The Hidden Spring

1. The Stuff of Dreams

• Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
  • The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
  • The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
• In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
• In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
  • Memory functions (they encode and store information)
  • Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
  • Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
• In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
• Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
• The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.

2. Before and After Freud

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3. The Cortical Fallacy

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4. What is Experienced?

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5. Feelings

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6. The Source

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7. The Free Energy Principle

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8. A Predictive Hierarchy

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9. Why and How Consciousness Arises

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10. Back to the Cortex

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11. The Hard Problem

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12. Making a Mind

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