An introduction and summary of "Consciousness Explained" By Daniel C. Dennett 1991In Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett reveals the secrets of one of the last remaining mysteries of the universe: the human brain.Daniel C. Dennett's now-classic book blends philosophy, psychology and neuroscience - with the aid of numerous examples and thought-experiments - to explore how consciousness has evolved, and how a modern understanding of the human mind is radically different from conventional...

An introduction and summary of "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future" By Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel P. Huttenlocher 2021"An A.I. that learned to play chess discovered moves that no human champion would have conceived of. Driverless cars edge forward at red lights, just like impatient humans, and so far, nobody can explain why it happens. Artificial intelligence is being put to use in sports, medicine, education, and even (frighteningly) how we wage war. In this book, three of our...

An introduction and summary of "The Laws of Human Nature" By Robert Greene 2018"From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations,...

An introduction and summary of "The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition" By Kristin Andrews 2020The philosophy of animal minds addresses profound questions about the nature of mind and the relationships between humans and other animals.In this fully revised and updated introductory text, Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems, and debates as they cut across animal cognition and philosophy of mind, citing historical and...

An introduction and summary of "Understanding the Representational Mind" By Josef Perner 1991A model of writing in cognitive development, Understanding the Representational Mind synthesizes the burgeoning literature on the child's theory of mind to provide an integrated account of children's understanding of representational and mental processes, which is crucial in their acquisition of our commonsense psychology.Perrier describes experimental work on children's acquisition of a theory of...

An introduction and summary of "Phenomenology of Perception" By Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1945Phenomenology of Perception is a 1945 book about perception by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the author expounds his thesis of "the primacy of perception". The work established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of French existentialism.Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty attempts to reveal the phenomenological structure of...

An introduction and summary of "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI" By Ethan Mollick 2024From Wharton professor and author of the popular One Useful Thing Substack newsletter Ethan Mollick comes the definitive playbook for working, learning, and living in the new age of AISomething new entered our world in November 2022 — the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the kinds of creative, innovative work that only humans could do previously. Wharton professor Ethan...

An introduction and summary of "The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of Emotional Life" By Michael Lewis 2013 Synthesizing decades of influential research and theory, Michael Lewis demonstrates the centrality of consciousness for emotional development. At first, infants' competencies constitute innate reactions to particular physical events in the child's world. These "action patterns" are not learned, but are readily influenced by temperament and social interactions. With the rise...

An introduction and summary of "The Conscious Mind" By Zoltan Torey 2014 An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech. How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series,...

An introduction and summary of "Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion" By William Fish 2009The idea of a disjunctive theory of visual experiences first found expression in J.M. Hinton's pioneering 1973 book Experiences. In the first monograph in this exciting area since then, William Fish develops a comprehensive disjunctive theory, incorporating detailed accounts of the three core kinds of visual experience--perception, hallucination, and illusion--and an explanation of how perception and...

An introduction and summary of "Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind" By Paul Churchland 1979 A study in the philosophy of science, proposing a strong form of the doctrine of scientific realism' and developing its implications for issues in the philosophy of mind. 'This is a very ambitious book. Beginning with the premise of scientific realism (explained clearly in the first six pages), Churchland aims at little less than a 'transvaluation of all values'. If some of Churchland's...

An introduction and summary of "Transparency and Self-knowledge" By Alex Byrne 2018 Alex Byrne sets out and defends a theory of self-knowledge-knowledge of one's mental states. Inspired by Gareth Evans' discussion of self-knowledge in his The Varieties of Reference, the basic idea is that one comes to know that one is in a mental state M by an inference from a worldly or environmental premise to the conclusion that one is in M. (Typically the worldly premise will not be about anything...

In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientist Jared Diamond, author of Gun, Germs, and Steel, explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it. We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet--having founded civilizations and...

An introduction and summary of "Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering" By Malcolm Gladwell 2024 Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do elite universities care so much about...

An introduction and summary of "Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-person Perspective" By Dan Zahavi 2005 What is a self? Does it exist in reality or is it a mere social construct -- or is it perhaps a neurologically induced illusion? The legitimacy of the concept of the self has been questioned by both neuroscientists and philosophers in recent years. Countering this, in Subjectivity and Selfhood, Dan Zahavi argues that the notion of self is crucial for a proper...

An introduction and summary of "Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI" By Yuval Noah Harari 2024 For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For...

Soon after Charles Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, primate cognition became a major area of research. In this book, Michael Tomasello and Josep Call assess the current state of our knowledge about the cognitive skills of non-human primates. They integrate empirical findings on the topic from the beginning of the century to the present, placing this research in theoretical perspective. They begin with an examination of the way primates adapt to their physical world, mostly for the...

An introduction and summary of "The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us about the Nature of Human Thought" By Peter Carruthers 2015 The Centered Mind offers a new view of the nature and causal determinants of both reflective thinking and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working-memory system. This system has been much studied by cognitive scientists. It...

Shaun Gallagher offers an account of psychopathologies as disorders of the self. The Self and its Disorders develops an interdisciplinary approach to an 'integrative' perspective in psychiatry. In contrast to some integrative approaches that focus on narrow brain-based conceptions, or on symptomology, this book takes its bearings from embodied and enactive conceptions of human experience. Gallagher offers an understanding of the self as a pattern of processes that include bodily,...

An introduction and summary of "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" By Nick Bostrom 2014 The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate...

An introduction and summary of "The Evolution of Consciousness: Representing the Present Moment" By Paula Droege 2022 The Evolution of Consciousness brings together interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science to explain consciousness in terms of the biological function that grounds it in the physical world. Drawing on the novel analogy of a house of cards, Paula Droege pieces together various conceptual questions and shows how they rest on each...

An introduction and summary of "Self and World" By Quassim Cassam 1997 Self and World is an exploration of the nature of self-awareness. Quassim Cassam challenges the widespread and influential view that we cannot be introspectively aware of ourselves as objects in the world. In opposition to the views of many empiricist and idealist philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein, he argues that the self is not systematically elusive from the perspective of self-consciousness, and that...

An introduction and summary of "On the Genealogy of Morality" By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1887 On The Genealogy of Morals is made up of three essays, all of which question and critique the value of our moral judgments based on a genealogical method whereby Nietzsche examines the origins and meanings of our different moral concepts. The first essay, "'Good and Evil,' 'Good and Bad'" contrasts what Nietzsche calls "master morality" and "slave morality." Master morality was developed by the...

An introduction and summary of "The Evolution of Agency Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans" By Michael Tomasello 2022 A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to human psychological agency. Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue...

An introduction and summary of "Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology" By Jean-Paul Sartre 1943 First published in French in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant is one of the greatest philosophical works of the twentieth century. In it, Sartre offers nothing less than a brilliant and radical account of the human condition. The English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote to a friend of "the excitement – I remember nothing like it since the days of...