my mind on books

• spiked review of books reviews ‘On Consciousness’ by Ted Honderich
• ‘Proust and the Squid’ reviewed at the Telegraph
• also at the Telegraph: ‘We-Think’
• New Metapsychology reviews this week include ‘Explaining the Brain’and ‘A Critique of Naturalistic Philosophies of Mind’

David Chalmers has posted about Andy Clark‘s upcoming book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. I enjoyed Clark’s earlier book Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence so I’ll be looking forward to this new one.

Mind Hacks has a recent post on the book Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The Psychopathology of Common Sense by Giovanni Stanghellini (Oxford University Press, 2004), which takes a phenomenological approach to schizophrenia and manic-depressive or bipolar disorder.

Google Books page for Disembodied Spirits

The Mind Hacks post also mentions the book Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic, which I had just posted about yesterday (from an interested layperson’s perspective).

Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds by David McFarland (Oxford University Press, 2008).

from the book description:

When we interact with animals, we intuitively read thoughts and feelings into their expressions and actions. …

But is our natural tendency to humanize other beings philosophically or scientifically justifiable? Can we ever know what non-human minds are really like? How different are human minds from the minds of animals or robots? In Guilty Robots and Happy Dogs , David McFarland offers an accessible exploration of these and many other intriguing questions, questions that illuminate our understanding the human mind and its limits in knowing and imagining other minds. In exploring these issues, McFarland looks not only at philosophy, but also examines new evidence from the science of animal behavior, plus the latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, to show how many different–and often quite surprising–conclusions we can draw about the nature of minds “alien” to our own. Can robots ever feel guilty? Can dogs feel happy? Answering these questions is not simply an abstract exercise but has real implications for such increasingly relevant topics as animal welfare, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics.

Link to Times Online review