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Consciousness, 'the last great mystery for science', has now become a hot topic. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are opening up debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories using illustrations, lively cartoons, and experiments.Topics include vision and attention, theories of self and will, experiments on action and awareness, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of brain damage and drugs.
[...]... changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness For example, drugs that affect brain function also affect subjective experiences; stimulation of small areas of the brain can induce specific experiences such as hallucinations, physical sensations, or emotional reactions; and damage to the brain can drastically affect a person’s state of consciousness This much we know for sure, but what remains a. .. be that A and B are actually 21 The human brain On the objective side, pain happens when, for example, the body is injured Various chemical changes take place at the site of the injury and then signals pass along specialized neurons called C-fibres to the spinal cord, and from there to the brain stem, thalamus, somatosensory cortex (which includes a map of all the areas of the body), and cingulate cortex... fundamental but must then explain why and how there appears to be a consistent physical world Neutral monists reject dualism but disagree about the fundamental nature of the world and how to unify it A third option is materialism and this is by far the most popular among scientists today Materialists take matter as fundamental, but they must then face the problem that this book is all about How do you account... cause the pain, in which case we have to solve the hard problem Maybe the pain causes the physical changes, in which case we need a supernatural theory Maybe something else causes both, in which case we have no idea what Or maybe they are really the same thing Many materialists have argued for this last explanation, but if it is true we have absolutely no idea how it could be true How could this awful,... were real, but recent research has confirmed the prevalence and stability of the effects Synaesthetes may have more connections between the different sensory areas of the brain, and Ramachandran argues that since numbers and colour are processed in adjacent areas this might explain the most common form of synaesthesia The neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) Everyone has experienced pain Pain is... understand how this feeling of being a conscious self having a stream of experiences comes about in a brain that really has no inner theatre, no show, and no audience Dennett coined the term ‘Cartesian materialist’ to describe those scientists who claim to reject dualism but still believe in the Cartesian theatre Note that both these terms, Cartesian theatre and Cartesian materialism, are Dennett’s and... arise from objective brains? That is, they emit rapid bursts of high-pitched squeaks while they fly and then, by analysing the echoes that come back to their sensitive ears, learn about the world around them What is it like to experience the world this way? It is no good imagining that you are a bat because an educated, speaking bat would not be a normal bat at all; conversely, if you became a normal... Descartes’ Few, if any, scientists admit to being Cartesian materialists Yet, as we shall see, the vast majority assume something like a stream of consciousness, or treat the mind as an inner theatre They may, of course, be right, and if they are, then the task of a science of consciousness is to explain what that metaphorical theatre corresponds to in the brain and how it works But I rather doubt that... later results of that processing But the fundamental problem remains We have no idea at all what it means to say that some computations are ‘qualia-laden’, or that consciousness is ‘generated’ in one brain area rather than another When we have found the relevant brain cells, we must still ask – How? Why? What is the magic difference? How can some cells give rise to subjective experiences and some not? Consciousness... the brain Brain scans show that there is a strong correlation between the amount of pain experienced and the amount of activity in these areas In other words, we understand some of the neural correlates of pain the same thing even though they do not appear to be (like water and H2O, or the morning star and the evening star) Consciousness Which is the case with pain? Maybe the physical changes cause . now: ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY. DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes ART HISTORY Dana Arnold ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY