Don't know how this hasn't made it to my read it shelf yet. This book is quite a good read. Really helped me understand how out conscious and subconscious work together and how evolutionarily we have arrived where we are and also how primal even the most basic reactions of our self to the environment is. Knowing that Neuroscience is still in its infancy it makes me excited to think of what will come in the future. While it is certainly well written in parts, I struggle to understand some of the praise lavished on this book, since it exhibits the conceptual problems so beset by neuroscientific studies of this type. What is particularly remarkable is the failure of the author to acknowledge the dualist metaphysical elements on which his ideas are founded, probably because it sits so uneasily with his faith in the power of natural science to tackle every question about us.To illustrate this point, let me take the author's definition of consciousness in the first chapter: "...A mind endowed with subjectivity, without which you would have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone who you are and what you think". This would be reasonable except that it fails to give due weight to another key feature of consciousness, namely that we are aware of our bodies and an external world outside of our minds. He only mentions this in passing, and this omission necessarily dictates the primary question that he poses: How does the brain construct a mind and consciousness? The inherent dualism here is obvious, and explains the sophistry of the section "overcoming a misleading intuition"; why the mind thinks it is non-physical. One can reasonably ask what grounds there are for setting up this postulated entity `mind' at all, if not on intuitive non-scientific grounds? Secondly, how can we know that there is an external world including brains, if we have no primitive awareness of this fact? Thirdly, how do we have awareness of the neural patterns that are supposed to form mental representations of this world? How are 'we' (whoever that is) supposed to 'observe' them, and why should we have any more awareness of these physical events than we have of the workings of our stomachs? It is certainly hard to see how they help to furnish us with a sense of time, learning or memory that the author (plausibly) claims are foundations of the self. Until neuroscience is able to adequately address how we have awareness of the world in all its qualitative richness (something there must be serious doubts it has the facility to do), it can have no real purchase on the problem of consciousness. I concede that the author does not go so far as to claim that he can explain consciousness. Nevertheless, my contention is that his philosophical preconceptions profoundly shape his scientific hypotheses.
What do You think about O Livro Da Consciência (2010)?
don't get the audio book it will put you to sleep.
—gwizzy21
Studying the self feels kind of self-indulgent.
—shelby12345
