A Mind So Rare

The Evolution of Human Consciousness

By: Merlin Donald

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Paperback | 1 June 2002 | Edition Number 1

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388 Pages

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20 x 12.5 x 2

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In this masterful rebuttal to the prevailing neuroscientific arguments that seek to explain away consciousness, Merlin Donald presents "a sophisticated conception of a multilayered consciousness drawing much of its power from its cultural matrix" (Booklist). Donald makes "a persuasive case...for consciousness as the central player in the drama of mind" (Peter Dodwell), as he details the forces, both cultural and neuronal, that power our distinctively human modes of awareness. He proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product, interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a "distributed" cognitive network. This hybrid mind, he argues, is our main evolutionary advantage, for it allowed humanity as a species to break free of the limitations of the mammalian brain. "Donald transcends the simplistic claims of Evolutionary Psychology, ...offering a true Darwinian perspective on the evolution of consciousness."--Philip Lieberman

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Psychology Cognition & Cognitive Psychology Science Biology, Life Sciences Life Sciences in General Evolution Science in General Developmental Biology Medicine Clinical & Internal Medicine Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology

Prologue	p. xi
Consciousness in Evolution	p. 1
Demons and memes	p. 3
Questions of definition	p. 4
Building our own demons	p. 7
How this book is organized	p. 8
The Paradox of Consciousness	p. 13
A limited instrument	p. 14
Minimalist people	p. 16
The ultimate form of deconstruction	p. 19
The tunnel of consciousness	p. 21
The paradox of paradoxes	p. 25
Hardliners	p. 28
Radical presumption	p. 31
Even more radical presumption	p. 35
Dennett's dangerous idea	p. 39
Conclusion	p. 44
The Governor of Mental Life	p. 46
The time frame of awareness	p. 47
Confusion over automaticity	p. 57
The clinical view: Consciousness and self-governance	p. 59
An aggressive, interventionist consciousness: A case history	p. 70
Zasetsky's mirror twins	p. 76
A literary view	p. 78
Vertical depth and unity: The true reach of metacognition	p. 83
Internalization and solipsistic awareness	p. 87
Changing our model	p. 88
The Consciousness Club	p. 92
The materiality of mind	p. 96
Eliminating the scale problem	p. 99
Vestigial brains, not so vestigial minds	p. 106
Avoiding the scala naturae	p. 113
Defining the domain	p. 117
The Consciousness Club	p. 122
Bringing extra resources to bear	p. 130
Embodiment, egocenters, and homunculi	p. 134
The Executive Suite: Defining the primate "zone of proximal evolution"	p. 137
Three Levels of Basic Awareness	p. 149
The myth of the isolated mind	p. 149
The great computational divide	p. 153
The dawn of hybrid mind: Access to memory	p. 157
Models of models and the tertiary regions	p. 164
Chasing phantoms	p. 168
Level-1 awareness: Selective binding	p. 178
Level-2 awareness: Short-term control	p. 184
Level-3 awareness: Intermediate- and long-term governance	p. 195
Episodic awareness	p. 200
Entertaining a radical possibility	p. 202
Condillac's Statue	p. 205
Minds in motion	p. 206
Superplasticity	p. 208
The Third Man: Deep enculturation	p. 211
The much-misunderstood Statue and the birth of Constructivism	p. 214
Mandler's dictum	p. 227
The extraordinary mind of Helen Keller	p. 232
Contact	p. 239
Outside-Inside	p. 250
The First Hybrid Minds on Earth	p. 252
Abandoning solipsism	p. 252
Consciousness and community of mind	p. 254
The cultural relevance of a multifocal, multilayered consciousness	p. 257
The stages of human cultural and cognitive evolution	p. 259
The first transition: Establishing the mimetic framework of human culture	p. 262
The germ of self-consciousness	p. 269
Kinematic imagination	p. 271
The second transition: The spiraling coevolution of thought and symbol	p. 274
Piggybacking language on culture	p. 279
Our cerebral boxing match with the cultural matrix	p. 285
The management of idea-laundering schemes	p. 287
Symbolic invention and the growth of the lexicon	p. 290
The virtual realities of oral-mythic culture	p. 295
Collectivity of mind	p. 298
The Triumph of Consciousness	p. 301
The third transition: The invention of symbolic technologies	p. 305
A Mirror of Consciousness: The external memory field	p. 308
A cerebral Trojan Horse	p. 315
Multilayered cultures, multilayered domains of awareness	p. 320
The essential unity of the conscious hierarchy	p. 322
Coda	p. 324
Notes	p. 327
References	p. 345
Acknowledgments	p. 363
Index	p. 365
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

A Mind So Rare

The Evolution of Human Consciousness

At a Glance

Paperback

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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