Thursday, September 30, 2021

Top ten books about human consciousness

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.

His books cover many fields. They include books on travel, evolutionary biology, natural history, anthropology, theology, archaeology, philosophy and law. Ultimately they are all attempts to answer the questions ‘Who or what are we?’, and ‘what on earth are we doing here?

Foster's newest book is Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 years of consciousness. It tries to answer the question ‘What sort of creature is a human?’

At the Guardian Foster tagged ten top books about human consciousness, including:
The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms

The market is awash with books expressing blithe optimism that neuroscience is about to tell us what consciousness is, why it’s there, and how it is generated. Solms is with the mainstream materialist cohort in thinking that consciousness is a function of brain activity. I’d prefer to say that brains receive, process, and perhaps broadcast consciousness. But Solms’s book stands out from the herd, marked by fitting wonderment and doubt.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue