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eBook The Brain and the Meaning of Life ePub

by Paul Thagard

Author: Paul Thagard
Language: English
ISBN: 0691142726
ISBN13: 978-0691142722
Publisher: Princeton University Press; F First Edition edition (February 14, 2010)
Pages: 296
Category: Social Sciences
Subcategory: Other
Rating: 4.3
Votes: 501
Formats: azw lit rtf mobi
ePub file: 1820 kb
Fb2 file: 1254 kb

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What is the meaning of life, and how can we find happiness in it? Thagard employs the latest tools and findings .

What is the meaning of life, and how can we find happiness in it? Thagard employs the latest tools and findings of science in his attempts to answer these (and additional) questions. -Michael Shermer, Science. ―Gilbert Harman, Princeton University.

Thagard's answer to the meaning of life is mostly reasonable but highly incomplete in a potentially dangerous way. The problem is that all the 3 sources of meaning he cites can be quite unreliable. It's often hard to find significant meaning in a job, and that meaning is vulnerable to job loss/professional failure. The Brain and the Meaning of Life by Paul Thagard. The Brain and the Meaning of Life" is an ambitious book about answering some of the most important philosophical questions.

Электронная книга "The Brain and the Meaning of Life", Paul Thagard

Электронная книга "The Brain and the Meaning of Life", Paul Thagard. Эту книгу можно прочитать в Google Play Книгах на компьютере, а также на устройствах Android и iOS. Выделяйте текст, добавляйте закладки и делайте заметки, скачав книгу "The Brain and the Meaning of Life" для чтения в офлайн-режиме.

Paul Thagard’s 2010 book, The Brain and the Meaning of Life, is essentially a neuros . assault on religion is a regrettable diversion that runs throughout the book and. serves no purpose: either readers are already naturalistically inclined and ﬁnd dispara-

Paul Thagard’s 2010 book, The Brain and the Meaning of Life, is essentially a neuros-. cientiﬁcally informed argument for why and how the meaning of life can be found in. our love, work, and play (a triad borrowed from the psychologist Martin Seligman). serves no purpose: either readers are already naturalistically inclined and ﬁnd dispara-.

The meaning of life is an important question Our topic today is the meaning of life, and the first book you’ve chosen is Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error

The meaning of life is an important question. Our topic today is the meaning of life, and the first book you’ve chosen is Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error. Why is that top of your list? The book isn’t actually about the meaning of life, but it’s incredibly important for pursuing the topic in a useful way. It came out in 1994 and it had a huge impact. There are probably two main advances in the book that I hadn’t seen in previous work in philosophy or psychology or other fields.

The Brain and the Meaning of Life Princeton University Press, 2010 . ISBN 978-1-4008-3461-7. Paul Thagard, Coherence in Thought and Action (Bradford Book, 2000, ISBN 0-262-20131-3). Paul Thagard, Hot thought: Mechanisms and applications of emotional cognition, 2006. Thagard, P. and Verbeurgt, K. (1998).

Paul Thagard (1950 – ) is professor of philosophy, psychology, and computer science and director of the cognitive science program at the University of Waterloo in Canada

Paul Thagard (1950 – ) is professor of philosophy, psychology, and computer science and director of the cognitive science program at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His recent book, The Brain and the Meaning of Life (2010), is the first book length study of the implications of brain science for the philosophical question of the meaning of life. Thagard admits that he long ago lost faith in his childhood Catholicism, but that he still finds life meaningful. Like most of us, love, work, and play provide him with reasons to live

The philosopher Paul Thagard does not make the reader wait long for his answer to the question implicit in the title of his book, The Brain and the Meaning of Life. In the first chapter he reveals that meaning in a material world can be found in love, work, and play. This answer is not new. Love and work as sources of meaning in life are famously attributed to Sigmund Freud (mistakenly so, Thagard tells us in Chapter 7) and play or leisure to Aristotle

Why is life worth living? What makes actions right or wrong? What is reality and how do we know it? The Brain and the Meaning of Life draws on research in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to answer some of the most pressing questions about life's nature and value. Paul Thagard argues that evidence requires the abandonment of many traditional ideas about the soul, free will, and immortality, and shows how brain science matters for fundamental issues about reality, morality, and the meaning of life. The ongoing Brain Revolution reveals how love, work, and play provide good reasons for living.

Defending the superiority of evidence-based reasoning over religious faith and philosophical thought experiments, Thagard argues that minds are brains and that reality is what science can discover. Brains come to know reality through a combination of perception and reasoning. Just as important, our brains evaluate aspects of reality through emotions that can produce both good and bad decisions. Our cognitive and emotional abilities allow us to understand reality, decide effectively, act morally, and pursue the vital needs of love, work, and play. Wisdom consists of knowing what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it.

The Brain and the Meaning of Life shows how brain science helps to answer questions about the nature of mind and reality, while alleviating anxiety about the difficulty of life in a vast universe. The book integrates decades of multidisciplinary research, but its clear explanations and humor make it accessible to the general reader.

Mbon

I couldn't wait to finish this excellent book so I could finally write a review and recommend it to anyone looking for a rational, evidence-based justification for meaning of life and ways to determine it.

Thagard first explains how minds (appear to) work, and why there is no need to appeal to any supernatural explanation to explain them. I had heard about neural networks, of course, (who hasn't? - I also took some college psychology classes and have read several books about psychology) but never really understood how this model actually explains our minds. This book explained the idea so well that this revelation alone would have been worth the read.

The second part of the book takes the concepts of the first part (minds are brains, free will is an illusion) and builds upon them to discuss the big questions of morality and the meaning of life. How can we be moral if there's no free will? How can there be any meaning in life if we haven't been created for a particular purpose?

To answer these questions, the author not only describes the scientific point of view (often describing competing theories), but regularly switches to normative philosophic arguments to show what we "ought" to value (e.g. why we should trust the scientific method, or why we should reject moral relativism). This combination of science and philosophy creates real synergy and succeeds in offering a very intellectually and emotionally satisfying account of the mind and meaning of life.

I read Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape just before this book and found its argument for a scientific basis for objective morality lacking. This book succeeded in showing - with lucid style and dispassionate (in a good sense!) argumentation - that we can find meaning in life without resorting to supernatural ideas.

I can't put in words how much I enjoyed reading this book and how much it has strung a chord. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. If you've ever pondered the questions mentioned above, do yourself a favor and read this book!

Perilanim

Good item , and prompt delivery

kewdiepie

Professor Thagard has done a fine job of bringing together various research to support a hypothesis that love, work, and play are the basic elements of meaning in life.

Of course you still know little about meaning if you don't study and understand how he supports his conclusion. This is where Mr. Thagard messes things up a little. Much of the book is a repudiation of philosophical theories. This content would be fine of course in an academic paper but I found it is distracting in this book. I have nothing against picking on philosophers who base their work on speculation but I would have preferred this effort to be in later chapters instead of sprinkled throughout the book. They keep diverting a reader's attention from the well constructed flow.

I have studied the human relationship to meaning for decades but especially in the past dozen years. Thagard's hypothesis fits in nicely with what I've found if you take the definitions of love, play, and work liberally as he does. People can attach meaning to pretty much anything physical or non-physical. That they do that through love, work, and/or play is new to me but so far I've found the hypothesis works to explain what is happening in the real world - including religion.

For an explanation of love, work, and play in a religious context think of "Protestant work ethic", "Love one another", and the numerous fun activities and songs hosted by most religious groups.

Mr. Thagard is very clear about what issues are not yet supported by enough research. He doesn't have all the answers. However, as many of us know, the gaps in knowledge are closing fast. It is difficult to see at this time that closing those gaps will make a material difference in Thagard's conclusions. We seem to be close to game over.

At the time of this review there is an extensive review of the book by an obvious theist. He's upset that the religious concept of Free Will is under attack and that our concept of mind is actually within a physical brain. He looks to religion to explain what is now mostly explained by rational research. He also practices "religion of the gaps" - trying to use the remaining unanswered questions to justify his beliefs.

I understand his frustration but really folks, we've been in this situation at least hundreds of times in the past 400 years of scientific reasoning and research methods and theist opinions consistently fail to explain the real world -- including how non-theists have lots of meaning and morality in their lives. Thagard's work covers all the bases to the extent of existing research. However, there are still a few gaps left in the research and theists try hard to use those gaps to discredit scientifically supported hypotheses.

The theist reviewer believes that we need gods for morality. He has clearly missed out on the huge amount of research that supports another more compelling view that fits the real world. For example, he conveniently omits the results from dozens of research reports that some 96% of the prison population in the U.S. are now and were religious when they committed their crimes. While there is little evidence that religion causes crime (sorry atheists) there is no evidence to support that religion has morality benefits any greater than secular communities. This topic is discussed elsewhere in detail so I'll avoid it here but Thagard's work is supportive of that overwhelming evidence.

My favorite analogy about our minds being material within brains is the simple case of dementia and brain injuries. As the brain deteriorates humans clearly lose parts of their minds. (Same with chemical imbalances.) So when we die and our brains do the ultimate deterioration why are we supposed to suddenly have whole minds again? Theists, there is a pattern here that is a big gap in your hypothesis.

I'll favor Thagard's hypothesis unless a better explanation comes along - and that is also his view.

zzzachibis

Thagard takes philosophy and makes it practical. That is what philosophy was originally developed to do.

Out of all the many meanings a human can pursue, he focusses attention on just a few: meanings based on human needs.

Therefore, one need not despair. The situation is not hopeless.

Some of us need such clear guidance desperately.

Now we can access it here in this book.

If you care to validate the claims made in terms of even more extact analysis, consult Matter and Mind: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science).

For more on the influence neurotransmitters have on thinking, check out The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History.