Self Comes to Mind continues a narrative that begins with Descartes Error (1994), continued with The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), and further developed by Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003). These books are meant to be accessible to the general public, but are also useful to those professionals and researchers, who are not neuroscientists, seeking a review of recent neuroscientific empirical developments and thinking concerning self and consciousness. These books summarizing one person's effort to capture the complex phenomena of self, consciousness and mind totally within the neurological processes of the central nervous system take their place in a large corpus of literature concerning self that is complex and sometimes difficult. “Few ideas are as weighty and as slippery as the notion of self,” to borrow Jerrold Seigel’s apt characterization in the introduction to his account of the western intellectual discussion of its varied and changing ideas of self, The Idea of the Self (Seigel, 2005, p. 3).
See Full PDF See Full PDFCross-species affective neuroscience is a new approach to understanding the mammalian BrainMind. 1 To achieve a coherent vision of foundational issues, the border between human and animal consciousness is intentionally blurred, especially at the primary-process level of organization (Table 1) — namely at the subcortical level — shared [1] I employ the terms BrainMind and MindBrain interchangeably, depending on desired emphasis, capitalized and without a space to highlight the monistic view of the brain as a unified experience-generating organ with no Cartesian dualities that have traditionally hindered scientific understanding.
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Journal of Consciousness Studies
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Philosophy of Education 2014
Although philosophers of education might contribute to addressing problematic mind-body dualisms in many ways, one way is to rethink cognition and learning by situating them more explicitly in a frame that brings together mind, brain, body, and environment. One such approach is an embodied understanding of cognition and learning. However, even this approach has largely neglected the nature and importance of affect and emotion. Even on an understanding of cognition as embodied sensorimotor coupling with the world, leaving out the emotions is at best incomplete. The emotions need to play a more central role in an embodied understanding of cognition and learning. The paper addresses that lack, arguing for the importance of affect and emotion in an embodied account of cognition. The problem is framed using Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis of emotion, arguing that it too remains dualist. The paper then draws on affective neuroscience for an account of basic emotions, on philosophy of biology for the idea that emotions gives humans a degree of detachment and inner freedom, and on phenomenology for the idea of humans as affectively experiencing subjects, to paint a less dualistic model. It ends with a discussion of one particular basic emotion, called seeking, and connects that to learning.
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In this paper, we argue for a stronger engagement between concepts in affective and social neuroscience on the one hand, and theories from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science and sociology on the other. Affective and social neuroscience could provide an additional assessment of social theories. We argue that some of the most influential social theories of the last four decades –rational choice theory, behavioral economics, and post-structuralism– contain assumptions that are inconsistent with key findings in affective and social neuroscience. We also show that another approach from the social sciences –plural rationality theory– shows greater compatibility with these findings. We further claim that, in their turn, social theories can strengthen affective and social neuroscience. The former can provide more precise formulations of the social phenomena that neuroscientific models have targeted, can help neuroscientists who build these models become more aware of their social and cultural biases, and can even improve the models themselves. To illustrate, we show how plural rationality theory can be used to further specify and test the somatic marker hypothesis. Thus, we aim to accelerate the much-needed merger of social theories with affective and social neuroscience.
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This paper presents current trends in philosophy of mind and philosophy of neuroscience, with a special focus on neuroscientists dealing with some topics usually discussed by philosophers of mind. The aim is to detect the philosophical views of those scientists, such as Eccles, Gazzaniga, Damasio, Changeux, and others, which are not easy to classify according to the standard divisions of dualism, functionalism, emergentism, and others. As the variety of opinions in these fields is sometimes a source of confusion, it is worth the effort to obtain an overall panorama of the topic. A general conclusion on epistemological and ontological issues, concerning the relationship between neurobiology and philosophy and the multi-level account of the embodied mind, is proposed.
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Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind
By rejecting dualisms and transcendent qualities of the mind promoted by philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes, Kant or Freud, in the late 1980s neuroscientists and philosophers began to define themselves as both materialists and monists. Publications like, for instance, Jean-Pierre Changeux’s "Neuronal Man" (1985), Antonio Damasio’s "Descartes’ Error" (1994) or Joseph LeDoux’s "Synaptic Self" (2002) incited a paradigm shift in the ways we think about the mind, finally bringing the studies of consciousness into the biological context (Nalbantian 2011, 3). Scientists, artists, writers, and philosophers alike began to inquire about the substrates of self-awareness, asking whether a gap really exists between what is natural and what is cultural. In my analysis I discuss Iain Banks’s ideas concerning the genesis and the function of consciousness. First, I focus on "The Player of Games"(1988), Banks’s early science-fiction novel, in order to argue that the Scottish writer perceives visceral sensations and affects as the building blocks of “higher,” autobiographical self-awareness. Then, I proceed to Banks’s early mainstream novel, "The Bridge" (1986), in order to explain why for Banks dreams are not the products of a Freudian unconscious, but an altered state of awareness. I examine how emotions and dreams promote the appearance of a mature, unified self, in order to illustrate Banks’s views on the characteristics of consciousness understood as the biological foundation of culture.
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Inheritance in Psychoanalysis
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Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience
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