my mind on books

Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life by Marya Schechtman (Oxford University Press, 2014)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the ‘Person Life View’, sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.

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Life Story video: Bruce Hood, Galen Strawson, Marya Schechtman

The Predictive Brain: Consciousness, Decision and Embodied Action by Mauro Maldonato (Sussex Academic Press, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

An investigation of the working of the human mind, this book sets out to show that the brain is not only a reactive mechanism, but rather proactive, allowing people to make hypotheses, anticipate consequences, and formulate expectations. The book discusses how the evolution of motor modes of behavior, such as the ability to construct and manipulate instruments, has given rise to an “embodied logic” underpinning not only action and prediction but also gestures and syllable sequences that are the basis of human communication. This book then looks at how, if consciousness is caused by specific neuronal processes and, therefore, conscious states are causally reducible to neurobiological processes, it is also true that conscious states exist at a higher level than neuron activity. For this reason, this work argues that it is necessary to go beyond a hierarchical idea of levels of consciousness, and to refute the idea according to which the mental sphere is qualitative, subjective, and in the first person, while the physical sphere is quantitative, objective, and in the third person.

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See also: Author’s website

Self: Philosophy In Transit by Barry Dainton (Penguin, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

In the third in a new series of short, provoking books of original philosophy, acclaimed thinker Barry Dainton takes us through the nature of Self When you think ‘What am I?’, what’s actually doing the thinking? Is it a soul, or some other kind of mental entity separate from your body, or are ‘you’ just a collection of nerve-endings and narratives? In the third in a new series of short, provoking books of original philosophy, acclaimed thinker Barry Dainton takes us through the nature of Self and its relation to the rest of reality. Starting his journey with Descartes’ claim that we are non-physical beings (even if it seems otherwise), and Locke’s view that a person is self-conscious matter (though not necessarily in human form), Dainton explores how today’s rapid movement of people, and information affects our understanding of self. When technology re-configures our minds, will it remake us, or kill us? If teleportation becomes possible, would it be rational to use it? Could we achieve immortality by uploading ourselves into virtual worlds? Far-reaching and witty, Self is a spirited exploration of the idea that in a constantly-changing world, we and our bodies can go their separate ways.

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Lecture: “From Phenomenal Selves to Hyper-Selves”

See also: Author’s website

Are You an Illusion? by Mary Midgley (Acumen, 2014)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Renowned philosopher Mary Midgley explores the remarkable gap that has opened up between our own understanding of our sense of our self and today’s scientific orthodoxy that claims the self to be nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Bringing her formidable acuity and analytic skills to bear, she exposes some very odd claims and muddled thinking on the part of cognitive scientists and psychologists when it comes to talk about the self. Well-known philosophical problems in causality, subjectivity, empiricism, free will and determinism are shown to have been glossed over by scientists claiming that the self is no more than a jumble of brain-cells. Midgley argues powerfully and persuasively that the rich variety of our imaginative life cannot be contained in the narrow bounds of a highly puritanical materialism that equates brain and self. The denial of the self has been sustained by the belief that physical science requires it, but there is not just one such pattern of thought but many others which all help to explain the different kinds of problems that arise in our life, argues Midgley. Physics’ amazing contemporary successes spring from attacking problems that arise within physics, not from outside. It is no more sensible to give a physical answer to a moral problem than it is to give political answers to physical ones. ‘Are you an Illusion?’ is an impassioned defence of the importance of our own experiences – the subjective sources of thought – which are every bit as necessary for the world as the objective ones such as brain cells.

Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate by W.R. Klemm (Prometheus, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

A leading neuroscientist offers the latest research and many new ideas on the connections between brain circuitry and conscious experience.

How the mysterious three-pound organ in our heads creates the rich array of human mental experience, including the sense of self and consciousness, is one of the great challenges of 21st-century science. Veteran neuroscientist W. R. Klemm presents the latest research findings on this elusive brain-mind connection in a lucidly presented, accessible, and engaging narrative.

The author focuses on how mind emerges from nerve-impulse patterns in the densely-packed neural circuits that make up most of the brain, suggesting that conscious mind can be viewed as a sort of neural-activity-based avatar. As an entity in its own right, mind on the conscious level can have significant independent action, shaping the brain that sustains it through its plans, goals, interests, and interactions with the world. Thus, in a very literal sense, we become what we think.

Against researchers who argue that conscious mind is merely a passive observer and free will an illusion, the author presents evidence showing that mental creativity, freedom to act, and personal responsibility are very real. He also delves into the role of dream sleep in both animals and humans, and explains the brain-based differences between nonconscious, unconscious, and conscious minds.

Written in a jargon-free style understandable to the lay reader, this is a fascinating synthesis of recent neuroscience and intriguing hypotheses.

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See also: Author’s website