This volume is product of the third online consciousness conference, held at http://consciousnessonline.com in February and March 2011. Chapters range over epistemological issues in the science and philosophy of perception, what neuroscience can do to help us solve philosophical issues in the philosophy of mind, what the true nature of black and white vision, pain, auditory, olfactory, or multi-modal experiences are, to higher-order theories of consciousness, synesthesia, among others. Each chapter includes a target article, commentaries, and in most cases, a final response from the author. Though wide-ranging all of the papers aim to understand consciousness both from the inside, as we experience it, and from the outside as we encounter it in our science. The Online Consciousness Conference, founded and organized by Richard Brown, is dedicated to the rigorous study of consciousness and mind. The goal is to bring philosophers, scientists, and interested lay persons together in an online venue to promote high-level discussion and exchanging of views, ideas and data related to the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness.

How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life. Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. Where there is life, Thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. Rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, Thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. This synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make Mind in Life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (coauthored with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela). Endlessly interesting and accessible, Mind in Life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.

Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It's widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don't have a clue. In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influences the processing of information from the other senses and how unified states of consciousness emerge from the bonds that tie conscious experiences together. Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness is the first book to address both of these topics, integrating scientific and philosophical concerns. A flood of recent work in both philosophy and perception science has challenged traditional conceptions of the sensory systems as operating in isolation. Contributors to the volume consider the ways in which perceptual contact with the world is or may be “multisensory,” discussing such subjects as the modeling of multisensory integration and philosophical aspects of sensory modalities. Recent years have seen a similar surge of interest in unity of consciousness. Contributors explore a range of questions on this topic, including the nature of that unity, the degree to which conscious experiences are unified, and the relationship between unified consciousness and the self. Contributors Tim Bayne, David J. Bennett, Berit Brogaard, Barry Dainton, Ophelia Deroy, Frederique de Vignemont, Marc Ernst, Richard Held, Christopher S. Hill, Geoffrey Lee, Kristan Marlow, Farid Masrour, Jennifer Matey, Casey O'Callaghan, Cesare V. Parise, Kevin Rice, Elizabeth Schechter, Pawan Sinha, Julia Trommershaeuser, Loes C. J. van Dam, Jonathan Vogel, James Van Cleve, Robert Van Gulick, Jonas Wulff

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind presents cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind, combining invited articles and articles selected from submissions. Each volume will highlight two themes to bring focus to debates. The series will reflect the diversity of methods adopted in contemporary philosophy of mind and provide a venue for rigorous and innovative work by both established and up-and-coming voices in the field. The themes covered in the second volume are doxastic states, the metaphysics of mind, and Spinoza's role in the history of philosophy of mind.

For most native speakers of English, the meanings of ordinary words like "blue," "cup," "stumble," and "carve" seem quite natural and self-evident. It turns out, however, that they are far from universal, as shown by recent research in the discipline known as semantic typology. To be sure, the roughly 6,500 languages around the world do have many similarities in the sorts of concepts they encode. But they also vary greatly in numerous ways, such as how they partition particular conceptual domains, how they map those domains onto syntactic categories, which distinctions they force speakers to habitually attend to, and how deeply they weave certain notions into the fabric of their grammar. Although these insights from semantic typology have had a major impact on the field of psycholinguistics, they have been mostly neglected by the branch of cognitive neuroscience that studies how concepts are represented, organized, and processed in our brains. In Concepts in the Brain, David Kemmerer exposes this oversight and demonstrates its significance. He argues that as research on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge moves forward, it should, to the extent possible, expand its purview to embrace the broad spectrum of cross-linguistic variation in the lexical and grammatical representation of meaning. Otherwise, it will never be able to achieve a truly comprehensive, pan-human account of the cortical underpinnings of concepts. Richly illustrated and written in an accessible interdisciplinary style, the book begins by elaborating the different perspectives on concepts that currently exist in the parallel fields of semantic typology and cognitive neuroscience. It then shows how a synthesis of these approaches can lead to a more unified and inclusive understanding of several domains of concrete meaning--specifically, objects, actions, and spatial relations. Finally, it explores a number of intriguing and controversial issues involving the interplay between language, cognition, and consciousness.

A team of distinguished philosophers and psychologists explore the nature of phenomenal qualities, the qualities of conscious experiences, and the ways in which they fit in with our understanding of mind and reality. This volume offers an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to understand the nature of conscious experience.