The MIT Press eBooks
November 21, 2023
Stephen Snelders
1 citation
Dutch psychedelic history had its own characteristics. In psychiatry, LSD therapy was used for the management of the traumas of World War II; in Dutch society, overlapping groups of activists and psychedelics users were involved in a playful transformation of society into a “Magical Center”; and in economics, the Netherlands became a key player in the illegal production and distribution of LSD...
The MIT Press eBooks
November 21, 2023
Magaly Tornay
From its very beginning, when a drop of LSD-25 permeated the skin of Albert Hofmann’s fingertips in Sandoz laboratories in 1943, the substance has been a negotiator of boundaries. Symbolized by Hofmann’s bicycle ride, the first intentional trip with the mysterious drug, it has since stood for journeys into unknown realms, expanding limits, and subverting authority. In its early history,...
The MIT Press eBooks
November 21, 2023
Wendy Kline
Whenever young Frank Crompton accompanied his grand mother on the bus through Worcester, England, in the 1950s, she made him put a bag over his head as the bus drove by Powick Psychiatric Hospital." Don't look that way or you'll get damaged by it," she would say. 1 The stigma of Powick was widespread in the local community.Beryl Kendall, whose mother was institutionalized at Powick, remembers...
The MIT Press eBooks
August 22, 2023
Eva Jablonka, Simona Ginsburg
8 citations
OverviewGoal-directed activities that do not depend on conscious will or preconceived design are referred to as teleonomic be hav iors.In living systems, the evaluative systems that underlie teleonomic be hav ior sense deviations from homeostasis and employ adaptive plasticity mechanisms that restore, sustain, and boost survival and reproduction.By virtue of their sustainability, all living...
The MIT Press eBooks
June 29, 2023
Dyck, Erika 1975-, Chris Elcock
4 citations
The first collection of its kind to explore the diverse and global history of psychedelics as they appealed to several generations of researchers and thinkers. Expanding Mindscapes offers a fascinatingly fluid and diverse history of psychedelics that stretches around the globe. While much of the literature to date has focused on the history of these drugs in the United States and Canada,...
The MIT Press eBooks
October 4, 2022
This book presents a detailed statement of the neurocognitive theory of dreaming, along with the empirical findings that support it.The theory has three levels.It begins with the neural substrate that subserves dreaming.Next, the specific cognitive processes supported by this neural substrate are outlined.Finally, the dream reports that research participants provide, either verbally or in...
The MIT Press eBooks
October 4, 2022
Based in large part on four different types of descriptive empirical findings, which are inconsistent to varying degrees with every theory of dream function that has been proposed, this chapter argues that dreaming has no adaptive function.In addition, still other empirical findings refute specific aspects of one or another adaptive theory.The four general findings are already familiar to...
The MIT Press eBooks
October 4, 2022
The results of both the laboratory dream studies and the studies of waking cognitive development explain why there are few studies of dream content in early childhood, whether inside or outside a laboratory setting.Young children do not dream frequently or with any complexity, and do not seem to understand the origins of their dreams.The first systematic attempt to collect dream reports from...
The MIT Press eBooks
July 14, 2020
Ido Hartogsohn
34 citations
How historical, social, and cultural forces shaped the psychedelic experience in midcentury America, from CIA LSD experiments the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Are psychedelics invaluable therapeutic medicines, or dangerously unpredictable drugs that precipitate psychosis? Tools for spiritual communion or cognitive enhancers that spark innovation? Activators for one's private muse or part of a...
The MIT Press eBooks
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
Consciousness is neuronal as it is based on the brain and its neural activity. This is what neuroscience tell us citing strong empirical evidence. At the same time, consciousness is ecological in that it extends beyond the brain to body and world – this is what philosophers tell us when they invoke concepts like embodiment, embeddedness, extendedness, and enactment. Is consciousness neuronal or...
The MIT Press eBooks
September 14, 2018
Georg Northoff
How can we eliminate the “intuition of mind”? I demonstrated that the “intuition of mind” can be traced to our pre-Copernican vantage point from within mind or brain (chapter 20). Analogous to Copernicus, we need to radically shift our vantage point to eliminate the intuition of mind and take into view the necessary ontological connection between brain and mental features. For that, we need...
The MIT Press eBooks
May 19, 2017
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
482 citations
Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of...
The MIT Press eBooks
April 14, 2017
Christoph Durt
2 citations
The chapter offers a new view on consciousness and culture by investigating their relation to significance. Against the widespread restriction of consciousness to phenomenal aspects and that of culture to “thick description,” Durt argues that consciousness discloses aspects of significance, while culture encompasses shared significance as well as the forms of behavior that enact significance....
The MIT Press eBooks
January 6, 2017
The Middle Way Evocations of GroundlessnessOur journey has now brought us to the point where we can appreciate that what we took to be solid ground is really more like shifting sand beneath our feet.We began with our common sense as cognitive scientists and found that our cognition emerges from the background of a world that extends beyond us but that cannot be found apart from our...
The MIT Press eBooks
December 14, 2012
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
515 citations
A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless. Most of what humans do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated,...
The MIT Press eBooks
July 29, 2011
Gerald Vision
This chapter explains the argument positing that certain effects or instances of behavior are not possible without access-conscious causes. Some claim that phenomenal awareness is not a distinct category of items but an ingredient of access-conscious properties. The natural contrasts of access consciousness would not be a lack of unmediated inner recognition and transparency, but it would...
The MIT Press eBooks
July 29, 2011
Harold Langsam
This chapter discusses how the intelligible features of conscious states can be discovered by reflecting on the familiar intrinsic properties of conscious states made known to man through introspection. An experience is the event of a subject instantiating a certain kind of mental property, and a subject can introspect this property when he has the experience. The introspectible properties that...
The MIT Press eBooks
July 29, 2011
Gerald Vision
This chapter tackles the theories that identify conscious properties and physical types. Specifically, it highlights the differences between chauvinism and pluralism. While chauvinists regard that the exclusive basis for having or ascribing phenomenal consciousness lies in the possession of a constitution approximating that of humans, pluralists tolerate differently constituted creatures as...
The MIT Press eBooks
November 24, 2010
Diego Cosmelli, Evan Thompson
65 citations
This chapter discusses the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment and attempts to determine what needs to be specified so that one can properly imagine a brain in a vat. Daniel Dennett notes that philosophers often fail to set up their intuition pumps properly by failing to think carefully about the requirements and implications of their imagined scenarios. His suggestion is considered here and a...
The MIT Press eBooks
November 24, 2010
Giovanna Colombetti
63 citations
The theory of autopoiesis is central to the enactive approach.Recent works emphasize that the theory of autopoiesis is a theory of sense-making in living systems, i.e. of how living systems produce and consume meaning.In this chapter I first illustrate (some aspects of) these recent works, and interpret their notion of sense-making as a bodily cognitiveemotional form of understanding.Then I...
The MIT Press eBooks
November 24, 2010
Michel Le van Quyen
8 citations
This chapter focuses on a main outstanding problem faced by the cognitive sciences—understanding how ongoing conscious experience is related to its biological and physical roots. Providing an essential experimental framework for the research into consciousness, the recent development of large-scale brain imaging techniques such as electroencephalography and the progress made in mathematical...
The MIT Press eBooks
August 13, 2010
Mark Rowlands
This chapter examines the flaws of the thesis of the amalgamated mind and explains that, although the combining theses for the amalgamated mind are both sound when approached individually, they are mutually incompatible and cannot be combined without encountering problems. “The amalgamated mind” is a combination of the theses of the embodied mind and the extended mind. In tackling the...
The MIT Press eBooks
May 21, 2010
Andy Clark
260 citations
This chapter analyzes the movie Memento and how the questions it poses is analogous with the essay “The Extended Mind.” The essay claims that mental states, including states of believing, could be grounded in physical traces that remained firmly outside the mind, as long as a few simple conditions are met. This chapter attempts to answer objections to this argument—especially those focusing on...
The MIT Press eBooks
May 21, 2010
Fred Adams, Kenneth Aizawa
188 citations
This chapter discusses the flaws of Clark’s extended mind hypothesis. Clark’s hypothesis assumes that the nature of the processes internal to an object has nothing to do with whether that object carries out cognitive processing. The only condition required is that the object is coupled with a cognitive agent and interacts with it in a certain way. In making this tenuous connection, Clark...
The MIT Press eBooks
May 21, 2010
Michael A. Wheeler
115 citations
This chapter aims to clarify the relationship between the extended cognition hypothesis (ExC) and functionalism, and to defend extended functionalism against three of its strongest criticisms. ExC claims that there are conditions under which thinking and thoughts are spatially distributed over the brain, body, and world in such a way that the external factors concerned are rightly accorded...