The Science of the Soul - On Consciousness and the Structure of Reality
Numerous books have been published over the past few decades on the subject of the apparent similarities between Eastern philosophy and the ideas of the "New Physics.
Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities.
This collection of essays is driven by the question of how we know what we know, and in particular how we can be certain about something even when we know it is an illusion. The contention of the book is that this age-old question has acquired a new urgency as certain trends in science, technology and ideas have taken the discussion of consciousness out of the philosophy department and deposited it in the world at large.
At two-thirty in the morning of June 6, 1998, Whitley Streiber was awakened by somebody knocking on his hotel room door. A man came in, and everything he said was life-altering. This is the unsettling and ultimately enlightening narrative of what happened that night. Strieber was never really sure who this strange and knowing visitor was--a "Master of Wisdom"? A figure from a different realm of consciousness? A preternaturally intelligent being? He called him the Master of the Key. The one thing of which Strieber was certain is that both the man and the encounter were real.
Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing
Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech as well as written fiction and nonfiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages, such as the historical present and the free indirect style.
