my mind on books

Some key figures in consciousness studies:

based on the book Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore – not a comprehensive list, but a good starting point.

Susan Blackmore – homepage

Bernard Baars – http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/baars/
includes link to ebook “A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness”
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/GWorkspace.html

Ned Block – http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/

David Chalmers – http://consc.net/chalmers/

Patricia and Paul Churchland – http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/EPL/Pat.html

Francis Crick – http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/crick-koch-cc-97.html

Daniel Dennett – http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm

Susan Greenfield – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Greenfield

Richard Gregory – http://www.richardgregory.org/

Stuart Hameroff – http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/

Christof Koch – http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/

Stephen LaBerge – http://www.lucidity.com/ (The Lucidity Institute)

Thomas Metzinger – http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/

Kevin O’Regan – http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/

Roger Penrose – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

V.S. Ramachandran – http://psy.ucsd.edu/chip/ramabio.html

John Searle – http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/

Petra Stoerig – http://cajal.unizar.es/eng/part/Stoerig.html

Francisco Varela – http://www.enolagaia.com/Varela.html

Max Velmans – http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/departments/psychology/staff/velpub.html

Daniel Wegner – http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7Ewegner/Home.html

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/fodo01_.html

“Strawson has the kind of expansive metaphysical imagination that used to be at the heart of philosophy, but which positivism and analysis succeeded for a long while in suppressing.”

The book reviewed is Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?

Galen Strawson’s homepage includes a link to the 2006 article ‘Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism’ (a 29-page pdf ).

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert received the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

p224-227. Gilbert identifies three shortcomings of the imagination that prevent us from knowing what will make us happy: 1. tendency to fill in/leave out things unconsciously, 2. tendency to project the present onto the future, 3. failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen. (Things will look better because the “psychological immune system” will transform meaning.)

The best way to predict is to see how others feel after similar experiences, but “our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates” (p 232).

I hope to find a more systematic way of monitoring new & forthcoming titles, but meanwhile here are some that look interesting (found by the “poking around” method). Feel free to add more suggestions in the comments!

Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner (April 3, 2007)
The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht (April 10, 2007)
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (April 17, 2007)
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (March 27, 2007)
Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle (Amazon says “June 5, 2007” but it is already available)
Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, And Language by Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle (May 2007)
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David J. Linden (March 31, 2007)
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth (May 15, 2007)
The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in People, Animals and Machines by Igor Aleksander (May 1, 2007)
The Character of Consciousness (Philosophy of Mind) by David Chalmers (March 1, 2008)
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (September 11, 2007)

Joseph Levine, Professor of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts Amherst, recently discussed “Can Science Explain Consciousness?” on the radio program Philosophy Talk. A RealAudio file of the program is available here.

Levine is the author of Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness (Philosophy of Mind Series)