Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's PrivacyCan consciousness and the human mind be understood and explained in sheerly physical terms? Materialism is a philosophical/scientific theory, according to which the mind is completely physical. This theory has been around for literally thousands of years, but it was always stymied by its inability to explain how exactly mere matter could do the amazing things the mind can do. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a revolution began quietly boiling away in the neurosciences, yielding increasingly detailed theories about how the brain might accomplish consciousness. Nevertheless, a fundamental obstacle remains. Contemporary research techniques seem to still have the scientific observer of the conscious state locked out of the sort of experience the subjects themselves are having. Science can observe, stimulate, and record events in the brain, but can it ever enter the most sacred citadel, the mind? Can it ever observe the most crucial properties of conscious states, the ones we are aware of? If it can't, this creates a problem. If conscious mental states lack a basic feature possessed by all other known physical states, i.e., the capability to be observed or experienced by many people, this give us reason to believe that they are not entirely physical. In this intriguing book, William Hirstein argues that it is indeed possible for one person to directly experience the conscious states of another, by way of what he calls mindmelding. This would involve making just the right connections in two peoples' brains, which he describes in detail. He then follows up the many other consequences of the possibility that what appeared to be a wall of privacy can actually be breached. Drawing on a range of research from neuroscience and psychology, and looking at executive functioning, mirror neuron work, as well as perceptual phenomena such as blind-sight and filling-in, this book presents a highly original new account of consciousness. |
Contents
1 The impasse | 1 |
2 An alternative framework | 19 |
3 The brain and its cortex | 30 |
4 Consciousness | 56 |
5 Preparing representations | 71 |
6 Executive processes | 87 |
7 Sense of self | 113 |
8 The reality and importance of the executive self | 134 |
10 Mindtalk | 165 |
11 Disentangling self and consciousness | 190 |
12 Representation and consciousness | 216 |
13 The mind and its care | 242 |
References | 253 |
273 | |
279 | |
9 Sharing conscious states | 148 |
Other editions - View all
Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy William Hirstein Limited preview - 2012 |
Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy William Hirstein No preview available - 2012 |
Common terms and phrases
actions amygdala argue attention aware Baars behavior believe binding blind spot Brodmann areas causal relations causally interact Chapter cingulate claim Clark Kent cognitive color concept connections conscious representations cortical areas Crick and Koch Dennett emotions executive processes exist experience false fasciculus folk psychology frontal function gyrus higher-order homunculus homunculus fallacy hypothesis idea imagine inhibition input inseparability introspection involve Lois Lane medial memory mental image mental representations metaphysical mind mindmelding mindreading modalities multimodal areas neural neurons normal notional level nuclei objects one’s orbitofrontal cortex pain Pandya parietal lobes patients perceive perception person Petrides philosophers physical posterior prefrontal areas prefrontal cortex prefrontal executive prefrontal lobes problem produce property instances psychological qualia represent scientists Searle self-representations sense sensory sentence sort stimuli superior temporal temporal lobes thalamic theory things thought tion uncinate fasciculus understand unified ventral stream visual field Wittgenstein