my mind on books

• Two books on neuroethics were published this month (Aug 2007): Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century by Neil Levy (Cambridge U Press) and Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science: Essential Readings in Neuroethics ed. by Walter Glannon (Dana Press)

• Brainethics blog has compiled a list of readings in neuroethics
• Wikipedia article
• neuroethics.upenn.edu (section on narrative perspectives has extensive list on neuroethics in film and literature)

philolsophers photostream at flickr!

[update: favorite - David Chalmers: "Doood - I has a hard problm"]

[For this reading challenge I picked non-fiction titles that are outside the usual scope of my reading and of this website.]

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

I enjoyed reading this book quite a lot, in part because many of the events take place in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and other Bay Area locations that I’m familiar with. It’s also a well written account, winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. The book relates the story of Muybridge’s famous motion studies, mostly concentrating on the photographer’s career leading up to and following the innovations that enabled him to capture the details of a trotting horse’s gait. His development of high-speed photographic techniques settled a debate by showing that all four hooves were off the ground at once. The Wikipedia entry for Muybridge cites this book as its source and so gives a fairly good summary of its contents, plus a nice collection of related links.

Solnit also focuses on the changes in the experience of time and space brought about by technological developments of the period such as the railroad and photography. The genealogy from Muybridge’s motion studies to Hollywood and Silicon Valley is just touched on in the last few pages of the book.

One of the full text articles from the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “I=Awareness” is also available from the author’s web site.

…when we use introspection to search for the origin of our subjectivity, we find that the search for ‘I’ leaves the customary aspects of personhood behind and takes us closer and closer to awareness, per se. If this process of introspective observation is carried to its conclusion, even the background sense of core subjective self disappears into awareness. Thus, if we proceed phenomenologically, we find that the ‘I’ is identical to awareness: ‘I’ = awareness.

Deikman’s books include The Observing Self.

Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, Amazon products, and more. Pointing the cursor at the icon next to a link will bring up the Snap Shot preview.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not. They work nicely for Amazon links, giving a little product and price information. (Plus the preview already helped me find an error in yesterday’s post on “The Political Brain” so I’ve fixed the link to the New York Times review!)

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

Update: 11/8/07 I’ve removed Snap Shots today because they added advertising & I thought the ads were too distracting.

Journal of Consciousness Studies, Aug 2007 (vol. 14, no. 8 )
For non-subscribers the website has full text of two conference reports (by Stuart Hameroff and Walter Truett Anderson) and five book reviews, plus abstracts of the articles.

Books reviewed in the current issue:
Michael Spivey, The Continuity of Mind , reviewed by Igor Aleksander
Imants Barušs, Science as a Spiritual Practice, reviewed by Allan Combs
Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy – and Why They Matter, reviewed by Jonathan Balcombe
Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity, reviewed by E.J. Lowe
Arthur J. Hudson, The Physiological Basis And Quantum Versions of Memory And Consciousness, reviewed by Chris Nunn

journal home page

compiled list of available full text articles

New York Times review of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation by Drew Westen: “…takes an interesting dollop of neuroscience and uses it to coat the conventional clichés of the Why Democrats Lose genre.”

The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality by Ruth M.J. Byrne - discusses research on cognitive processes involved in counterfactual (“if only…”) and semifactual (“even if…”) thinking.
excerpt from the summary, p. 214:

This book has sketched seven principles derived from the study of reasoning that explain imaginative thoughts. People think about possibilities, … true possibilities. They do not tend to think about false possibilities. They also tend to think about just a few of the true possibilities. People can think about dual possibilities… When they think about counterfactual possibilities, they can think about a possibility that is false, and they may even suppose it to be true. They keep track of whether the possibilities they think about are real or imagined. Dual possibilities are more mutable than single possibilities; people can more readily create a counterfactual alternative to a possibility when they have mentally represented it from the outset with a second possibility. People understand obligations by thinking about the forbidden possibility as well as the permitted possibility. They can imagine how a situation should have been different by mentally changing a forbidden possibility to be more like the permitted possibility. The possibilities people envisage encode temporal information about the order of events in the world. The seven principles are not intended as an exhaustive set; nonetheless this fragment provides the beginnings of an explanation of the counterfactual imagination, The principles help to explain some of the remarkable regularities in the counterfactual alternatives that people create. For example, they explain why people create counterfactual alternatives to actions, to controllable events, to forbidden events, and to recent events. They explain why counterfactual thoughts focus on enabling causal relations and semifactual thoughts focus on weak causal relations.

My claim is that the counterfactual imagination is rational. … the set of principles that guide the possibilities people think about when they reason also guide their imaginative thoughts.

more information at Google Book Search

“The Objects of Our Desire”, an article in today’s Washington Post discusses the new book
Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Evocative Objects is the first of a planned three-book series on technology and self.

See also Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, suggesting humans are “beings primed by Mother Nature to annex wave upon wave of external elements and structures as part and parcel of their own extended minds.” (p. 31)

Here is a list of books on the self, published in 2007 or coming soon, the start of a cumulative list to be placed in the sidebar.

Berkeley’s Philosophy of Spirit: Consciousness, Ontology and the Elusive Subject by Talia Mae Bettcher (London ; New York : Continuum, 2007).

The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of the Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology by Jonardon Ganeri (Oxford : Clarendon, 2007)

The First Person Singular by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007).

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R Hofstadter (New York : Basic Books, 2007)

The Messy Self ed. by Jennifer Rosner (Boulder : Paradigm Publishers, 2007). ["an edited volume that challenges the idea and the ideal of a coherent, harmonious self"]
(more…)