my mind on books

Consciousness researcher Christof Koch is interviewed on Brain Science Podcast #22.

Koch is the author of The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach

I saw him speak at Berkeley when he gave the Foerster Lecture in 2006, which can be viewed through Google video.

Brain Science Podcast has many more interesting episodes, plus a list of “Best Books on the Brain.”

What do Michel Foucault and Thich Nhat Hanh have in common? Maybe not much, but both have bestselling books in Amazon’s “Consciousness & Thought” category (and they both live/d in France!)

Amazon’s lists are usually interesting to browse, though their subject categories can sometimes give you an odd assortment of titles. The category “Consciousness & Thought” is found in Books/Nonfiction/Philosophy.

Right now the top five books in this category are

1. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
2. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (a personal favorite)
3. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction by Michel Foucault
4. The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
5. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James

This list should change as Amazon updates their bestseller information: Amazon’s most popular books in Consciousness & Thought

The top five new & future releases in Consciousness & Thought are

1. Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness (Columbia Series in Science and Religion) by B. Alan Wallace
2. The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman
3. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding by Mark Johnson
4. Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre
5. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will

Link to the complete and ever-changing list:
Amazon’s bestselling new & future releases in Consciousness & Thought

• 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.

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