my mind on books

The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini (Granta Books, 2012)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Are you still the person who lived fifteen, ten or five years ago? Fifteen, ten or five minutes ago? Can you plan for your retirement if the you of thirty years hence is in some sense a different person? What and who is the real you? Does it remain constant over time and place, or is it something much more fragmented and fluid? Is it known to you, or are you as much a mystery to yourself as others are to you? With his usual wit, infectious curiosity and bracing scepticism, Julian Baggini sets out to answer these fundamental and unsettling questions. His fascinating quest draws on the history of philosophy, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology and neurology; he talks to theologians, priests, allegedly reincarnated Lamas, and delves into real-life cases of lost memory, personality disorders and personal transformation; and, candidly and engagingly, he describes his own experiences. After reading The Ego Trick, you will never see yourself in the same way again.

See also: Author’s website

The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance by Jonardon Ganeri (Oxford University Press, USA)

(amazon.co.uk – Apr 2012)

Book details from the publisher:

What is it to occupy a first-person stance? Is the first-personal idea one has of oneself in conflict with the idea of oneself as a physical being? How, if there is a conflict, is it to be resolved? The Self recommends a new way to approach those questions, finding inspiration in theories about consciousness and mind in first millennial India. These philosophers do not regard the first-person stance as in conflict with the natural–their idea of nature is not that of scientific naturalism, but rather a liberal naturalism non-exclusive of the normative. Jonardon Ganeri explores a wide range of ideas about the self: reflexive self-representation, mental files, and quasi-subject analyses of subjective consciousness; the theory of emergence as transformation; embodiment and the idea of a bodily self; the centrality of the emotions to the unity of self. Buddhism’s claim that there is no self too readily assumes an account of what a self must be. Ganeri argues instead that the self is a negotiation between self-presentation and normative avowal, a transaction grounded in unconscious mind. Immersion, participation, and coordination are jointly constitutive of self, the first-person stance at once lived, engaged, and underwritten. And all is in harmony with the idea of the natural.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s webpage

The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity by Bruce Hood (Oxford University Press, USA)

(amazon.co.uk – 19 Apr)

Book description from the publisher:

Most of us believe that we are an independent, coherent self–an individual inside our head who thinks, watches, wonders, dreams, and makes plans for the future. This sense of our self may seem incredibly real but a wealth of recent scientific evidence reveals that it is not what it seems–it is all an illusion.

In The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood reveals how the self emerges during childhood and how the architecture of the developing brain enables us to become social animals dependent on each other. Humans spend proportionally the greatest amount of time in childhood compared to any other animal. It’s not only to learn from others, Hood notes, but also to learn to become like others. We learn to become our self. Even as adults we are continually developing and elaborating this story, learning to become different selves in different situations–the work self, the home self, the parent self. Moreover, Hood shows that this already fluid process–the construction of self–has dramatically changed in recent years. Social networking activities–such as blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter–are fast becoming socialization on steroids. The speed and ease at which we can form alliances and relationships are outstripping the same selection processes that shaped our self prior to the internet era. Things will never be the same again in the online social world. Hood offers our first glimpse into this unchartered territory.

Who we are is, in short, a story of our self–a narrative that our brain creates. Like the science fiction movie, we are living in a matrix that is our mind. But Hood concludes that though the self is an illusion, it is an illusion we must continue to embrace to live happily in human society.

Google books preview:

See also: Author’s website, Royal Institution 2011 Christmas Lectures

Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are by Sebastian Seung (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

We know that each of us is unique, but science has struggled to pinpoint where, precisely, our uniqueness resides. Is it in our genes? The structure of our brains? Our genome may determine our eye color and even aspects of our personality. But our friendships, failures, and passions also shape who we are. The question is: how?

Sebastian Seung, a dynamic professor at MIT, is on a quest to discover the biological basis of identity. He believes it lies in the pattern of connections between the brain’s neurons, which change slowly over time as we learn and grow. The connectome, as it’s called, is where our genetic inheritance intersects with our life experience. It’s where nature meets nurture.

Seung introduces us to the dedicated researchers who are mapping the brain’s connections, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. It is a monumental undertaking—the scientific equivalent of climbing Mount Everest—but if they succeed, it could reveal the basis of personality, intelligence, memory, and perhaps even mental disorders. Many scientists speculate that people with anorexia, autism, and schizophrenia are “wired differently,” but nobody knows for sure. The brain’s wiring has never been clearly seen.

In sparklingly clear prose, Seung reveals the amazing technological advances that will soon help us map connectomes. He also examines the evidence that these maps will someday allow humans to “upload” their minds into computers, achieving a kind of immortality.

Connectome is a mind-bending adventure story, told with great passion and authority. It presents a daring scientific and technological vision for at last understanding what makes us who we are. Welcome to the future of neuroscience.

Google books preview:

See also: Book website

Consciousness and the Self: New Essays ed. by JeeLoo Liu and John Perry (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

(amazon.co.uk – 17 Nov 2011)

Product description from the publisher:

‘I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.’ These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry’s collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood and the epistemic access to one’s own thoughts, desires or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self.

Table of Contents

Introduction: consciousness and the self
1. Awareness and identification of self – David Rosenthal
2. Self-representationalism and the explanatory gap – Uriah Kriegel
3. Thinking about the self – John Perry
4. Ordinary self-consciousness – Lucy O’Brien
5. Waiting for the self – Jesse Prinz
6. I think I think, therefore I am – I think: skeptical doubts about self-knowledge – Fred Dretske
7. Knowing what I want – Alex Byrne
8. Self-ignorance – Eric Schwitzgebel
9. Personhood and consciousness – Sydney Shoemaker
10. My non-narrative, non-forensic Dasein: the first and second self – Owen Flanagan.