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How does the conscious mind relate to the physical body? Two common views from the past offered the stark choice between dualism which said mind and body were quite separate and physicalism which said that the mind was in fact 'nothing but' the physical brain. Both these views are now widely rejected. 'Emergence' theory offers a compromise: the mind 'emerges' from the physical body but the whole person, mind and body, is more than the sum of the physical parts. In The Emergence of Consciousness philosopher Robert Van Gulick gives a clear and masterly overview and comparison of the...

Once the domain of philosophers, the study of consciousness is now an exciting branch of science. Author Anthony Freeman, managing editor of the "Journal of Consciousness Studies," opens "Consciousness" with a history of mind study, from the ancient Greeks to the present, and provides a multidisciplinary review of cognitive science. Freeman untangles the conflicting theories on the working of the brain, analyzing the techniques developed for its study over the years.

"Seeing" v. "believing," mind/body connections, zombies, and assembly line robots are just the beginning. Even chaos...

Rupert Sheldrake outraged the scientific establishment in the early 1980s with his hypothesis of morphic resonance: his book A New Science of Life was denounced by the journal Nature as 'the best candidate for burning there has been for many years'. With his academic career torpedoed, Sheldrake has become the champion of 'the people's science'. Books such as Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At have won him popular acclaim and academic opprobrium in equal measure. In this special issue of the Journal of...

What is it for you to be conscious? To be conscious now, for instance, of the room you are in? Theories on offer divide into just two categories, labelled by Ted Honderich as devout physicalism and spiritualism. The first reduces consciousness to no more than the physical, while the second takes it out of space and into mystery. But none of the proposed solutions has worked convincingly, and the reason, according to Honderich, lies in the persistent and resilient human belief that consciousness really is different. Hence his new theory of Radical Externalism, set out here and then...

God In Us is a radical representation of the Christian faith for the 21st century. Following the example of the Old Testament prophets and the first-century Christians it overturns received ideas about God. God is not an invisible person 'out there' somewhere, but lives in the human heart and mind as 'the sum of all our values and ideals' guiding and inspiring our lives. This new updated edition includes a foreword by Bishop John Shelby Spong and an afterword from the author.

At the heart of the parapsychology (psi) battle are two types of phenomena: extra-sensory perception (ESP) and psycho-kinesis (PK). ESP is reception of information without any normal sensory means; PK is the use of the mind to influence physical states without any direct physical contact. Neither effect can be explained by ordinary science, so parapsychologists with experimental evidence that they are real are accused of bad science or bad faith or both. This collection of essays shows that a simple division into 'sceptics' and 'believers' cannot be made. The real struggle, for all...

For the last five years philosopher Galen Strawson has provoked a mixture of shock and scepticism with his carefully argued case that physicalism (the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical) entails panpsychism (the view that the existence of every real concrete thing involves experiential being). In this book Strawson provides the fullest and most careful statement of his position to date, throwing down the gauntlet to his critics -- including Peter Carruthers, Frank Jackson, David Rosenthal and J.J.C. Smart -- by inviting them to respond in print. The book...