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An Italian philosopher, psychologist and robotics engineer, Manzotti presents an alternative and ecological hypothesis about how consciousness exists in the real world.
List of contents
1. The Spread Mind
1.1 What, where and when is experience?
1.2 Experience is the object
1.3 I am world
1.4 A better object?
1.5 Nothing appears, everything takes place
1.6 Appearance is reality
1.7 Shangri-La
2. The Spread Object
2.1 The fridge-light model of the object
2.2 Traditional and actual spread objects
2.3 Senses as multiple objects
2.4 Phenomenal is physical
2.5 The last Ptolemaic stand
2.6 Percipere est esse
3. The causal geometry of experience
3.1 Stretching over space and time
3.2 Glass, mirrors and beyond
3.3 A storage-less model of memory
3.4 Dreams and hallucinations as spatiotemporal kaleidoscopes
3.5 The causal argument revisited
3.6 Return to Shangri-La
4. Illusions
4.1 Proxy and alleged properties
4.2 Illusions as misbeliefs
4.3 A zoo of illusions
4.4 Benham's Top
4.5 A comparison with other accounts
5. Hallucinations and dreams
5.1 Ordinary and extraordinary hallucinations
5.2 Gerrymandered objects and direct brain stimulation
5.3 Double preemption
5.4 A continuum ¿ from objects to hallucinations
5.5 The common kind assumption
6. A zoo of objects and experiences
6.1 The myth of endogenous mental experience
6.2 Phosphenes and blindness
6.3 Visual images and congenitally blinds
6.4 Geometric hallucinations
6.5 Impossible, forbidden and Martian colors
6.6 Additions and subtractions
6.7 Afterimages
6.8 The myth of supersaturated red
6.9 Filling in
6.10 Innate phantom limbs
7. Joint causation and wholes
7.1 Actual existence
7.2 Objects and wholes
7.3 Joint causation
7.4 No time, no wholes
7.5 The cause of the cause is the effect
8. The spread now
8.1 The present is not punctual
8.2 The spread now
8.3 Now is relative and multiple
8.4 Present is near past and past is far present
8.5 Pastness has no color
8.6 The time-gap argument
8.7 Time is an ocean, the present is its shore
9. In nature, identity is the only relation
9.1 A is A
9.2 Thou shalt have no other relations before me
9.3 Kinds of representations
9.4 Brains as world makers
10. Look at the universe and you'll see yourself
References
About the author
RICCARDO MANZOTTI is a Professor of Philosophy at IULM University in Milan, Italy. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT. He holds a PhD in robotics, is the author of 50 papers on the basis of consciousness, artificial intelligence, machine consciousness and perception. He is the webmaster of consciousness.it and thespreadmind.com. His published work addresses the nature of the self and the meshing of technology and consciousness. Over a period of many months, The
New York Review of Books Daily has posted an extended series of conversations between Manzotti and the novelist Tim Parks, in which the two attempt to dissect the nature of consciousness.
