Biophysics of Consciousness

A Foundational Approach

The problem of how the brain produces consciousness, subjectivity and "something it is like to be" remains one of the greatest challenges to a complete science of the natural world. While various scientists and philosophers approach the problem from their own unique perspectives and in the terms of their own respective fields, Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach attempts a consilience across disparate disciplines to explain how it is possible that an objective brain produces subjective experience.

This volume unites the crème de la crème of physicists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists in the attempt to understand consciousness through a foundational approach encompassing ontological, evolutionary, neurobiological, and Freudian interpretations with the focus on conscious phenomena occurring in the brain. By integrating the perspectives of these diverse disciplines with the latest research and theories on the biophysics of the brain, the book tries to explain how consciousness can be an adaptive and causal element in the natural world.

Contents:

• Preface
• Foreword: Addressing the Hard Problem of Consciousness
• Contributing Authors
• Neurobiological Naturalism
• The Evolutionary Origins of Consciousness
• How Language Evolution Reshaped Human Consciousness
• Consciousness by Surprise: A Neuropsychoanalytic Approach to the Hard Problem
• Can Qualitative Biophysics Solve the Hard Problem?
• The Causal Roots of Integration and the Unity of Consciousness
• The Holoinformational Foundations of Consciousness
• Neural Transition Dynamics and Conscious Perceptive States
• The Two-Brains Hypothesis: Implications for Consciousness
• The Origins of the Brain's Endogenous Electromagnetic Field and Its Relationship to Provision of Consciousness
• Consciousness as a Quantum Dynamic Effect
• Quantum Spin Formalism on Consciousness
• The "Quantum Underground": Where Life and Consciousness Originate
• Consciousness in the Universe — An Updated Review of the "Orch OR" Theory
• Index

Readership: Researchers in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, biophysics and quantum physics investigating conscious phenomena occurring in the brain.
Key Features:

• Almost all existing studies try to solve the problem of consciousness using subjects that are already conscious. This book offers new research and theories on how the subject gets to be conscious in the first place
• Features prominent contributors including Michael A Arbib (USC Brain Project, University of Southern California); John R Searle (University of California, Berkeley)