Most people are both repelled and intrigued by the images of cold-blooded, conscienceless murderers that increasingly populate our movies, television programs, and newspaper headlines. With their flagrant criminal violation of society's rules, serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy are among the most dramatic examples of the psychopath. Individuals with this personality disorder are fully aware of the consequences of their actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are terrifyingly self-centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others. Perhaps most frightening, they often seem completely normal to unsuspecting targets--and they do not always ply their trade by killing. Presenting a compelling portrait of these dangerous men and women based on 25 years of distinguished scientific research, Dr. Robert D. Hare vividly describes a world of con artists, hustlers, rapists, and other predators who charm, lie, and manipulate their way through life. Are psychopaths mad, or simply bad? How can they be recognized? And how can we protect ourselves? This book provides solid information and surprising insights for anyone seeking to understand this devastating condition.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

This work presents a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public. Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments---illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics---Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe. Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science: from the origin of the Second Law of thermodynamics, to the development of complexity in biology, the computational limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, and the interplay between free will and determinism.

Our lives are a continuous series of daily choices, and the consequences of our choices should be intentional. Are you a bystander watching your life events unfold in a random fashion? Or do you recognize and make deliberate choices? In Life is about Choices, author Ed Scott details the myriad issues involved in making the important decisions in life. Scott examines the relationship of human consciousness, synchronicity, and the law of attraction. Because our beliefs and our dominant thoughts create our reality, what we have thought about in the past has attracted our world of today, and that which we believe and think about today will determine our future reality. This ancient law of attraction is constantly at work in our creative universe as cause and effect. A global resurgence of spirituality asks that we examine our core beliefs and values in order to awaken to a new reality. Life is about Choices offers techniques and suggestions for awakening to that new reality and for finding optimal health, financial security, and purpose in a meaningful existence, to find and return to our true spiritual being.

The central goal of this volume is to bring the learning perspective into the discussion of intuition in judgment and decision making. The book gathers recent work on intuitive decision making that goes beyond the current dominant heuristic processing perspective. However, that does not mean that the book will strictly oppose this perspective. The unique perspective of this book will help to tie together these different conceptualizations of intuition and develop an integrative approach to the psychological understanding of intuition in judgment and decision making. Accordingly, some of the chapters reflect prior research from the heuristic processing perspective in the new light of the learning perspective. This book provides a representative overview of what we currently know about intuition in judgment and decision making. The authors provide latest theoretical developments, integrative frameworks and state-of-the-art reviews of research in the laboratory and in the field. Moreover, some chapters deal with applied topics. Intuition in Judgment and Decision Making aims not only at the interest of students and researchers of psychology, but also at scholars from neighboring social and behavioral sciences such as economy, sociology, political sciences, and neurosciences.

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.