Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano
In reviewing Consciousness And The Social Brain, By Michael Graziano, currently you may not additionally do conventionally. In this contemporary era, device as well as computer will certainly assist you a lot. This is the time for you to open up the gizmo and also remain in this website. It is the ideal doing. You can see the connect to download this Consciousness And The Social Brain, By Michael Graziano here, can not you? Merely click the link as well as make a deal to download it. You could reach acquire guide Consciousness And The Social Brain, By Michael Graziano by on the internet and all set to download and install. It is really different with the conventional means by gong to the book establishment around your city.
Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano
Best Ebook PDF Online Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano
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. Now in an affordable paperback edition!
Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano- Amazon Sales Rank: #391570 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-14
- Released on: 2015-09-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.50" h x .80" w x 8.20" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review "The author offers an engaging and accessible explanation of his theory. Rather than merely touting its merits, he aims to show how it is compatible with other popular theories. Avoiding technical details, he uses anecdotes, drawings, and metaphors to convey an understanding of the important concepts. [This book] turns the field's contemporary wisdom on its head, and from its new vantage point one has the sense that an answer to the problem of consciousness might be in sight. Graziano's attention schema theory marks a milestone by offering a plausible, mechanistic answer to the hard problem." --Aaron Schurger, Science Magazine
"Graziano proposes a new and intriguing theory of consciousness... [He] guides readers step-by-step through his captivating and convincing theory of consciousness, explaining how the theory accounts for many oddities in human perception. This book is an essential read for anyone interested in consciousness from either a scientific or philosophical perspective." --Library Journal"In most scientific theories, awareness emerges from the physical functioning of the brain, almost like heat rising from circuits. Laid out in his recent book...Graziano's theory takes a completely different approach to explaining consciousness. 'In this theory, the brain is an information-processing device. It doesn't produce non-physical essences -- it computes information,' Graziano said. Graziano has given consciousness a more solid footing in the real, tangible world even if it remains a creation of the brain, Schurger said. 'If anything, his theory stands to demystify consciousness, in the same way that our understanding of genetics and self-organizing systems has begun to demystify 'life,' which was once thought to depend on an unseen force.'" --Morgan Kelly, Princeton University News"There are many rewards to this text... Graziano's work is in important step in bridging a persistent gap between mind and brain in interdisciplinary research, notably because he attempts to answer the questions that require asking, and he does so with a remarkable level of humility." --MetapsychologyAbout the Author Michael S. A. Graziano, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Princeton University, is an internationally renowned scientist and an award-winning novelist. His books include the popular science title God, Soul, Mind, Brain and the short novels The Divine Farce, The Love Song of Monkey, and Death My Own Way.
Where to Download Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano
Most helpful customer reviews
40 of 45 people found the following review helpful. Clear, Methodical, and Original By Steven H. Clason Graziano, a Psychologist and Neuroscientist at Princeton, here carefully and methodically lays out his argument that consciousness, rather than being an epiphenomenon, an emergent phenomenon or some ethereal, immaterial thing, is instead a straightforward (though complex) brain function.His theory is easily summarized -- he does it himself 8 pages in (total spoiler, gives the whole story away):"The brain does two things that are of particular importance to the present theory. First, the brain uses a method that most neuroscientists call attention. Lacking the resources to processes everything at the same time, the brain focuses its processing on a very few items at any one time. Attention is a data-handling trick for deeply processing some information at the expense of most information. Second, the brain uses internal data to construct simplified, schematic models of objects and events in the world. Those models can be used to make predictions, try out simulations, and plan actions. What happens when the brain inevitably combines those two talents? In the theory outlined in this book, awareness is the brain's simplified, schematic model of the complicated, data-handling process of attention."The rest of the book explains and supports this theory in great detail. He doesn't evade obviously controversial issues, like where religion and spirituality fit in to this scheme or whether or not other creatures possess consciousness, and he places the development of consciousness as an adaptive feature of human evolution, important for our development into a deeply social animal, and now important for additional reasons.Graziano's frequent repetition of the fundamental ideas might put some people off, but, not being anything like an expert on the subject matter I found that the frequent guideposts prevented my getting lost in unfamiliar intellectual terrain.I haven't a clue about the scientific value of his claims, but I recommend the book for its fresh approach to the "problem" of consciousness and for the care and grace with which the author makes his case.In the Kindle version, you should be warned, some footnotes are difficult to access because the author often cites supporting documents in bulk, like "[15-18]" referring to footnote numbers 15 though 18. Numbers 16 and 17 would be hard to read, in this case.
48 of 58 people found the following review helpful. Best book about consciousness I've read By Brian Hines I'm a neuroscientific-book addict. I've read lots of them. Graziano's book is the best one I've come across. Clearest. Best-written. Most convincing.Over and over, I found myself saying "yes, yes, yes." Yet not, as Graziano notes in several places, without some disturbing underlying feelings behind those "yes's." His theory that awareness is information concerning a sketch of the brain's attention processes goes against our subjective intuition that consciousness is, if not other-worldly, something mysterious -- the well-known Hard Problem.Well, maybe. But this book persuasively argues that the problem is simpler than it appears. Philosophers, mystics, scientists, and others have assumed that consciousness has certain characteristics, then they try to explain how those characteristics come to be. I find Graziano's approach refreshingly creative and out-of-the box.Awareness is information. So is consciousness. The information available to awareness does not contain all of the neurological facts, as these are unnecessary for effective functioning in everyday life.Here's one of my favorite quotes: "Consciousness is composed of information that says, in effect, 'This information is not information'...The brain has constructed a model of something, a picture painted in the medium of information. The model is not terribly accurate."Brilliant. A word I kept saying about Graziano as I read his book.Again, I've read many books dealing with consciousness and how the brain works. Usually I get to the last page feeling like I've been exposed to a lot of facts, most of which I'll quickly forget, but few insights into how seemingly immaterial consciousness/awareness relates to physical goings-on in the brain.In contrast, "Consciousness and the Social Brain" left me feeling like a window had been opened on a whole new way of looking upon myself, other people, and reality as a whole. There are still curtains over that window. Graziano's theory isn't close to being universally, or even widely, accepted. But personally, I have no problem with the book's contention that I have as much consciousness as a puppet does. (Read the book to learn why this is true.)Or, as God does. I much appreciated the next to last chapter, "Some Spiritual Matters." Graziano holds a view of religion and spirituality that makes excellent sense. He accepts two simultaneous truths:"One, literally and objectively, there is no spirit world. Minds do not float independently of bodies and brains. Two, perceptually, there is a spirit world. We live in a perceptual world, a world simulated by the brain, in which consciousness inhabits many things around us, including sometimes empty space."
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful. The First Sensible Neuroscientific Elucidation of Consciousness By Max Hoiland "Consciousness Explained" might have been a more accurate title for this book, but it was already taken.Author Michael Graziano's previous research in neuroscience is on the body schema and the motor cortex, which makes him an unlikely candidate for cracking open a new perspective on the hard nut of consciousness. But just as the motor cortex controls and directs our movements, there's the sense that consciousness controls and directs our thoughts.The theory in brief: Attention itself is our automatic ability to focus on one or two aspects of our environment at a time so that our cognitive capacity is not overloaded by trying to focus on everything around us at once. To be able to control something, in this case what we mentally are attending to at any moment, we need a representation of that thing. As our mental representation of our body helps us control our body movements, our mental representation of our attention helps us control our attention. What we pay attention to is crucial for not only carrying out simple tasks but also for high-level and long-term planning. So we need some kind of mechanism for controlling our attention in order to carry out complex tasks in a complex world. And voila, the representation of attention facilitates this control and is what we experience as consciousness.The theory isn't complicated, but it is rather abstract. Reading summaries or reviews of it will probably not make it seem convincing or even immediately comprehensible, but the book lays out all of the parts and shows how they fit together to create a coherent mechanism that we call consciousness. After the basic ideas are grasped, the theory is quite simple, as all good and far-reaching scientific theories are.A major strength of the book is how Graziano places his ideas in the context of other contending theories. While his framework for explaining consciousness is novel, his theory incorporates many of the insights of existing rival theories, like the integrated information hypothesis and various social theories of consciousness. The integrated info hypothesis makes sense in light of how when we attend to an object, our representation of that object appears to be integrated; its shape, color, texture, and location are not separate but tied together in our consciousness. Social theories of consciousness focus on how our consciousness is bound up with the stories we insert ourselves into in order to make sense of our relations with other people and our physical environment. But while both of those theories on their own seem to only each account for partial aspects of how we experience and study consciousness, Graziano's account integrates them so that they plug each other's theoretical gaps.Graziano discusses the neuroscience of the theory, including how and which brain areas are involved. He also examines the philosophical questions at stake, like those relating to free will and qualia, aka the sensation of 'being' conscious. Perhaps the highest praise for this part of the book is that two of the most prominent philosophers of consciousness, Patricia Churchland and Dan Dennett, have come out in support of Graziano's theory.If there was one bone that got stuck in my chops, it would be that the main terms themselves can mean so many different things that occasional passages seemed ambiguous in the broad theoretical sketch contained in the early chapters. However, in the middle of the book he defines his terms more fully and the ambiguity disappears. One wonders whether those fuller definitions could have come earlier or if they were necessarily postponed for the sake of giving an initial big-picture view.Consciousness is something many have strong intuitions about because of its centrality to our experience as experience--a property that seems to not merely belong to us but to define us. This book is for those, not everyone, who are curious about consciousness as a phenomena that is in principle susceptible to philosophical and neuroscientific understanding.
See all 39 customer reviews... Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael GrazianoConsciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano PDF
Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano iBooks
Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano ePub
Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano rtf
Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano AZW
Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar