my mind on books

“I think therefore I am, I think” by Stephen Cave (3/22/07) reviews three recent books dealing with free will, but concludes “the book that really does justice to this question is yet to be written.”

Books discussed in the article: Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by John Searle

Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human by Susan Blackmore

Four Views on Free Will (Great Debates in Philosophy) (forthcoming)

[A good book on free will, not reviewed in the above article, is The Illusion of Conscious Will (Bradford Books) by Daniel Wegner.]

Blindsight by Peter Watts: An interesting SF novel dealing with issues of consciousness, especially questions concerning the costs and benefits of consciousness. The extensive “notes and references” section at the end especially praises Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Bradford Books) (which I haven’t read).

Watts’s website is www.rifters.com.

In The Principles of Psychology, William James describes five primary characteristics of consciousness.

According to James, consciousness is

• subjective and private
• constantly changing
• continuous
• noetic (has function of knowing, intentionality, content)
• characterized by selective attention

[cited in Consciousness Studies: Cross-Cultural Perspectives by K. Ramakrishna Rao, McFarland & Co., 2002, p. 33-46]

An extensive annotated bibliography on consciousness and the brain is available here: www.consciousness-brain.org.

Arranged by author, the bibliography covers articles and books. Most of the entries have annotations, sometimes quite detailed summaries of the content. A few have links. The latest date I saw was 1996.

A recent book by neurophysiologist R. Grant Steen on brain science: The Evolving Brain: The Known and the Unknown

Chapter 9 deals with consciousness; a few excerpts follow….

“We propose that consciousness arises only when a subject shows a combination of attention, perception, memory, and awareness.” p. 187

“Consciousness may be equivalent to neuronal synchronization. If so, does anything that increases neural synchronization also increase consciousness? Recent evidence shows that Buddhist monks are able to synchronize large brain areas as they meditate. This is consistent with the focused attention and increased consciousness that practitioners claim as a benefit of meditation. Equating synchronization to consciousness makes a fairly simple hypothesis, with the obvious appeal that it would be easy to test and easy to prove false.” p. 202

“It seems likely that consciousness is a correlate of complexity, an emergent property of the brain.” p. 208