholars and emerging theorists that showcase how several current debates in epistemology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind can benefit from more reflections on these and related questions about the significance of consciousness for inference.