Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality [Paperback]

Does the brain create the mind, or is some external entity involved? In addressing this hard problem of consciousness, we face a central human challenge: what do we really know and how do we know it? Tentative answers in this book follow from a synthesis of profound ideas, borrowed from philosophy, religion, politics, economics, neuroscience, physics, mathematics, and cosmology, the knowledge structures supporting our meager grasps of reality. This search for new links in the web of human knowledge extends in many directions: the shadows of our thought processes revealed by brain imagining, brains treated as complex adaptive systems that reveal fractal-like behavior in the brain's nested hierarchy, resonant interactions facilitating functional connections in brain tissue, probability and entropy as measures of human ignorance, fundamental limits on human knowledge, and the central role played by information in both brains and physical systems.

InBrain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality, Paul Nunez discusses the possibility of deep connections between relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and consciousness: all entities involved with fundamental information barriers. Dr. Nunez elaborates on possible new links in this nested web of human knowledge that may tell us something new about the nature and origins of consciousness. In the end, does the brain create the mind? Or is the Mind already out there? You decide.

Chapter 1. Many Faces of Consciousness
Chapter 2. Ethics, Religion, and the Identity of Self
Chapter 3. States of Mind
Chapter 4. Why Hearts Don't Love and Brains Don't Pump
Chapter 5. EEG: A Window on the Mind
Chapter 6. Dynamic Patterns as Shadows of Thought
Chapter 7. Networks, Waves, and Resonant Binding
Chapter 8. The Limits of Science: What Do We Really Know?
Chapter 9. Modern Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness
Chapter 10. The Weird Behavior of Quantum Systems
Chapter 11. Ontological Il$