[CTN] Announcing a new book by Founding CTN member Paul Thagard

[Britt Anderson]

As you will see on from the news item on the CTN home page
(https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-theoretical-neuroscience/) Paul Thagard
has a new book out:  Dreams, Jokes and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness.

To quote my news item:

The book provides:

-- Clear and empirically supported explanation of consciousness as resulting from four brain  mechanisms.

-- Application to a broad range of conscious experiences including smell, hunger, loneliness,  self-awareness, religious experience, sports performance, and romantic chemistry.

-- Use of these mechanisms to generate novel theories of dreaming, humor, and musical experience.

-- Proposal of a new theory of time consciousness drawing on recent advances in neuroscience.

-- Assessment of consciousness in non-human animals and machines, including the new generative  AI models such as ChatGPT.

-- Development of a new solution to the mind-body problem, called coherent materialism.

And in a preview of coming attractions, stay tuned for his next book AI Boom or Doom?  Philosophy and Psychology of the New Artificial Intelligence, to be published soon by MIT Press

For more information you can follow Paul´s blog.

Book site: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dreams-jokes-and-songs-9780198962359?facet_narrowbypubdate_facet=Last%203%20months&lang=en&cc=ck

Paul´s Blog: https://paulthagard.com/dreams-jokes-and-songs/

--
Britt Anderson, PhD & MD
Dept. of Psychology and Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience
University of Waterloo, Canada
https://brittlab.uwaterloo.ca