Best cognitive psychology books according to redditors
We found 15 Reddit comments discussing the best cognitive psychology books. We ranked the 5 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 15 Reddit comments discussing the best cognitive psychology books. We ranked the 5 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I haven't read it, but I can tell you that the consensus about it in the History of Philosophy community is that it's pretty bad. I've only seen it cited in history of philosophy journals as a foil. For a broad introduction, I've heard Kenny's new work is pretty good. And I rather like Copleston's History, though it's nine ~500 page volumes. I think your best bet, though, is just to read some philosophical classics. Perhaps Plato's Five Dialogues (https://www.amazon.com/Plato-Dialogues-Euthyphro-Apology-Classics/dp/0872206335/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467069583&sr=8-1&keywords=five+dialogues), Descartes' Meditations (https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-First-Philosophy-Hackett-Classics/dp/0872201929/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467069631&sr=8-1&keywords=meditations+descartes), Russel's Problems of Philosophy (https://www.amazon.com/Problems-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/1613821875/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1467069667&sr=8-7&keywords=problems+of+philosophy), and maybe Searle's Brief Introduction to Mind (https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Brief-Introduction-Fundamentals-Philosophy/dp/0195157346/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467069693&sr=8-1&keywords=searle+mind).
There are better, more important, and more recent works than these, but I think these are good intros to philosophy as a whole for two reasons: 1) these are very representative of Ancient, Modern, Early Analytic, and contemporary philosophy of mind. And 2) these are all pretty easy. Philosophy's batshit complicated, at times; but none of these are more difficult than they have to be (and yet, they're not Idiot's Guides … )
Susan Blackmore I think had a good one that was basically interviews many usual suspects you run into in intro discussions on philosophy of mind.
Conversations on Consciousness I think it was called.
https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Consciousness-Susan-J-Blackmore/dp/0192806238
I'll pass along wokeupabug's typical recommendations:
>A good broad introduction is Lowe's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (for a broader, philosophy and cognition sort of approach). For an introduction more focused on the mind-body problem, you have lots of options; Kim's Philosophy of Mind and Heil's Philosophy of Mind... are good choices. For a history anthology approach, the Chalmers' Philosophy of Mind... is a good choice; a little more accessible would be Morton's Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind.
And the recommendation from the FAQ page:
>For philosophy of mind, Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction.
I don't really know what you mean by a 'consideration of the future'. Do you mean issues that could crop up in the future germane to phil. mind (A.I., cog. enhancement, etc.)? If so, that's a tough one! Likely just the Cambridge Handbook. The introduciton is avail here if you'd like a preview. And this book on Machine Ethics is recommended on the PhilPapers bibliography.
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I highly recommend John Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction.
Searle's is a bit biased towards his argument for "Emergent consciousness" throughout the book but he does give a very thorough and accessible overview of the history and important arguments/debates about consciousness/free will/personal identity. Also tons of helpful references at the end of each chapter that will lead you towards many of the notable papers. and books if you wish to follow up in more detail.
The books main strength lies in Searle's prose which (in this book at least) is engaging, easy to follow, full of life and energy and informative at the same time.
It is a bit older than the books mentioned by wyzaard above, so it might better serve as a compliment to read alongside the texts he recommended.
I really recommend a Wreck This Journal - I think her age is perfect for it. It can help channel creativity and explore both good and bad emotions. Here is a video of what a completed Wreck This Journal looks like for one person.
Given that all of our neuroscience hasn't shed the slightest glimpse of a glimmer of an idea how we have subjective experience, I wouldn't be quite so celebratory.
Typically posts claiming this are made by people who have only a Popular Science level of knowledge of the subject, but don't actually know that the best we have are what are called NCCs (neural correlates of consciousness), not consciousness itself. In other words, we know that a certain bundle of c fibers fire when people experience pain, but we do not ever see pain, or love, or thoughts, under a microscope. We just see neurons firing.
John Searle has written several excellent books on the subject, of which this is probably the most accessible.
Fear cuts deeper than swords
Main WL
WHEW. That took way longer than I thought it would but I think I found everything but what your name is! Thanks for the contest, I had a blast!
The questions you are asking are related to philosphy of mind. Two good, recent, and not too dense books on the topic are http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Brief-Introduction-Fundamentals-Philosophy/dp/0195157346/ and
http://www.amazon.com/Body-Shapes-Mind-Shaun-Gallagher/dp/0199204160/
To understand how consciousness works you probably need to start with the brain. You can look at it from afar and you'll see a mess of grey tissue and up close you'll see a bunch tiny cells and electrical and chemical signals. You won't find any consciousnesses. So you pay more attention and see that the tiny cells (neurons) are constantly interacting with each other and with different parts of the body like eyes and limbs. These interactions start small and gradually build up. Making a big leap, you see that human biology has organized these interactions to perform higher order tasks like using visual information (a ball rushing through the air towards you) to direct limb movement (reaching out your hands to catch it.) But these types of actions aren't necessarily the result of conscious states, they could just be reflex actions.
Making the next step is difficult. You know that you have consciouness and that you have higher order brain activities, but dreams for example seem to be higher order brain activities that occur when you're unconscious. So what makes higher order brain activities into conscious states? Philosophy and cognitive science have a great deal to say here and there's not a definitive answer, but I think Gallagher (in ch. 8 from the second book above) has a pretty good model (building off of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness.)
According to Gallagher's model your ongoing experience of the world breaks down into three time-based phases. You have the sense of the now, of what is happening at this very moment (primal impression.) You feel itchy or see blue or smell cinammon. You also have a working memory (retention) of the recent past. You weren't just feeling itchy or seeing blue or smelling cinammon. And you also are able to anticipate what is just about to happen (protention.) You aniticpate scratching the itch or being crushed by a tidal wave or eating dessert. Your being conscious is the result of your brain performing these phases in unison. Your stream of consciousness is the ongoing temporal connection. When you're unconscious you don't have full access to all three phases, when you're dreaming you don't really utilize retention or protention. There is a lot more to the model and its implications, but that's a very general picture.
Other organisms probably (in most cases certainly) don't have the sophisticated interactions that the human brain does which create consciousness. There are also complications with other aspects of mind stuff (esp. intentionality) would keep a computer from being conscious as we generally understand even if it was programmed with retention, protention, and now-ness (and getting proper anticipation/protention into a computer is a big challenge on its own.) I don't think we know enough to say when evolution produced consciousness. And while consciousness is not reducible to individual cells and electrochemical impulses it is a result of our biology, so when human babies get made and develop normally they end up gaining consciousness
Well, if you want a concentrated course of study you might consider looking for secondary sources that focus on particular areas of research in philosophy rather than trying to read very few (5-10) authors in real depth. I see Kant has been suggested, for example, and while I would never doubt his importance as a philosopher, if you set out with the intention of reading the bulk of his works as you say you might you would have to tackle a great deal of dry, technical material which I think would prove to be a lot more work than you could expect. Same could be said for Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Descartes, nearly anyone you really might care to list. I don't know if you've read much philosophy, but you might instead look at something like an introduction to philosophy, an intro to ethics, or an intro to the philosophy of mind. These are only some examples, there are books like this for pretty much any area of study that attracts your interest. I'm sure others could provide suggestions as well.
A few suggested additions:
There's a book called On Blindness which is just a correspondence between two philosophers, one blind and one sighted. I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
Ok, so you said that "there are no objects that exist and events that occur in the world outside the mind" and then proceeded to tell me believing otherwise is just an assumption. How is that different from what I did? I actually gave a substantial starting point from where we can continue.
"Just as humans are born with a characteristic anatomical structure that differentiates our species from other animal creatures, so also do we enter embodied life with a psychical organization that predetermines the general form in which our consciousness may develop, irrespective of the extent to which the specific form of that consciousness may be conditioned by environmental factors"
This highlights an important point I want to make about the nature of the mind and objective reality. Like #1 says above, we come limited and predisposed to think and talk about reality through "conceptual schemes and the limits of our language" which is limited by the function and capacity of our evolutionary hand-me-down the cerebral cortex. I only admit that our understanding of the outside world is hampered by these limitations and therefore the discussion must then be directed towards the question of, as with #2, "how much of the apparent intelligibility of the world is a contribution of the mind and how much the world itself contributes to that seeming intelligibility".
So what you are trying to debate is this: When we look at an object in nature, is our knowledge about that object the object inside the mind or the object outside the mind. You say the dichotomy between inside and outside is an illusion and therefore we are only ever thinking of objects "inside the mind". Many problems arise with this line of thinking. Joseph Margolis summarizes the skeptics (your) position...
"So that if, in coming to know the independent world we must always rely on “ideas” in the mind, which cannot in principle claim direct access to the world said to be known, we cannot confirm that those ideas ever correspond to the way the world actually is. This is the insuperable formula of modern skepticism."
"These two themes—(a) the principled disjunction between the resources of knowledge and the “corresponding” properties of the independent world and (b) the restriction of our cognitive resources to an entirely interior “representational” function (a tertium)—are the chief sources of an intolerable skepticism that runs through much of modern philosophy"
But there is a solution to our modern infatuation with skepticism...
"The resolution of modern skepticism requires two distinct steps. Speaking loosely, we may say the first was taken by Kant and the second by Hegel. Kant argues (in the Critique of Pure Reason) that the cognizable structure of the objective world is itself constituted—originally structured—in accord with the prior constituting powers of experience, the so-called pure intuitions of time and space, and the categories of the understanding: in effect, the intelligible (all the intelligible) structures of reality that the mind is capable of comprehending."
This harkens back to the first quote about being "born with a characteristic anatomical structure".
"It was, however, Hegel’s supreme contribution to have grasped the fact that skepticism could never be put to rest without taking a step beyond the puzzles of representationality and correspondence (call that symbiosis)."
"...there remains one unshakable discovery: namely, that the accumulating history of what counts
as knowledge (and our cognizing competence) is the essential condition of the continuing evolution of knowledge itself (and of our cognizing competence); furthermore, that same process must be understood as gathering up the aggregated experience of individual human subjects as well as the collective ethos of the historical society within whose terms such individuals function in the apt (but limited) way they do. All that is part and parcel of the “experience” imputed to Hegel’s invented subject, Geist."
"...the import of representationalism (the first of the two skeptical puzzles mentioned) cannot be decisively resolved except by resolving the second (correspondentism: the puzzle of the relationship between appearance and reality)."
"...the language of Geist brings together (a) the subjective side of the run of pre-Kantian/Kantian thought, (b) the objective side of what is “other” than that,the “world,” which all hands wish to preserve, and (c) the union of (a) and (b) as internal to a putatively inclusive being (“Absolute Geist”) which is the logical “space,” so to say, in which the historical unfolding of human knowledge obtains, cast (metaphorically) as the creative process of Geist’s“self”-knowledge... the improvement over Kant stands: the relocation of epistemic legitimation in the collective processes of historical life. "
"The truth is, there is no way to prioritize metaphysics over epistemology or epistemology over metaphysics. Whatever we say is true of reality rests on whatever we suppose we can validly claim, and whatever we claim (in terms of our subjective or cognitional powers) we suppose holds true in virtue of the way the world is." - Joseph Margolis
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wreck-This-Journal-Create-Destroy/dp/1846144450
Cinnamon Toast Crunch is good, but COCOA PEBBLES ARE THE BEST!
This doodle/drawing book looks like a LOT of fun, and would give me some needed pointers on how to improve my cartoons. It says it's unavailable, but it says it's available from other sellers.
ORRR
THIS BOOK which I've been wanting for a while now. I WANT TO WRECK IT!! :D :D
Wow. What a blatant rip-off!! They are clearly copying the Wreck this Journal series. :-/
Wreck This Journal
http://amzn.com/1846144450