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The Ego Tunnel
- The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
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Publisher's summary
But if the self is not "real," why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability?
In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.
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Solitude, Showers and Awe, Oh My!
- By Gillian on 01-05-16
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Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, Wallace, a pioneer of modern consciousness research, offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physics and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism.
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Great companion piece to Anathem by Stephenson
- By Kal on 02-20-09
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The Perfect You
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There are a lot of personality tests out there designed to label you and put you in a particular box. But Dr. Caroline Leaf says there's much more to you than a personality profile can capture. In fact, you cannot be categorized! In this fascinating book, she takes listeners through seven steps to rediscover and unlock their unique "you quotient".
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Hands down, the most helpful book I've listened to
- By Rose O'Connor on 07-31-17
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Should be "next-up" on your reading list!
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With Dream Yoga, Andrew Holecek guided us into Tibetan Buddhism’s nocturnal path to lucid dreaming. Here, he offers in-depth instruction in the tradition’s daytime practices. “Waking experience is also a type of dream”, teaches Holecek, “and things are not as solid and real as we think. This insight is what transforms a non-lucid life into a lucid one.” For those drawn to Tibet’s profound teachings for awakening to the true nature of reality - in the day or night - this guide shows us the way.
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Highly enjoyable, but how useful is it actually to spiritual practice?
- By Sunyata on 11-11-21
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The Age of Insight
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A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind - our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions - and how mind and brain relate to art.
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Worth the listen
- By Amazon Customer on 01-28-19
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The Mind of God
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Is there a God? It's a question billions of people have asked since the dawn of time. You would think by now we'd have a satisfactory, universal answer. No such luck...or maybe we do and we just need to look in the right place. For Dr. Jay Lombard that place is the brain, and more importantly the mind, that center of awareness and consciousness that creates reality. In The Mind of God, Dr. Lombard employs case studies from his own behavioral neurology practice to explore the spiritual conundrums that we all ask ourselves.
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Keenly insightful
- By Rick Smith on 09-30-19
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Philosophy of Mind
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In this lively and entertaining introduction to the philosophy of mind, Edward Feser explores the questions central to the discipline, and relates them not only to the human brain and its capacity for thought, but also to the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence. This in-depth primer is an account of all the most important and significant attempts that have been made to answer the riddles of consciousness and thought.
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Author is a Christian apologist, and it shows
- By David Penn on 08-30-15
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About Behaviorism
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About Behaviorism is about the controversial philosophy known as behaviorism, written by its leading exponent.
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Refreshing and concise
- By Autumn and Sam on 07-30-22
By: B.F. Skinner
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Don't buy - visual examples missing, no pdf
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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
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What listeners say about The Ego Tunnel
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- Antti-Ville
- 03-23-16
Awesome
Still a way ahead of time. The Ego tunnel is a metzingers tour de force. Highly recommended, if you can handle it
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- Rodrigo Oliveri
- 06-21-18
Excelent
I really enjoy The book and Metzinger's depth un every topic. It was a mind blowing audiobook, very well narrated
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1 person found this helpful
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- Michael
- 07-30-20
Ego Tunnel
What an incredibly fascinating and thought-provoking book. I'm afraid of simplifying the ideas, but for the sake of those trying to decide if they're interested, it's basically saying that our sense of self is a symbolic representation, created by the brain in order to manage and interact with the world around us, which is also represented in the brain (as opposed to being a direct experience of reality, whatever that may be). "I" and "the world" are therefore nothing more than two extremes in a symbolic tunnel. By implication, the self isn't real--we don't actually exist, in other words, at least not in the way we think we do. The basic ideas are elaborated in chapters on dreams and lucid dreaming, artificial intelligence, psychoactive drugs, and experiments having to do with so-called phantom limbs. It ends with a forward-looking discussion about the ethics of consciousness.
The narrator's voice and delivery are just right. He sounds like he could actually be a scientist or a philosopher--nerdy, but impassioned.
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- Joe Leiman
- 05-01-19
great topic
the author makes some opinionated statements that are based on scientific research.
Author tries to balance scientific jargon with and everyday understanding of how the brain in the mind works.
the author senses that ethics is the major frontier to investigate and create societally acceptable frameworks to address new problems stemming from our new capabilities and our new science of consciousness.
the author speculates on a vision for the future which is necessarily individualist. I'm not sure this is supported. the author extrapolates on the benefits from an individual perspective, but doesn't give enough consideration to the benefits to society or the possible exploitations of the state.
not does the author address the intellectual imbalance between human and digital forms of intelligence. can't blame him for that.
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- Hasan
- 01-14-10
explorations on the margins of self
Strongly recommend this excellent work which brings modern neurobiological research and its philosophical implications.Reflections on broad spectrum which ranges From the formation of concsiousness to the rise of sense of self,future of sense of self and how this would play out in technology,economy and culture in near and distant future.This book is full of new ideas or new angles of looking at age old problems i,e consciousness,self,will and so on and so forth.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Stanley Jungleib
- 03-20-18
"I know what you have been reading."
I hope evermuch that the text is filled with references, as otherwise this is a summary of namedrops and buzzwords from oher popular texts. He flies across traditional issues without conclusion, or worse, into simple dogma of the inevitablity of the rule of neuroscience. He goes apeshit on our limited senses, while discounting features such as our incredible pitch discrimination. Complains of scattered data but doesn't realize he's describing the missing operating system. Oddly admits viability of Mysterian acount. Simply discard all concepts of subjectivity, consciousness and mind in favor of materialism, full stop. The payoff? nothing less than the NCC to the entire universe. Absolute determinism. You don't exist.
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- Paul
- 01-28-13
The Beginning of a Moral Storm
Lots of folks would be really angry if the scientific community said human beings were no more than very exotic machines. Yet as philosophers team up with neuro-scientists they are explaining the formerly unexplainable (perhaps spiritual) with measurable physical processes. To equate feelings with a chemical reaction in the brain is hard for some of us to believe. Yet what many humans believe about reality is also hard to believe. And so I found this book reached out to meet some of my own beliefs by treating philosophy and science less like oil and water.
It's hard to envision that all your reality is going on in your brain/mind based on a model you have evolved there from the many, many stimuli you've accumulated since birth. I can't share in your model but it's there in a tangible form of chemical and molecular configurations. But in very, very, very tiny ways neurobiologists are beginning to be able to read your mind/brain.
The Ego Tunnel reminds us that we are really living inside our heads because the flow of sights, sounds, feelings, etc. all end up in our brains where we manage it all into some sense (a model) of who we are, what is all about us and how we relate to it and them.
At this point in the book it's pretty easy to say, "So what." and switch to a murder mystery to listen to. But what I take away from this book is that you don't need more than a mixture of chemical elements to build a senescent being. This shakes up a lot of philosophical and spiritual thinkers who always added a non-material item to the physical ingredients that make up human beings. Can chemistry do what only spirit was supposed to be able to do?
Perhaps I am reading too much into the Ego Tunnel but I kinda like the ideas it is investigating.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jay
- 09-16-12
Everything about this book sounds good...but...
What did you like best about The Ego Tunnel? What did you like least?
I try and finish a book even if I don't like it too much. However, I gave up on this book at the end of part 1, making it one of the few books I've purchased and not finished.
The subject matter is interesting. The reader did a good job. Based on my recent reading history, this should have been a four or five-star read for me.
The book is very technical and moves at a fast pace, and for some reason, it is like there are no points made...at junctures in the book where there should have been more of a point made, in my opinion.
I don't mind technical, it is one of the reasons I picked this book, because I wanted it to be scientific. But, there is something about the pace of the book, the jargon used, and the lack of solid conclusions that made this a very hard book to focus on. If words went in my ears, it was translated to something like, "blah, blah, blah."
A battle of (free) wills? I did really try to follow this book, but it was like that little man in my head kept whispering, "turn it off."
Note that I did give it three stars, because it isn't a total waste of time. Several areas were covered that made me want to explore them deeper in the future.
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
Slow it down a little bit, and make a little more effort at actually making a point instead of just presenting information at breakneck speed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-11-18
fantastic book, extremely insightful.
fantastic book, extremely insightful. loved the author. I had heard him in talks before on YouTube, which lead me to this book, which I loved. a little hard to follow at times, but well worth the effort!
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- Arthur Prilutzki
- 09-04-17
Very nice
This book pauses a lot of interesting questions on the way we understand our consciousness.
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