Scientific Approaches to Consciousness (Carnegie Mellon Symposia on Cognition)

Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource
Review: I quoted quite a bit of this book in "The Secret Sales Pitch," particularly:

Reber's comments on the evolution of consciousness,
Kihlstrom's chapter on multiple personalities, and
Mandler's observations that the conscious mind is a serial processor whereas the unconscoius can process many things simulataneously.
Ironically, Greenwald and Draine concluded "Subliminal techniques of the sort now used in laboratory research COULD POSSIBLY be developed for use in mass media to produce signficant influences on behavior." (emphasis added.)

I enjoyed reading it, and, if your are interested in this subject, I am sure you will too.


Rating:
Summary: Great addition to the consciousness literature.
Review: THis book is a great collection of papres, straightfowardly focused on scientific issues in consicousness studies. Implicit (unconscious) influences, attention, consicousness and higher cognition are all given space mostly in the diciplines of neuroscience and cognitive science. Like most edited volumes, not every paper is groundbreaking nor incredibly interesting. Some material might also have been published (content wise) somewhere else. BUt as it is also usual, some papers are really brilliant.

The introduction is adequate, and the second section is brilliant. Jacoby et al propose that conscious and unconsicous influences in cognition are independent of each other. Shriffin argues that equating unnconsicous with automatic and consicous with controled is an oversim plification. Shneider et al propose a cognitive processing control funtion for consicousness. IN section four, Rebers paper clearly stands out, and it is quite good. Section five has some great speculation into the meta-cognitive aspect of consicousness. Section six is also great. Kinsbourne claims that consicousness arises from any neural circuit that has certain properties, like activation, duration and congruence of activity. Farah raise some interesting insight into the neural bases of consicousness that arise from cases of prosopagnosia. Hobsons paper deals with the neuromodulatory role of certain chemicals in consicous states. Section seven is more philosophically inclined. Flanagan presents his idea of a science of consciousness and Baars his workspace model. Herbert A. Simon concludes with a very interesting paper on the issues in the science of consicousness.

In closing, this book is quite complete, and more scientifically inclined than other collections. IT should interest anyone interested in consciousnes studies.