Showing results for "MIND" in Philosophy

What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture.

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity of his experiments - using such low-tech tools such as cotton swabs, glasses of water, and dime-store mirrors.

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association....

Light of the Mind, Light of the World tells a daring new story about how we got here, and how we can chart a better path forward. Surveying the history of science and faith from the astronomers of Babylon to the quantum physicists of postwar Europe and America, classicist and scholar Spencer A. Klavan argues that science itself is leading us not away from God but back to him, and to the ancient faith that places the human soul at the center of the universe.

The New York Times best-selling author of Darwin’s Doubt presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology.

Thanks to recent advances in AI, humans have entered a world where we are no longer the sole custodians of knowledge. A new wave of disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us - and are beginning to transform everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work. Can AI ‘think’, 'know' and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.

Although Professor Stephen Westaby was born with the necessary coordination and manual dexterity, it was a head trauma sustained during university that gifted him the qualities of an exceptional heart surgeon: qualities that are frequently associated with psychopathy. His 35-year career has been characterised by fearlessness and ruthless ambition, leaving empathy at the hospital door as thousands of patients put their lives in his hands.

In very recent times humanity has learnt a vast amount about the universe, the past and itself. But through our remarkable successes in acquiring knowledge we have learned how much we have yet to learn: the science we have, for example, addresses just five per cent of the universe, pre-history is still being revealed, with thousands of historical sites yet to be explored, and the new neurosciences of mind and brain are just beginning.

Whether it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning - a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to talk about all sorts of things - from your new labradoodle puppy to the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s backhand to things that don’t exist at all, like flying pigs.

In your life, your Personal Monad is the singularity in your own consciousness, the point of view from which you experience the world. You are conscious because the universe is conscious, and the commonplace experience of being a single point of awareness in your own mind—of being whole in your own little world—is a reflection of the Greater Monad in you. The focus in this book is on your relationship to the Greater Monad. Whatever the ultimate truth of the universe, that is not going to change.

Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology is the eighth title published in the Templeton Science and Religion Series, in which scientists from a wide range of fields distill their experience and knowledge into brief tours of their respective specialties. In this volume, well-known cognitive scientist Justin L. Barrett offers an accessible overview of this interdisciplinary field, reviews key findings in this area, and discusses the implications of these findings for religious thought and practice.

Engaging, thought-provoking, and groundbreaking, The Immortal Mind shows here that some aspect of who we are is spiritual and immortal, transcending the physical body. Using science, he proves the existence of the human soul.

The first audiobook of its kind, Mind Wars covers the ethical dilemmas and bizarre history of cutting-edge technology and neuroscience developed for military applications. As the author discusses the innovative Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the role of the intelligence community and countless university science departments in preparing the military and intelligence services for the 21st century, he also charts the future of national security.

This collection brings together history, science, philosophy and comedy to explore our age-old search for meaning. We live in an age of self-improvement and self-examination - lifehacking, wellbeing, self-care, mindfulness retreats - but this seemingly very modern phenomenon is a pursuit that dates back for millennia.

Like many people, you’ve probably asked some of these questions when you were younger or maybe recently. Well, you will be pleasantly surprised to discover the interesting and maybe slightly bizarre origins of the strange things we do. In Wonder Why? Fascinating Stories, Curious Facts, and Answers About the Mysteries of Science, History, Pop Culture, and Traditions Around the World cover 55 of the most regularly asked questions with fascinating origin stories.

Among all life on Earth, we alone experience rich moral emotions, follow complex rules governing how we treat one another, and engage in moral dialogue. But how did human morality evolve? And can humans become morally evolved? In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell draw on the latest research in the biological and social sciences to explain the key role that morality has played in human evolution.

In the best-selling and critically acclaimed Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance, Phillip Johnson took on the academic elites and exposed the misleading claims of evolutionary naturalism. Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds provides a new and powerful treatment of these issues for high-school students, parents, teachers, pastors, youth advisers, and ordinary listeners. Johnson aims not just to defeat a bad theory, but to defeat it in the right way - by opening minds to the truth.