By Jerome W. Elbert
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First tagged by Jerome W. Elbert
Customer tags: science, psychology, philosophy, personal transformation, consciousness
Review & Description
What would be the point of being alive without ever being conscious? Consciousness may be one’s most important asset, but people know little about it or how it is produced. While no book can explain everything about consciousness, this book reveals a great deal about what it is, how it is produced, and why it evolved.
The Unplanned Miracle of Consciousness treats consciousness as the result of ordinary physical and evolutionary processes. This book will furnish most readers with a new understanding of the neural mechanisms that shape our experiences, our behavior, and our nature. It shows how evolutionary factors influence our thoughts and feelings. What it says about the functions of awareness, feelings, and qualia will increase one’s understanding of what it is to be human.
This book applies evidence from neuroscience, psychology, biology, physics, and anthropology to such topics as color vision, emotions, motivations, and decision-making. Definitions and explanations are included to allow readers to understand special terms from various fields.
The book includes the following outstanding features:
1) It describes an awareness process in which consciousness emerges through the brain’s neural activity. This activity represents what is happening near a person or an advanced animal. Using inherited neural mechanisms and retrieving memories from similar, previous experiences, the awareness process collects information from all of one’s senses and memories, enabling it to select adaptive actions.
2) This book features a tour of the brain, highlighting functions handled in various regions. Regions involved in emotions, planning actions, and making decisions are identified. It focuses on biological mechanisms involved in sensing, learning, and the formation and retrieval of memories, which make important contributions to the awareness process.
3) It describes the features and adaptive roles of various emotions. Emotions motivate adaptive behavior and prepare the body for adaptive actions. We are feeling and caring organisms because of our inherited emotional mechanisms. The book’s discussions of motivations and decision making lead to a description of plausible versions of free will.
4) It discusses sensory perception and the properties of sensory experiences, emphasizing color vision. It is shown that the categories of hues reported by humans are not arbitrary, but are determined by the visual system’s structure. An enlightening chapter proposes reasons why colors appear the way they do.
5) It explores the nature of our sensory experiences and finds a role for “qualia,” the qualitative aspects of our sensory experiences. An example is the “redness” experienced when looking at an apple. It is proposed that qualia have the functional role of representing the identity of certain variables in our sensations and feelings. Thus, qualia may be essential for our awareness, playing a crucial role in our survival.
6) This book presents a novel description of how neural mechanisms produce the pleasantness and unpleasantness experienced in our pleasures and pains. This describes why it is like something (pleasant or unpleasant, in this case) to be an animal with an awareness system. Since it describes how neural mechanisms produce unpleasant feelings, it is an explanation of why pain hurts!
Jerome W. Elbert is a retired research professor. He has a Ph.D. in physics, with minors in mathematics and zoology.
What would be the point of being alive without ever being conscious? Consciousness may be one’s most important asset, but people know little about it or how it is produced. While no book can explain everything about consciousness, this book reveals a great deal about what it is, how it is produced, and why it evolved.
The Unplanned Miracle of Consciousness treats consciousness as the result of ordinary physical and evolutionary processes. This book will furnish most readers with a new understanding of the neural mechanisms that shape our experiences, our behavior, and our nature. It shows how evolutionary factors influence our thoughts and feelings. What it says about the functions of awareness, feelings, and qualia will increase one’s understanding of what it is to be human.
This book applies evidence from neuroscience, psychology, biology, physics, and anthropology to such topics as color vision, emotions, motivations, and decision-making. Definitions and explanations are included to allow readers to understand special terms from various fields.
The book includes the following outstanding features:
1) It describes an awareness process in which consciousness emerges through the brain’s neural activity. This activity represents what is happening near a person or an advanced animal. Using inherited neural mechanisms and retrieving memories from similar, previous experiences, the awareness process collects information from all of one’s senses and memories, enabling it to select adaptive actions.
2) This book features a tour of the brain, highlighting functions handled in various regions. Regions involved in emotions, planning actions, and making decisions are identified. It focuses on biological mechanisms involved in sensing, learning, and the formation and retrieval of memories, which make important contributions to the awareness process.
3) It describes the features and adaptive roles of various emotions. Emotions motivate adaptive behavior and prepare the body for adaptive actions. We are feeling and caring organisms because of our inherited emotional mechanisms. The book’s discussions of motivations and decision making lead to a description of plausible versions of free will.
4) It discusses sensory perception and the properties of sensory experiences, emphasizing color vision. It is shown that the categories of hues reported by humans are not arbitrary, but are determined by the visual system’s structure. An enlightening chapter proposes reasons why colors appear the way they do.
5) It explores the nature of our sensory experiences and finds a role for “qualia,” the qualitative aspects of our sensory experiences. An example is the “redness” experienced when looking at an apple. It is proposed that qualia have the functional role of representing the identity of certain variables in our sensations and feelings. Thus, qualia may be essential for our awareness, playing a crucial role in our survival.
6) This book presents a novel description of how neural mechanisms produce the pleasantness and unpleasantness experienced in our pleasures and pains. This describes why it is like something (pleasant or unpleasant, in this case) to be an animal with an awareness system. Since it describes how neural mechanisms produce unpleasant feelings, it is an explanation of why pain hurts!
Jerome W. Elbert is a retired research professor. He has a Ph.D. in physics, with minors in mathematics and zoology.
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