my mind on books

Brain Imaging: What it Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About Consciousness by Robert G. Shulman (Oxford University Press, USA, 2013)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Magnetic resonance imaging methods have taken a commanding position in brain studies because they allow scientists to follow brain activities in the living human. The ability to measure cerebral anatomy, neuronal firing, and brain metabolism has extended and re-invigorated hopes of understanding the role that brain activity plays in human life. The brain has assumed a central role in our thinking of the world that can be traced back to the philosophies that are expressed in psychology, religion, literature, and everyday life. Brain scientists, planning and measuring brain activities by imaging methods, have consciously or unconsciously been influenced by these philosophical views.

Brain Imaging: What It Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About Consciousness, in describing the experiments using imaging methods, traces how assumptions about the nature of brain function made in planning scientific experiments are the consequences of philosophical positions. Experiments that relate brain activities to observable behavior are shown to avoid the philosophical and psychological assumptions about mental processes that have been proposed to underlie these behaviors. This analysis establishes the conditions necessary for reproducible brain responses.

Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

One of the world’s leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments.

Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun.Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built.

Alongside well-known favorites like Occam’s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett’s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett’s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions.”

A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that’s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers—in all walks of life—delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.

Google Books preview:

Transparent Minds: A Study of Self-Knowledge by Jordi Fernandez (Oxford University Press, USA, 2013)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

We all seem to be capable of telling what our current states of mind are. At any given moment, we know, for example, what we believe, and what we want. But how do we know that? In Transparent Minds, Jordi Fernandez explains our knowledge of our own propositional attitudes. Drawing on the so-called “transparency” of belief, he proposes that we attribute beliefs and desires to ourselves based on our grounds for those beliefs and desires. The book argues that this view explains our privileged access to those propositional attitudes. Three applications are drawn from the model of self-knowledge that emerges: a solution to Moore’s paradox, an account of the thought-insertion delusion, and an explanation of self-deception. The puzzles raised by all three phenomena can be resolved, Fernandez argues, if we construe them as failures of self-knowledge. The resulting picture of self-knowledge challenges the traditional notion that it is a matter of introspection. For the main tenet of Transparent Minds is that we come to know what we believe and desire by “looking outward,” and attending to the states of affairs which those beliefs and desires are about.

See also: Author’s website

$0.99 kindle ebook (short) on Amazon: ‘Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness’ by Kirsten Mortensen amazon.com/gp/product/B00… via @amazon

— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) March 14, 2013

Decomposing the Will (Philosophy of Mind Series), ed. by Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein, and Tillmann Vierkant (Oxford University Press, USA, 2013)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

There is growing evidence from the science of human behavior that our everyday, folk understanding of ourselves as conscious, rational, responsible agents may be radically mistaken. The science, some argue, recommends a view of conscious agency as merely epiphenomenal: an impotent accompaniment to the whirring unconscious machinery (the inner zombie) that prepares, decides and causes our behavior. The new essays in this volume display and explore this radical claim, revisiting the folk concept of the responsible agent after abandoning the image of a central executive, and “decomposing” the notion of the conscious will into multiple interlocking aspects and functions.

Part 1 of this volume provides an overview of the scientific research that has been taken to support “the zombie challenge.” In part 2, contributors explore the phenomenology of agency and what it is like to be the author of one’s own actions. Part 3 then explores different strategies for using the science and phenomenology of human agency to respond to the zombie challenge.

Questions explored include: what distinguishes automatic behavior and voluntary action? What, if anything, does consciousness contribute to the voluntary control of behavior? What does the science of human behavior really tell us about the nature of self-control?

Table of Contents
1. Decomposing the WIll: Meeting the Zombie Challenge , Tillmann Vierkant, Julian Kiverstein, and Andy Clark
PART ONE The Zombie Challenge
2. The Neuroscience of Volition , Adina L. Roskies
3. Beyond Libet: Long-term Prediction of Free Choices from Neuroimaging Signals , John-Dylan Haynes
4. Vetoing and Consciousness , Alfred R. Mele
5. From Determinism to Resignation; and How to Stop It , Richard Holton

PART TWO The Sense of Agency
6. From the Fact to the Sense of Agency , Manos Tsakiris and Aikaterini Fotopoulou
7. Ambiguity in the Sense of Agency , Shaun Gallagher
8. There’s Nothing Life Being Free: Default Dispositions, Judgments of Freedom, and the Phenomenology of Coercion , Fabio Paglieri
9. Agency as a Marker of Consciousness , Tim Bayne

PART THREE The Function of Conscious Control: Conflict Resolution, Emotion, and Mental Actions

10. Voluntary Action and the Three Forms of Binding in the Brain , Ezequiel Morsella, Tara C. Dennehy, and John A. Bargh
11. Emotion Regulation and Free Will , Nico H. Frijda
12. Action Control by Implementation Intentions: The Role of Discrete Emotions , Sam J. Maglio, Peter M. Gollwitzer, and Gabriele Oettingen
13. Mental Action and the Threat of Automaticity , Wayne Wu
14. Mental Acts as Natural Kinds , Jo^”elle Proust

PART FOUR Decomposed Accounts of the Will
15. Managerial Control and Free Mental Agency , Tillmann Vierkant
16. Recomposing the Will: Distributed Motivation and Computer-Mediated Extrospection , Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, and David de Leon
17. Situationism and Moral Responsibility: Free Will in Fragments , Manuel Vargas