Price: $50.00 - $40.00
(as of Feb 04, 2025 16:03:00 UTC – Details)
A neuroscientific perspective on the mind–body problem that focuses on how the brain actually accomplishes mental causation.
The issues of mental causation, consciousness, and free will have vexed philosophers since Plato. In this book, Peter Tse examines these unresolved issues from a neuroscientific perspective. In contrast with philosophers who use logic rather than data to argue whether mental causation or consciousness can exist given unproven first assumptions, Tse proposes that we instead listen to what neurons have to say.
Tse draws on exciting recent neuroscientific data concerning how informational causation is realized in physical causation at the level of NMDA receptors, synapses, dendrites, neurons, and neuronal circuits. He argues that a particular kind of strong free will and “downward” mental causation are realized in rapid synaptic plasticity. Such informational causation cannot change the physical basis of information realized in the present, but it can change the physical basis of information that may be realized in the immediate future. This gets around the standard argument against free will centered on the impossibility of self-causation. Tse explores the ways that mental causation and qualia might be realized in this kind of neuronal and associated information-processing architecture, and considers the psychological and philosophical implications of having such an architecture realized in our brains.
Publisher : The MIT Press; Reprint edition (August 21, 2015)
Language : English
Paperback : 472 pages
ISBN-10 : 0262528312
ISBN-13 : 978-0262528313
Reading age : 18 years and up
Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
Dimensions : 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
Customers say
Customers find the book insightful, creative, and scholarly. It contains new ideas about mental causation, free will, volitional attention, and the neural. They consider it innovative and novel. The style is described as elegant and simple, providing a new view of how we can simulate wholes.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews