my mind on books

• David Chalmers surveys “recent collections on consciousness”
• detailed review of Sebastian Rödl’s Self Consciousness by Béatrice Longuenesse at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
  

  Self-consciousness, as Rödl defines it, is the power to think of oneself as oneself. This power is fundamentally related to the capacity to use the word “I.” A theory of self-consciousness is thus inseparable from a theory of self-reference: investigating self-consciousness is investigating the way(s) in which “I” refers.

• Priscilla Palmer is compiling a massive list of personal development blogs
  

[Update 9/14 – The personal development list just grew and grew and became a wiki, created by Isabella Mori of change therapy]

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.

“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…)

I want to make note of the paradoxical notion of “selfless solipsism” from John V. Canfield’s book ‘The Looking-Glass Self’ (more on the book in yesterday’s post) since I have spent some years looking into various forms of nondualism (especially Advaita Vedanta).

So Canfield quotes Wittgenstein: “Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality coordinated with it.” (The Looking Glass Self, p. 46)