The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One - Hardcover

Manzotti, Riccardo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1944869492 ISBN 13: 9781944869496

Publisher: OR Books, 2018

Synopsis

Once we came out of the jungle and found time to think of something besides food, sex, and shelter, we confronted the fundamental questions: what are we? Who are we? Is a person a body, a soul? How do we access the external world if we are nothing but brains encased in bodies?
As neuroscientists map the most detailed aspects of the human brain and its interplay with the rest of the body, they remain baffled by what is essentially human: our selves. In most of the existing scientific literature, information processing has taken the place of the soul. Yet thus far, no convincing account has been presented of exactly where and how consciousness is stored in our bodies.
In The Spread Mind, Riccardo Manzotti convincingly argues that our bodies do not contain subjective experience. Yet consciousness is real, and, like any other real phenomenon, is physical. Where is it, then? Manzotti's radical hypothesis is that consciousness is one and the same as the physical world surrounding us.
Drawing on Einstein's theories of relativity, evidence about dreams and hallucination, and the geometry of light in perception, and using vivid, real-world examples to illustrate his ideas, Manzotti argues that consciousness is not a ''movie in the head.'' Experience is not in our head: it is the actual world we move in.

About this title

About the Author:

RICCARDO MANZOTTI is a Professor of Philosophy at IULM University in Milan, Italy. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT. He holds a PhD in robotics, is the author of 50 papers on the basis of consciousness, artificial intelligence, machine consciousness and perception. He is the webmaster of consciousness.it and thespreadmind.com. His published work addresses the nature of the self and the meshing of technology and consciousness. Over a period of many months, The New York Review of Books Daily has posted an extended series of conversations between Manzotti and the novelist Tim Parks, in which the two attempt to dissect the nature of consciousness.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

"I look around. I see a world made of objects and their properties. By and large, if something is physical, it should be locatable in space and time. Everything, since it is a part of nature, must be somewhere and at some time. No exact punctual location is required. A location can be fuzzy, vague, probabilistic, and plagued by uncertainty. Then, in the world I live in and perceive, what and where is my experience? Slightly more unusually, when does my experience take place? Roughly, we know where our bodies are. Likewise, we know where either the moon or a red apple is. Here, however, I do not refer to my body, but to the thing that my experience is – customarily described in terms of perceptions, dreams, thoughts, and desires7F. Can I locate my own experience as I can locate the performance of Vivaldi's Gloria I heard at the Boston Symphony Hall on the afternoon of March 12, in 2014? Can I locate my dream of a pink elephant in the same way? Where, when and what is the stuff my dreams are made of? To this day, both scientists and philosophers falter when confronted with such questions – whether it be a dream, a hallucination, or a perception. At best, scholars of a scientific bent point at correlates, supervenience bases, representational vehicles, and so forth. The hesitation is embarrassing because if one assumes that experience is a natural phenomenon, it ought to be spatiotemporally located. However, putting the mind inside the brain has not yielded any solid finding because, trivially, nothing inside a brain has the properties of our experience. So, again, what, where and when is experience?"

About this edition

• Publisher: OR Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1944869492
• ISBN 13: 9781944869496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304