Book Summaries
The Top Books about Consciousness
**The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes ** **Author(s)**: Donald D. Hoffman **First published:** 2019 How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? **The Ghost in the
**The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes **
Author(s): Donald D. Hoffman
First published: 2019
How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth?
The Ghost in the Machine
Author(s): Arthur Koestler
First published: 1990
Koestler examines the notion that the parts of the human brain-structure which account for reason and emotion are not fully coordinated.
Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research
Author(s): Stanislav Grof
First published: 2000
Summarizes Grof’s experiences and observations from more than forty years of research into non-ordinary states of consciousness.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Author(s): Julian Jaynes
First published: 1976
A 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.
Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited
Author(s): Marcel Kuijsten
First published: 2006
Why are gods and idols ubiquitous throughout the ancient world? What is the relationship of consciousness and language? How is it that oracles came to influence entire nations such as Greece?
A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness
Author(s): Nicholas Humphrey
First published: 1992
From the “phantom pain” experienced by people who have lost their limbs to the uncanny faculty of “blindsight,” Humphrey argues that raw sensations are central to all conscious states and that consciousness must have evolved, just like all other mental faculties, over time from our ancestors’ bodily responses to pain and pleasure.
**The Construction of Social Reality **
Author(s): John Rogers Searle
First published: 1995
How we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a ‘five-pound note’ with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch.
Mind: A Brief Introduction
Author(s): John Rogers Searle
First published: 2004
One of the world’s most eminent thinkers, Searle dismantles these theories as he presents a vividly written, comprehensive introduction to the mind.
The Mystery Of Consciousness
Author(s): John Rogers Searle
First published: 1990
John Searle writes, “the most important problem in the biological sciences”: What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body?
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Author(s): William James
First published: 1901
James elaborates a pluralistic framework in which “the divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions.
The Savage Mind
Author(s): Claude Lévi-Strauss
First published: 1962
An examination of the structure of the thought of primitive’ peoples, and has contributed significantly to our understanding of the way the human mind works.
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
Author(s): David J. Chalmers
First published: 1996
What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning?
The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind
Author(s): Michael S. Gazzaniga
First published: 2018
How do neurons turn into minds? How does physical “stuff”–atoms, molecules, chemicals, and cells–create the vivid and various worlds inside our heads?
Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
Author(s): Annaka Harris
First published: 2019
What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we?
Consciousness Explained
Author(s): Daniel C. Dennett
First published: 1991
Daniel Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence.
Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature
Author(s): Richard P. Bentall
First published: 2003
Is madness purely a medical condition that can be treated with drugs? Is there really a clear dividing line between mental health and mental illness – or is it not so easy to classify who is sane and who is insane?
Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
Author(s): Pim van Lommel
First published: 2007
Pim van Lommel shows that our consciousness does not always coincide with brain functions and that, remarkably and significantly, consciousness can even be experienced separate from the body.
Life After Life
Author(s): Raymond Moody
First published: 1975
Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything
Author(s): Bernardo Kastrup
First published: 2014
The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness.
The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics
Author(s): Roger Penrose
First published: 1989
Can a computer eventually do everything a human mind can do? In this absorbing and frequently contentious book, Roger Penrose–eminent physicist and winner, with Stephen Hawking, of the prestigious Wolf prize–puts forward his view that there are some facets of human thinking that can never be emulated by a machine.
**The Doors of Perception **
Author(s): Aldous Huxley
First published: 1954
A philosophical essay, released as a book, by Aldous Huxley. First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline.
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