The Predictive Brain: Consciousness, Decision and Embodied Action

✍ Scribed by Mauro Maldonato

• Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 113
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

An investigation of the working of the human mind, this book sets out to show that the brain is not only a reactive mechanism, but rather proactive, allowing people to make hypotheses, anticipate consequences, and formulate expectations. The book discusses how the evolution of motor modes of behavior, such as the ability to construct and manipulate instruments, has given rise to an "embodied logic" underpinning not only action and prediction but also gestures and syllable sequences that are the basis of human communication. This book then looks at how, if consciousness is caused by specific neuronal processes and, therefore, conscious states are causally reducible to neurobiological processes, it is also true that conscious states exist at a higher level than neuron activity. For this reason, this work argues that it is necessary to go beyond a hierarchical idea of levels of consciousness, and to refute the idea according to which the mental sphere is qualitative, subjective, and in the first person, while the physical sphere is quantitative, objective, and in the third person.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
1 At the Origin of the Experience of the Self
2 The Roots of Conscious Awareness
3 Consciousness: A Multilevel Framework
4 Between Conscious Global Workspace and Unconscious Levels
5 Does a Hierarchy of Nervous Functions Exist?
6 Movement’s Architectures
7 The Origin of Movements
8 Ecological Rationality: Intuition, Decision and Other Evolution Strategies
Index
Back Cover