Rezensionen und Bibliografien zum Bewusstsein, zusammengestellt von Herbert Huber.

An article by Oliver Sacks in The New York Review of Books worth reading— abd if it's only because Borges is mentioned in the first and last sentence.

Looking at the visual system, as Crick and Koch do, I feel quite convinced, that consciousness might work with discontinous elements. But what about auditive perception? Do we really dissect melodies in parts to hear them? Hard to imagine.

Das Netz der Persönlichkeit. Wie unser Selbst entsteht von Joseph LeDoux (Walter, 2003) (via Perlentaucher)

Klappentext: “Seine provokante These: Unsere Synapsen sind es, über die Gefühle und Erinnerungen, Denken und Handeln sich herausbilden und die so die Entstehung der Persönlichkeit maßgeblich bestimmen.” Mein Gott, die Synapsen! (1) Wer fühlt sich dadurch provoziert? (2) Wieso verwechselt der Klappentextautor These mit Tatsache? (3) Antithese: Es sind nicht die Synapsen, sondern die Nieren. Das wussten schon die Griechen. Oder war des die Milz?

Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore (Hodder and Stoughton / Oxford University Press, 2003)

A review by Ilya Farber in Nature. Sounds interesting.

in the New Scientist. (mostly boring)

Being No One / The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity by Thomas Metzinger (MIT Press, 2003) reviewed in Science by Franz Mechsner and Albert Newen:

Unsatisfied with the Cartesian framework, scientists try to explain human self-consciousness as a natural phenomenon. This “naturalization project” is guided by the complex question: How may conscious selfhood (subjective experience and autonomous agency) emerge from causal chains of events in a physical world? In Being No One, the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger addresses this challenge and proposes a framework of how self-consciousness might be naturalized.

“How the late philosopher Donald Davidson showed that reality can't be an illusion” by Richard Rorty. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Thomas C. Grubb, Jr. : The Mind of the Trout.
A Cognitive Ecology for Biologists and Anglers. (Univ of Wisconsin Pr, June 2003)

How and why do trout think? How do they decide where to eat and which food to eat? Why do they refuse to behave as predicted, stumping anglers by rejecting a larger fly for a smaller one or not responding at all to anything in an angler's box?


(Mind the dogs.)