Book opinions

I still have this type of nightmare: I’m back at the university, I’m at the exam, I get the question, and I realize that I know nothing about the topic; I didn’t understand it during lectures, and I couldn’t understand it with self-study. I’m terrified. The topic is ‘representational theory of mind’. I wake up from fear, and I decide that I need to read something to understand representational theory of mind better. The book that I read this time is ‘Representations in Cognitive Science’ by N. Shea.

I read books that I can find. Also, I try to familiarize myself with contemporary debates about consciousness. Sometimes, contemporary books are not present in my library. That’s why I appreciate the endeavors of some authors to publish open-access books. It is very important for the spread of the knowledge, and it doesn’t leave out any potential readers. If I publish a book, it will certainly be open access. However, this time I read the book by Jonathan Birch, “The Edge of Sentience”. It’s open-access and (I think) an important read for many.

I am a PhD student in the field of neuroscience. My primary interest is brain oscillations. Neurons in the brain engage in the coherent activity from time to time. We may see this non-invasively when we record electroencephalography (EEG). This activity looks like regular periodic waves, and it represents the changing electrical and magnetic fields which in turn reflect currents inside neurons. In my studies, I want to know how structural characteristics of neurons and brain tissue in general determine the way oscillations look and function. The book that I’m reviewing today related to my field of study somewhat tangentially, but I was curious to learn more about oscillations in general. The book is “Biological clocks, rhythms, and oscillations” by Daniel B. Forger.

I have a list of books that I want to read. I collect recommendations wherever I can. With that being said, sometimes I like to just wander around the library and pick books that sound interesting. It was the case with this book: “A philosophy of person and identity” by M. Meijsing. It starts with a personal story as a quite intriguing hook, but the development of arguments and the conclusion are unsatisfactory.

Some people are stuck between two worlds. One world of physics, where everything is predetermined and laws are rigid. The other world is personal experience, where thoughts lead to actions and actions to observable consequences. I am one of those people, and maybe so are you. It would be very satisfying to have a theory that combines these worlds. The book that I have read attempts just this. It’s titled “How can physics underlie the mind?: Top-down causation in the human context” by George Ellis. Spoiler alert: there is a theory, but it is not satisfying.

I like to think about myself as a neuroscientist. Quite often, while reading philosophy books, I feel a gap between my daily scientific life and contemplations of the author. However, this time I have by accident grabbed a book that tries to leverage neuroscience data to fit in the hypotheses about the mind. It was Minds without Meanings: An Essay on the Content of Concepts by J.A. Fodor and Z.W. Pylyshyn. Or as I thought. In the end, the gap is still there.

Bad news and worse than bad news for mental causation—this could be an alternative title of the book that I have just read. The real title is “Mind in a Physical World” by Jaegwon Kim. The book is a series of lectures that the author gave at the University of California in 1996. Fun fact: David Chalmers was the member of the audience. I wish I could be a fly on the wall at that moment. 

There are many theories in philosophy and cognitive science that I don’t understand. There are some theories that I have tried to understand but couldn’t. The book “A Drive to Survive: the Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life” by Kathryn Nave covers two theories that I was unable to comprehend: enactivism and Karl Friston’s active inference/predictive coding/free energy principle fusion. Now, I comprehend them a little bit better, and good enough to make me even more skeptical than I was before. Let me briefly describe both theories. 

Some theories in science disappear like a glacier because their time has come, while others are fiercely fought against. One of the latter ones is vitalism. Generally speaking, vitalists are those who claim physics is insufficient to explain life, as life requires a special vital law, force, essence, or property. However, there are many flavors to vitalism. Those flavors are covered in the book that I had read: “Vitalism and it’s legacy in twentieth century life sciencies and philosophy” edited by C. Donohue and C.T. Wolfe. 

I had somewhat fragmented knowledge of recent advances in the search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). I needed a book that could put everything in order: what kind of experimental paradigms are used, what brain regions are investigated, and what gaps in knowledge can be clearly identified. I found the book just right.

Agency could mean different things to different people. I am familiar with agency from the perspectives of neuroscience and philosophy, which are, to say the least, pretty divergent. Well, it turned out that evolutionary biologists have their own opinions. This time I read "The Evolution of Agency’" by M. Tomasello (it is his most recent book).

The book “The cortex and the critical point: understanding the power of emergence” by John M. Beggs was recommended to me by my supervisor when I began asking too many questions about the critical brain hypothesis. Did I find my answers there? Some. Was it useful? Certainly.

Mazviita Chirimuuta is a neuroscientist turned philosopher. My motivation to read her book stemmed not from the topic. Rather, I wanted to look at the philosophical issue of whether color is mind-independent through the prism of neuroscience. I can say I gained what I was looking for.

The old books are quite often outdated when it comes to science. However, it could be useful to familiarize oneself with “older” texts (some of them are not that old) to gain insights on how we got to where we are. Driven partially by this notion and partially by the necessity of my PhD curriculum, I read “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” by B.F. Skinner.

I was swept away by the recent Netflix documentary “Cave of Bones”. Not that I have believed the narrative (I did not), but it made me curious. The question that seems to bother many people (not me) is: what is so special about us, humans? I thought to myself that maybe I lacked some understanding and decided to read the book “A natural history of human thinking” by M. Tomasello. This book argues for a hypothesis that Tomasello and colleagues have been promoting for a while. The hypothesis is supposed to answer the question: how uniquely human thinking emerged? The answer is shared intentionality.

This book is a collection of papers on the topic of phenomenal consciousness, posing and answering the Mary-the-brilliant-neuroscientist-in-a-black-and-white-room thought experiment. This thought experiment was first published by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982). Since then, many objections and objections on the objections have been published, so much so that Frank Jackson himself turned against his creation.

The book is a collection of essays from various scholars who research or think about agency. Agency in psychology and philosophy is the ability of the agent to carry out actions and control their outcomes. Therefore, the sense of agency is the 'feeling' that I am the agent of my actions; I produce and control my actions. Some disorders, such as schizophrenia, exhibit symptoms connected with the loss or impairment of sense of agency. Additionally, empirical research and theoretical speculations about agency relate to the fields of ethics and AI.

The book is an up-to-date collection of different studies covering a wide range of topics. The primary topic is oscillations of various frequencies, starting from ultraslow (0.01–0.1 Hz) and ending with the gamma range (40–100 Hz).

For a reason unknown to me, a recent research project on consciousness takes a closer look at two theories. Admittedly, these are influential and neuroscientifically informed theories. One is the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), and Bernard J. Baars is one of its creators.

As the name suggests, the book's stance is embodied cognition. In my impression, the book communicates two main ideas (that are interconnected). First idea: in the scientific literature, there seems to exist a misconception between the terms ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’ that needs to be settled.