How Brains Make Up Their Minds
by Walter J. Freeman
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I think, therefore I am. The legendary pronouncement of philosopher Ren? Descartes lingers as accepted wisdom in the Western world nearly four centuries after its author's death. But does thought really come first? Who actually runs the show: we, our thoughts, or the neurons firing within our brains?Walter J. Freeman explores how we control our behavior and make sense of the world around us. Avoiding determinism both in sociobiology, which proposes that persons' genes control their brains' show more functioning, and in neuroscience, which posits that their brains' disposition is molded by chemistry and environmental forces, Freeman charts a new course -- one that gives individuals due credit and responsibility for their actions. Drawing upon his five decades of research in neuroscience, Freeman utilizes the latest advances in his field as well as perspectives from disciplines as diverse as mathematics, psychology, and philosophy to explicate how different human brains act in their chosen diverse ways. He clarifies the implications of brain imaging, by which neural activity can be observed during the course of normal movements, and shows how nonlinear dynamics reveals order within the fecund chaos of brain function. show lessTags
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This is a really tough book to get through, but it repays the hard work. Freeman is not only a brain expert, he's also a philosopher (cites Aquinas and Merleau-Ponty in particular) and an electronic engineer which is what makes this book pivotal to my own understanding of the world. His conclusions are entirely consistent with those of Donald Hoffman but he doesn't spend any time pondering the consequences of his theory of epistemological solipsism. According to Hoffman, the brain is just another icon in the MUI with no causal powers so I'd like to know precisely *how* Freeman knows (with his solipsistic brain) that the perceptual process is only uni-directional...
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9+ Works 151 Members
Walter J. Freeman is professor in the Graduate School in the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught brain science for forty years.
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- Languages
- English, Italian
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- Paper
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
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