my mind on books

Passage by Connie Willis (Bantam, 2001, 2002) is a “neurofictional” account of scientific research on near-death experiences. Willis is usually classified as a science fiction writer, but here that would be in the sense of “fiction about science.” The premise is that a researcher has found a psychoactive drug that simulates the near-death experience. He enlists psychologist Joanna Lander to interview research subjects but she soon volunteers to take the drug herself and this intensifies her quest to discover the meaning of the experience.

The back of the book has a rather odd blurb from Newsday that calls Willis “a true heir to John Donne, Kurt Godel and Preston Sturges….” so try to imagine that combination in a novel! I found the story compelling and consumed the whole 780 pages over about three days.

Embodied Minds in Action by Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese (Oxford University Press, 2009) – Amazon promises “in stock on Feb. 22” and they have a sample available online.

Product Description
In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied. This entails that our minds are necessarily spread throughout our living, organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution. So minds like ours are necessarily alive. The second claim is that essentially embodied minds are self-organizing thermodynamic systems. This entails that our mental lives consist in the possibility and actuality of moving our own living organismic bodies through space and time, by means of our conscious desires. The upshot is that we are essentially minded animals who help to create the natural world through our own agency. This doctrine–the Essential Embodiment Theory–is a truly radical idea which subverts the traditionally opposed and seemingly exhaustive categories of Dualism and Materialism, and offers a new paradigm for contemporary mainstream research in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë (one of the philosophers interviewed in the recent book ‘Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions‘) is due out from Hill and Wang on Feb. 17 (according to Amazon) or Feb. 24 (according to the publisher).

(link for UK)

Publisher’s description:

Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.

Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don’t have a clue.

In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.

See also: Alva Noë on Edge.org

David Chalmers mentioned this book awhile ago and I just noticed it is available now: Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions ed. by Patrick Grim (Automatic, 2009).

(link for UK)

Product Description
Debates concerning the nature of mind and consciousness are active and ongoing, with implications for philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence and the neurosciences. This book collects interviews with some of the foremost philosophers of mind, focusing on open questions, promising projects, and their own intellectual histories. The result is a rich glimpse of the contemporary debate through some of the people who make it what it is. Interviews with Lynne Rudder Baker, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Fred Dretske, Owen Flanagan, Samuel Guttenplan, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, John Heil, Terence Horgan, Douglas Hofstadter, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, William Lycan, Alva Noë, Hilary Putnam, David Rosenthal, John Searle, Steven Stich, Galen Strawson, Michael Tye.

Our relation to our past is no more passive than is our relation to what we presently visually perceive; we are not the containers of memory-images that a true narrative would accurately describe. Rather, we are in a continual process of reconsideration, … of reflective restructuring, and of repositioning the actions, events, occurrences, interactions, efforts, aspirations, achievements, intentions — in short, our words, deeds, and everything in between that, taken together, form the teleological trajectories, the narrative threads, of our selves. … Memories, understood in this way, are not inert visual images filed into storage by time and date. They are remembered experiences of all composite kinds, and, like works of art and like human selves, they take on and cast off relational properties, networks of interconnections to other experiences both similar and different. (Hagberg,Describing Ourselves, p. 236)

Garry L. Hagberg, in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2008), explores Wittgenstein’s views on the self in relation to autobiographical writing.

The ‘Cartesian’ view of introspection as an internal act of inspecting determinate mental “objects” exerts a pervasive influence on concepts of the mind and self. According to Hagberg, Wittgenstein opposed this view without falling into the contrasting behaviorist camp that shares the presuppositions of the Cartesian, dualistic account. “Wittgenstein’s position … cuts beneath the metaphysical presuppositions of both of these polarized, antithetical theories of the self.” (p. 185) However, Wittgenstein’s own position resists any simple capsule formulation. As Hagberg states (p. 240), “the very phrase ‘Wittgenstein’s method’ can easily prove… misleading” but he points to a convergence between therapeutic philosophy and autobiography:

To see autobiography as philosophy is to see it as an ineliminable source of language-games of narrative self-description, and to see philosophy as autobiography is to see it, in turn, as the distinctive kind of self-analysis — the intricate, layered disentangling of the mind’s grammatically fueled impulses to misspeak, to mischaracterize itself — that Wittgenstein’s remarks on therapeutic philosophy articulate. (p. 256)