Mind Games E-Book

Martin Cohen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This original and innovative book is an exploration of one of the key mysteries of the mind, the question of consciousness. Conducted through a one month course of both practical and entertaining 'thought experiments', these stimulating mind-games are used as a vehicle for investigating the complexities of the way the mind works. * By turns, fun, eye-opening and intriguing approach to thinking about thinking, which contains inventive and engaging 'thought experiments' for the general reader * Includes specially drawn illustrations by the French avant-garde artist, Judit * Reunites the social science disciplines of psychology, sociology and political theory with the traditional concerns of philosophy

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title page

Copyright page

Forward!

Acknowledgements

How To Use This Book

Week 1

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Week 2

Day 8

Another dotty experiment

Day 9 (a.m.)

Day 9 (p.m.)

Day 9 (evening)

Day 10

Day 11

Day 12

Day 13

Day 14

Week 3

Day 15

Day 16

Day 17

Day 18 (a.m.)

Day 18 (p.m.)

Day 19 (a.m)

Day 19 (p.m.)

Day 20

Day 21

Week 4

Day 22 (a.m.)

Day 22 (p.m.)

Day 23

Day 24

Day 25

Day 26

Day 27

Day 28 (a.m.)

Day 28 (p.m.)

Day 29

Day 30

Day 31

Part II

Week 1

Day 1 Words

Day 2 Identifying the Reptile

Day 3 The Fallacy of the Lonely Fact

Day 4 The Immortals

Day 5 My Three Favourite Animals

Day 6 The Prison of the Self

Day 7 Trappism

Week 2

Day 8 Dotty Experiments on Teddies

Day 9 (a.m.) The Cow in the Field-that-gets built-on

(p.m.) The Mountains of Egocentricity

(evening) Behave Yourself!

Day 10 The Dissonance of the $1 Volunteers

Day 11 Investigating Memory

Day 12 Jargon for Dummies

Day 13 Be Lucky!

Day 14 This Is Not a Self-Help Book

Week 3

Day 15 The Upside-down Goggles

Day 16 Fire-walking and Cold Baths

Day 17 R-pentomino

Day 18 Proprioception and the McGurk Effect

Day 19 (a.m.) Go for a Long Walk on the Much Too Long Coastal Path

(p.m.) Make a Bed of Nails

Day 20 Now Getting Really Rather Dangerous …

Day 21 Doodle

Week 4

Day 22 (a.m.) Molyneux’s Problem

(p.m.) Mary’s Room

Day 23 Unable To See Change

Day 24 Cascade Theory

Day 25 Explain Yourself!

Day 26 Investigating Un-Reason and Argument

Day 27 Subliminal Messages

Day 28 (a.m.) The Power of Prayer

(p.m.) Pray for Good Crops

Day 29 The Horror and the Beauty Or Vice Versa

Day 30 Strange Things

Day 31 Manipulating Minds Down on the Farm

Appendix A: Three Lines Test

Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Index

About the Author

Martin Cohen is editor of The Philosopher, and one of today’s best-known authors introducing key issues in philosophy, social science and politics to a wider audience. His books (more than 250,000 copies sold) have helped revolutionise the way mainstream philosophy is discussed and written about, spawning a new generation of popular introductions to the subject. Refusing to accept traditional constraints on subject matter and style, he has been aptly dubbed by his Taiwanese publisher as the ‘enfant terrible’ of philosophy.

Other recent books include Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments (Blackwell, 2004), No Holiday: 80 Places You Don’t Want to Visit (Disinformation Travel Guides) (2006), Philosophical Tales (Blackwell, 2008), and the UK edition of Philosophy for Dummies (Wiley, 2010).

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 John Wiley & Sons Inc

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Martin, 1964–

 Mind games : 31 days to rediscover your brain / Martin Cohen.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4443-3709-9 (pbk. : alk. paper); ISBN 978-1-4443-4148-5 (epub) 1. Consciousness. 2. Thought experiments. I. Title.

 B105.C477C62 2010

 128′.2–dc22

2010016200

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Forward!

This is a book about thinking. We’re going to follow Descartes and do a bit of thinking about thinking. Do monkeys think? Do plants? Not like us anyway. They just appear to do so, even as they follow preprogrammed evolutionary strategies. A bit like computers in fact. But, unlike computers, they are ‘undoubtedly’ conscious of something. For if nowadays everyone agrees that the body, indeed the whole universe, is a machine, still no one is quite able to say that there isn’t a ghost riding along in the centre of it.

Descartes wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’, or at least, many people think he wrote that. He said awareness of the brute fact of existing was the only he thing he could be sure of, and used this nugget not only to get himself up in the morning but to rediscover the world. You see, Descartes was onto something. And that thing is consciousness. Perhaps this is the central mystery of philosophy. Science can explain everything else, but the strange sense of self-awareness it can only dismiss as an illusion.

So this book is really a celebration of consciousness, that goes under a rather more appealing title of Mind Games. There are plenty of these here, yes, but not merely in the evergreen Sudoku sense of puzzles and conceptual trickery, or in the scientific sense of explorations of the way the brain works, and often does not work, or even of ‘thought experiments’ in the widest philosophical sense of imaginary scenarios proceeding through the appliance of logic to factual hypotheses.

These are all very well, but the mind is more than that. It can also deal with things that do not exist, that do not make sense, that cannot be explained. Some people even think it can project thoughts instantaneously across distances, cause departed souls to rematerialise, and, of course, pass messages directly to the Creator. Yet if serious philosophers have been loath to countenance such irrationality, that’s no reason to pass up an opportunity for practising some alternative mind games here. For science, like philosophy should be open to all questions and answers, not just those that fit the narrow fashions of the times.

And if you try all of the 31 experiments here, and if you still, by the end of it, can’t remember what month it is let alone anything more impressively mathematical, still can’t move objects by simply concentrating upon them, nor yet even see through verbal flim-flam to the essential argumentative core – if you read this book and yet somehow still cannot do any of that, I can offer you at least one thing. And that is that by the end of the course it will have turned out that the way you think, and the way I think, are not quite as individual as ‘I think, therefore I am’ implies. Because the human mind is created and renewed at every moment collectively, and no one of us can rediscover our sense of self, let alone rediscover our brain, entirely alone.

Acknowledgements

The illustrations have been specially drawn for this book by the French artist, Judit, with characteristic attention to the ‘philosophical spirit’ of the text. I should like especially to thank both her and Wiley-Blackwell’s indefatigable and scholarly editor, Jeff Dean, for their support, enthusiasm, insights and ideas!

How To Use This Book

This book invites the reader to be active and to participate in the exploration of the ideas and in the experiments themselves. There are ‘answers’ at the back, avoiding the need to carry out all the activities, but these are not ‘real answers’ they are merely ideas and reflections on the issue, reflections that will be of more value – or quite possibly of no value – after you have tried the ‘Mind Game’ for yourself.

Now I know plenty of people (especially professors) who find it annoying to have to pause to think, let alone to actually try things out for themselves. Why not just say what we know about the state of current knowledge and give some suitable references to peer-reviewed papers? Surely that would be more logical? But the reason for this active approach is that the ‘inconveniency’ (as a famous philosopher termed such things) is also the opportunity to rediscover your brain – something too few books, let alone professors allow. And then too, in using these kinds of activities as starting points for philosophical discussions, I’ve been amazed at just how often people never even turn to the established authorities on the matters, but prefer to find solutions for themselves.

Many books go only part read. But even if you read only little bits of this book, that’s fine. Because philosophy is not a body of knowledge, but an activity, and Mind Games is an opportunity – and an invitation – to enjoy that.

Week 1

Influencing the Reptile Mind

Day 1

Words

Task

Spend all day trying to think for yourself

But already, we’re off to a bad start! These words you are now reading, whose are they?

Whose is that voice in your head? Yours or mine?

When you hear someone speak, the words remain theirs – to be ignored or disagreed with as you choose. But somehow to read someone’s thoughts is to allow them, however temporarily, to take over the language centres of your brain. For as long as you are caught up in what they say, the writer becomes your inner voice.

Does that mean that, for a moment, the writer becomes the reader?

Or does it mean instead that, for a moment, the reader becomes the writer?*

Note

* All the tasks are discussed, explained and – just occasionally! – ‘solved’ in the Debriefing section which makes up the second half of the book. In this case, see p. 71 for a fairly brief contextual note.