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Conscience
- The Origins of Moral Intuition
- Narrated by: Suzie Althens
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
In Conscience, Patricia S. Churchland, the distinguished founder of neurophilosophy, explores how moral systems arise from our physical selves in combination with environmental demands.
All social groups have ideals for behavior, even though ethics vary among different cultures and among individuals within each culture. In trying to understand why, Churchland brings together an understanding of the influences of nature and nurture. She looks to evolution to elucidate how, from birth, our brains are configured to form bonds, to cooperate, and to care. Conscience delves into scientific studies, particularly the fascinating work on twins, to deepen our understanding of whether people have a predisposition to embrace specific ethical stands. Research on psychopaths illuminates the knowledge about those who abide by no moral system and the explanations science gives for these disturbing individuals.
Churchland then turns to philosophy - that of Socrates, Aquinas, and contemporary thinkers like Owen Flanagan - to explore why morality is central to all societies, how it is transmitted through the generations, and why different cultures live by different morals. Her unparalleled ability to join ideas rarely put into dialogue brings light to a subject that speaks to the meaning of being human.
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- Ashraf Haddad
- 05-18-20
Started out well
The book started out strong with interesting science, but became more vague and less interesting as a book went on. She also did not seem to do much justice to the topic of free will as an illusion and its implications. I found the science of Robert Sapolsky and the philosophy of Sam Harris to have more direction in their respective works than Churchland did in this book.
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- Mike A Klotz
- 03-03-20
Made me think
a highly engaging book that should be used as a springboard to research the vast and varied world of consciousness. there are times when the author surely rubs the philosophical Elite the wrong way, and for that I applaud her.
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Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called “the rainbow colors” around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a 21st century treatise on human existence. Once criticized for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls here his most expansive and advanced theories on human behavior, recognizing that, even though the human and spider evolved similarly, the poet’s sonnet is wholly different than the spider’s web.
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Pleasant Humble Simple Rationalism
- By Michael on 03-14-15
By: Edward O. Wilson
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Rethinking Consciousness
- A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience
- By: Michael S. A. Graziano
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.
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Clueless on Many Fronts
- By wbiro on 12-10-19
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The Scientific Attitude
- Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience
- By: Lee McIntyre
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In this book, Lee McIntyre argues that what distinguishes science from its rivals is what he calls "the scientific attitude" - caring about evidence and being willing to change theories on the basis of new evidence. The history of science is littered with theories that were scientific but turned out to be wrong; the scientific attitude reveals why even a failed theory can help us to understand what is special about science.
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The Ghost in The Scientific Machinery
- By Cade Campbell on 06-20-19
By: Lee McIntyre
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From Eternity to Here
- The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 16 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Time moves forward, not backward---everyone knows you can't unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today's hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too. In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions before the Big Bang itself---a period of modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed.
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Great Book For Cosmology Lovers
- By Mardon on 10-24-11
By: Sean Carroll
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A Decent Life
- Morality for the Rest of Us
- By: Todd May
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In A Decent Life, May leads listeners through the traditional philosophical bases of a number of arguments about what ethics asks of us, then he develops a more reasonable and achievable way of thinking about them, one that shows us how we can use philosophical insights to participate in the complicated world around us. He explores how we should approach the many relationships in our lives - with friends, family, animals, people in need - through the use of a more forgiving, if no less fundamentally serious, moral compass.
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Simple and Inspirational
- By Anonymous User on 07-26-20
By: Todd May
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Conscience
- What It Is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who Differ
- By: Andrew David Naselli, D. A. Carson - foreword, J. D. Crowley
- Narrated by: Claton Butcher
- Length: 4 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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What do you do when you disagree with other Christians? How do you determine which convictions are negotiable and which are not? How do you get along with people who have different personal standards? All of these questions have to do with the conscience. Yet there is hardly a more neglected topic among Christians.
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understanding different ideas
- By Amazon Customer on 10-07-20
By: Andrew David Naselli, and others
Related to this topic
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Wild Justice
- The Moral Lives of Animals
- By: Marc Bekoff, Jessica Pierce
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male?
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What Some Of Us Have Always Known...
- By Douglas on 12-12-13
By: Marc Bekoff, and others
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The Blank Slate
- The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
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Don't bother. Outdated science & poor logic...
- By ejf211 on 03-31-10
By: Steven Pinker
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Primates and Philosophers
- How Morality Evolved
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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"It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality.In this provocative book, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world, emphasizing our "selfish" genes.
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Having Just Read...
- By Douglas on 12-14-13
By: Frans de Waal
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The Self Illusion
- Why There Is No "You" Inside Your Head
- By: Bruce Hood
- Narrated by: Bruce Hood
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Self Illusion provides a fascinating examination of how the latest science shows that our individual concept of a self is in fact an illusion. Most of us believe that we possess a self - an internal individual who resides inside our bodies, making decisions, authoring actions and possessing free will. The feeling that a single, unified, enduring self inhabits the body is compelling and inescapable. But that sovereignty of the self is increasingly under threat from science as our understanding of the brain advances.
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Disappointing
- By David R Pinsof on 05-10-12
By: Bruce Hood
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The Mind of the Market
- Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics
- By: Michael Shermer
- Narrated by: Michael Shermer
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Abridged
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The Mind of the Market will change the way we think about the economics of everyday life. Drawing on research from neuroeconomics, Michael Shermer explores what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and how trust is established in business. Utilizing experiments in behavioral economics, Shermer shows why people hang on to losing stocks and failing companies, why business negotiations often disintegrate into emotional tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy.
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Good ideas overshadowed by obnoxious polemics
- By Philo on 09-15-13
By: Michael Shermer
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Evolutionary Psychology: Bolinda Beginner Guides
- By: Robin Dunbar, John Lycett, Louise Barrett
- Narrated by: Miranda Nation
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Evolutionary Psychology is a uniquely accessible yet comprehensive guide to the study of the effects of evolutionary theory on human behaviour. Written specifically for the general listener and for entry-level students, it covers all the most important elements of this interdisciplinary subject, from the role of evolution in our selection of partner, to the influence of genetics on parenting. This audiobook draws widely on examples, case studies and background facts to convey a substantial amount of information.