Through analysis of metaphors of consciousness in the philosophy and fiction of William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this work traces the significance of representations of knowledge, gender and social class, revealing how writers conceived of the self in modern literature.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is supposed to constitute the 'hardproblem' for a scientific world view, and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog' (fine-grained) intentional content and a corresponding higher-orderanalog content, representing the first-order content of the experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel.The next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness). Then the final four chapters focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious (as his account probably implies), this needn't prevent the frustrations and sufferings ofanimals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively that even insects have minds that include abelief/desire/perception psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal consciousness couldn't be further apart.Carruthers's writing throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science.

Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines. Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets out a bold interpretation of consciousness that neutralizes the philosophical problems and explains how we can make scientific predictions about the consciousness of animals, brain-damaged patients and machines. Gamez interprets the scientific study of consciousness as a search for mathematical theories that map between measurements of consciousness and measurements of the physical world. We can use artificial intelligence to discover these theories and they could make accurate predictions about the consciousness of humans, animals and artificial systems. Human and Machine Consciousness also provides original insights into unusual conscious experiences, such as hallucinations, religious experiences and out-of-body states, and demonstrates how ‘designer’ states of consciousness could be created in the future. Gamez explains difficult concepts in a clear way that closely engages with scientific research. His punchy, concise prose is packed with vivid examples, making it suitable for the educated general reader as well as philosophers and scientists. Problems are brought to life in colourful illustrations and a helpful summary is given at the end of each chapter. The endnotes provide detailed discussions of individual points and full references to the scientific and philosophical literature.

What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano's theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.

The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. The intermediate stages are projected in the universal myths of the World Creation, Great Mother, Separation of the World Parents, Birth of the Hero, Slaying of the Dragon, Rescue of the Captive, and Transformation and Deification of the Hero. Throughout the sequence, the Hero is the evolving ego consciousness. Featuring a foreword by Jung, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and enduring work.

Neuroscience has made considerable progress in figuring out how the brain works. We know much about the molecular-genetic and biochemical underpinnings of sensory and motor functions. Recent neuroimaging work has opened the door to investigating the neural underpinnings of higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and even free will. In these types of investigations, researchers apply specific stimuli to induce neural activity in the brain and look for the function in question. However, there may be more to the brain and its neuronal states than the changes in activity we induce by applying particular external stimuli. In Volume 2 of Unlocking the Brain, Georg Northoff addresses consciousness by hypothesizing about the relationship between particular neuronal mechanisms and the various phenomenal features of consciousness. Northoff puts consciousness in the context of the resting state of the brain thereby delivering a new point of view to the debate that permits very interesting insights into the nature of consciousness. Moreover, he describes and discusses detailed findings from different branches of neuroscience including single cell data, animal data, human imaging data, and psychiatric findings. This yields a unique and novel picture of the brain, and will have a major and lasting impact on neuroscientists working in neuroscience, psychiatry, and related fields.

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.

This work presents a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public. Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments---illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics---Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe. Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science: from the origin of the Second Law of thermodynamics, to the development of complexity in biology, the computational limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, and the interplay between free will and determinism.

This book is the first to identify an interpretive path through Paleolithic cave art that can provide plausible meaning to the animal figures in the Lascaux cave in France. The artwork was created during a period described as the Creative Explosion, spanning from 35,000 to 11,000 BC. The author has found that the artists, or shamans, have left clear evidence of aspects of their worldview and by using ethological evidence, such as a bison shedding its winter coat to identify spring as the season portrayed in a specific panel, he adds a level of certainty to his interpretations. In sum, this book argues that the cave art describes the journey of the soul from the spirit world to the natural world and back, and that it identifies a spectrum of consciousness involving the five traditional senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. Moreover, the book explores the hunting strategies employed early survival groups which are depicted in the cave art. The role of the shamans’ impact on the artwork is also addressed.