According to epiphenomenalism, our behavior is caused by events in our brains that also cause our mentality. This resulting mentality reflects our brains’ organization, but does not in turn cause anything. This book defends an epiphenomenalist account of philosophy of mind. It builds on the author’s previous work by moving beyond a discussion of sensations to apply an epiphenomenalist outlook to other aspects of mental causation such as beliefs, desires, pleasure, and displeasure. The first four chapters of the book argue for a dualistic theory of sensations and develop an epiphenomenalist version of dualism. The remaining chapters discuss propositional attitudes and valence. The author also responds to potential objections to epiphenomenalism by considering how sensations, intelligence, or understanding might be built into a robot. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in philosophy of mind who are interested in consciousness, mental causation, and how our mentality is situated in the world.

Writing in a rigorous, thought-provoking style, the author takes us on a far-reaching tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness, offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.

This collection of essays presents the core of the work of influential philosopher Jaegwon Kim.

CONSCIOUSNESS Consciousness is a thought-provoking collection of classic and contemporary philosophical literature on consciousness, bringing together influential scholarship by seminal thinkers and the work of emerging voices who reflect the diversity of the field. Editors Josh Weisberg and David Rosenthal have selected discussions that animate modern debates and connect consciousness to broader philosophical topics. Providing an expansive view of the philosophical landscape of consciousness studies, this carefully calibrated reader features classic work from the past four decades by seminal thinkers such as Thomas Nagel, David Lewis, Ned Block, Gilbert Harman, and Daniel Dennett, as well as important recent work from David Chalmers, Fiona Macperson, Joseph Levine, Kathleen Akins, and other contemporary philosophers. Divided into five parts, Consciousness explores the nature of consciousness, consciousness and knowledge, qualitative consciousness, and theories of consciousness. A final section on agency and physicalism includes work by Galen Strawson and a previously unpublished article by Myrto Mylopoulos. Philosophically challenging yet accessible to students, Consciousness is an ideal reader for many undergraduate and graduate courses on consciousness or philosophy of mind, as well as a useful supplementary text for general classes in philosophy and a valuable reference text for philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and psychologists.

Uriah Kriegel develops an objective theory of what it is for a mental state to be conscious. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental states differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they represent, they represent themselves in a very specific way.

The book is intended as a reader-friendly introduction to issues in the philosophy of mind, including mental–physical causal interaction, computational models of thought, the relation minds bear to brains, and assorted -isms: behaviorism, dualism, eliminativism, emergentism, functionalism, materialism, neutral monism, and panpsychism. The Fourth Edition reintroduces a chapter on Donald Davidson and a discussion of ‘Non-Cartesian Dualism’, along with a wholly new chapter on emergence and panpsychism. A concluding chapter draws together material in earlier chapters and offers what the author regards as a plausible account of the mind’s place in nature. Suggested readings at the conclusion of each chapter have been updated, with a focus on accessible, non-technical material. Key Features of the Fourth Edition Includes a new chapter, 'Emergence and Panpsychism' (Chapter 13), reflecting growing interest in these areas Reintroduces and updates a chapter on Donald Davidson, 'Radical Interpretation' (Chapter 8), which was excised from the previous edition Updates 'Descartes' Legacy' (Chapter 3) to include a discussion of E. J. Lowe's arresting 'Non-Cartesian Dualism', also removed from the previous edition Includes a highly revised final chapter, which draws together much of the previous material and sketches a plausible account of the mind’s place in nature Updated 'Suggested Reading' lists at the end of each chapter

Building a conscious robot is a scientific and technological challenge. Debates about the possibility of conscious robots and the related positive outcomes and hazards for human beings are today no longer confined to philosophical circles. Robot consciousness is a research field aimed at a two-part goal: on the one hand, scholars working in robot consciousness take inspiration from biological consciousness to build robots that present forms of experiential and functional consciousness. On the other hand, scholars employ robots as tools to better understand biological consciousness. Thus, part one of the goal concerns the replication of aspects of biological consciousness in robots, by unifying a variety of approaches from AI and robotics, cognitive robotics, epigenetic and affective robotics, situated and embodied robotics, developmental robotics, anticipatory systems, and biomimetic robotics. Part two of the goal is pursued by employing robots to advance and mark progress in the study of consciousness in humans and animals. Notably, neuroscientists involved in the study of consciousness do not exclude the possibility that robots may be conscious. This eBook comprises a collection of thirteen manuscripts and an Editorial published by Frontiers in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, under the section Humanoid Robotics, and Frontiers in Neurorobotics, on the topic “Consciousness in Humanoid Robots.” This compendium aims at collating the most recent theoretical studies, models, and case studies of machine consciousness that take the humanoid robot as a frame of reference. The content in the articles may be applied to many different kinds of robots, and to software agents as well.

Fundamentals of Cognitive Science draws on research from psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, evolution, and neuroscience to provide an engaging and student-friendly introduction to this interdisciplinary field. While structured around traditional cognitive psychology topics, from attention, learning theory, and memory to information processing, thinking, and decision making, the book also looks at neural networks, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition, and magic to illustrate cognitive science principles. The book is organized around the history of thinking about the mind and its relation to the world. It considers the evolution of cognition and how it demonstrates how our current thinking about cognitive processes is derived from pre-scientific philosophies and common sense, through psychologists’ empirical inquiries into mind and behavior as they pursued a science of cognition and the construction of artificial intelligences. The architectures of cognition are also applied throughout, and the book proposes a synthesis of them, from traditional symbol system architectures to recent work in embodied cognition and Bayesian predictive processing. Practical and policy implications are also considered but solutions are left for the readers to determine. Using extended case studies to address the most important themes, ideas, and findings, this book is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and related fields. It is also suitable for general readers interested in an accessible treatment of cognitive science and its practical implications. Please visit www.fundamentalsofcognitivescience.com for further resources to accompany the book.

History's biggest lie is that there's one "God" and he created the universe out of nothing. Nothing has done more damage to the human psyche than monotheism - the doctrine of an all-powerful "Spy God", the divine peeping Tom, who sentences to hell anyone who doesn't slavishly obey him. In fact, the universe is a mathematical "God factory" and creates infinite Gods over eons of time. The universe, via dialectical ontological mathematics, is converging on the perfect answer to everything: the condition known as the Absolute or the Omega Point. The universe travels, mathematically, from Alpha to Omega, from perfect potential to perfect actualization. The ancient secret society of the Illuminati has waged a war against Abrahamic monotheism and promoted the doctrine of "becoming God". Mathematics is the Philosopher's Stone that can transmute base metal (ordinary humans) into gold (Gods). You too can complete your cosmic journey, across countless reincarnations. Are you ready to become an Omega Human?