The Consciousness Revolutions: From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation

ISBN-13: 9783031240119 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 226 str.

Shimon Edelman

Opis

This book is about all things consciousness, great and small. It starts by pointing to the key characteristic of consciousness, without realizing which it cannot be understood: like everything else about the mind, it is fundamentally a kind of computation. Among many other matters, this explains: how it is that we share some aspects of consciousness with bacteria; how it can arise in artificial machines and not just living ones; how the empty cocoon of the self that it spins ends up pretending to be the butterfly; and how consciousness dooms this virtual butterfly to the splendor and the suffering of being awake and aware. Unlike most other books on consciousness, this one includes a discussion of some possible ways whereby we, pinned like butterflies by our species’ history and socioeconomic circumstances, can awake to our collective predicament and join forces to do something about it. It should be of interest to all readers who care about the nature of our lived experience — and about our survival, which depends on developing critical consciousness of our dire situation and the social dynamics that shape it.

Spis treści

Part I THE HUMAN CONDITION 1

Prelude 

The story of Oh: a brief account of consciousness, from Amoeba to

Zoloft.

1 Selfless Consciousness 

Tower of power. The brain’s virtual reality. Identity theory. Computation

all the way down. No cognition without representation.

What makes representation special and how it can give rise to basic

phenomenal awareness. Stimulus and response and awareness and

zombies. Slipping into the future. Once again, with feeling. The

Gang of Four. Minimal consciousness. The first revolution.

Notes 

Further reading 

2 Minimal Selves 

Tired starlings. The web of cause and effect. Emergence: the effective

self as a local causal domain. Emergence and causality: Where

has all the physics gone? The self and others. The captive scapegoat

and the birth of tragedy. The second revolution.

Notes 

Further reading 

3 Self-consciousness 

Self-affirmation. Self-evidencing. Self-creation. Self-location and

perspective. Body ownership and agency. Free will. The self as a

good regulator. The self’s blankie. Subjectivity of self-models. Phenomenal

content and phenomenal affect. Virtual reality, real suffering.

The third revolution.

Notes

Further reading 

4 Speech and Sign 

The dawning of magic. A shared toolbox. Writing. Stories and culture.

Narrative selves. Power, persuasion, and propaganda. Manifesto

destiny. The fourth revolution.

Notes 

Further reading 

5 Self and Society

A beast or a god. The discovery of critical consciousness. Learning

freedom. Selves and collectives. Morality and cooperation.

Conscience and consciousness. The fifth revolution. The counterrevolution,

or: What Went Wrong.

Notes 

Further reading 

Part II THE ROADS TO FREEDOM 

Interlude 

At a crossroads.

6 Self-care 

Suffering: eliminable and not. Too much self, too little social. The

dance of life. The heart of a heartless world. Being and nothingness

and zombies. The science of getting help. The sixth revolution.

Notes 

Further reading

7 A World to Win 

The status quo. False consciousness and alienation. Critical consciousness:

coming to senses. Optimism of the will. Selves in society.

Armed love. The last revolution.

Notes 

Further reading

Epilogue 

The way out.

Index 

O autorze

Shimon Edelman holds degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science and is presently Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. Having worked and published in computer and human vision and motor control, language acquisition and evolution, computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, brain imaging, theoretical and computational neuroscience, and computational social science, he is now primarily interested in consciousness in all its manifestations: from the basic sentience of an amoeba to critical and class consciousness of human selves in their natural social settings. His most recent book is Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist's View of the Human Condition.