my mind on books

• Two books on neuroethics were published this month (Aug 2007): Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century by Neil Levy (Cambridge U Press) and Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science: Essential Readings in Neuroethics ed. by Walter Glannon (Dana Press)

• Brainethics blog has compiled a list of readings in neuroethics
• Wikipedia article
• neuroethics.upenn.edu (section on narrative perspectives has extensive list on neuroethics in film and literature)

philolsophers photostream at flickr!

[update: favorite – David Chalmers: “Doood – I has a hard problm”]

[For this reading challenge I picked non-fiction titles that are outside the usual scope of my reading and of this website.]

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

I enjoyed reading this book quite a lot, in part because many of the events take place in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and other Bay Area locations that I’m familiar with. It’s also a well written account, winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. The book relates the story of Muybridge’s famous motion studies, mostly concentrating on the photographer’s career leading up to and following the innovations that enabled him to capture the details of a trotting horse’s gait. His development of high-speed photographic techniques settled a debate by showing that all four hooves were off the ground at once. The Wikipedia entry for Muybridge cites this book as its source and so gives a fairly good summary of its contents, plus a nice collection of related links.

Solnit also focuses on the changes in the experience of time and space brought about by technological developments of the period such as the railroad and photography. The genealogy from Muybridge’s motion studies to Hollywood and Silicon Valley is just touched on in the last few pages of the book.

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.

Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, Amazon products, and more. Pointing the cursor at the icon next to a link will bring up the Snap Shot preview.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not. They work nicely for Amazon links, giving a little product and price information. (Plus the preview already helped me find an error in yesterday’s post on “The Political Brain” so I’ve fixed the link to the New York Times review!)

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

Update: 11/8/07 I’ve removed Snap Shots today because they added advertising & I thought the ads were too distracting.