The conscious mind

Resource Information

The work The conscious mind represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The conscious mind

Statement of responsibility

Zoltan L. Torey

Creator

• Torey, Zoltan

Author

• Torey, Zoltan

Subject

• Brain
• Brain
• COGNITIVE SCIENCES/General
• COGNITIVE SCIENCES/Psychology/Cognitive Psychology
• Central Nervous System
• Cognition
• Cognition
• Consciousness
• Consciousness
• Electronic books
• Mental Processes
• Nervous System
• PSYCHOLOGY -- Cognitive Psychology
• Psychiatry and Psychology
• Psychological Phenomena
• Psychological Phenomena and Processes
• Psychology
• Psychophysiology
• SCIENCE -- Cognitive Science
• Social Sciences
• Anatomy
• Bewustzijn

Genre

• Electronic books

Language

eng

Summary

• An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech
• "How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary breakthrough that created the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent mind--a new ('off-line') internal response system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's 'awareness' became self-accessible and reflective--that is, how the human brain acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues, as free will. Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to emerge--because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired 'quality, ' 'cosmic principle, ' 'circuitry arrangement, ' or 'epiphenomenon, ' as others have argued, but an indispensable working component of the living system's manner of functioning"--MIT CogNet

Member of

• MIT Press essential knowledge series

Cataloging source

N$T

Dewey number

153

Index

index present

Language note

English

LC call number

BF311

LC item number

.T6548 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

NLM call number

• 2016 D-492
• BF 311

Series statement

The MIT Press essential knowledge series