Consciousness is a fundamentally important neurological capacity which is also of great relevance to ethical thinking and decision-making. The scientific basis of consciousness, and the philosophical questions raised by scientific discoveries about consciousness, have both attracted intense interest over recent decades. This chapter provides a wide-ranging review of the topic. It first considers the principal senses of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness,” acknowledging that both terms are as much colloquial as scientific: “consciousness” is used to refer first, to the waking state and second, to the contents of current experience or awareness; “self-consciousness” can be used to refer to self-perception, self-monitoring, self-recognition, the awareness of one’s own and others’ minds, and the capacity for mental time travel. Next, we review the biological basis of conscious states and conscious contents. The third section presents a taxonomy of states of altered consciousness. The fourth section reviews the major current overarching theories of consciousness. Finally we examine the main philosophic accounts of the relationship between consciousness and neural activity, emphasizing three strong but sometimes conflicting intuitions about consciousness: that it is a robust phenomenon, has a physical basis in neuronal activity, and plays a role in the control of behavior.
Consciousness is a fundamentally important neurological capacity which is also of great relevance to ethical thinking and decision-making. The scientific basis of consciousness, and the philosophical questions raised by scientific discoveries about consciousness, have both attracted intense interest over recent decades. This chapter provides a wide-ranging review of the topic. It first considers the principal senses of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness,” acknowledging that both terms are as much colloquial as scientific: “consciousness” is used to refer first, to the waking state and second, to the contents of current experience or awareness; “self-consciousness” can be used to refer to self-perception, self-monitoring, self-recognition, the awareness of one’s own and others’ minds, and the capacity for mental time travel. Next, we review the biological basis of conscious states and conscious contents. The third section presents a taxonomy of states of altered consciousness. The fourth section reviews the major current overarching theories of consciousness. Finally we examine the main philosophic accounts of the relationship between consciousness and neural activity, emphasizing three strong but sometimes conflicting intuitions about consciousness: that it is a robust phenomenon, has a physical basis in neuronal activity, and plays a role in the control of behavior.
This book describes and analyses the history of Dutch mathematics education from the point of view of the changing motivations behind the teaching of mathematics over a 200 year period. During the course of the 19th century, mathematics in the Netherlands developed from a topic for practitioners into a school topic that was taught to almost all pupils of secondary education. As mathematics teaching gradually lost its practical orientation and became more and more motivated on the basis of its supposed formative value, the HBS (Hogere Burgerschool), the Dutch variant of the German Realschule, became the dominant school of thought for mathematics pedagogy. This book examines the gradual development of the field, culminating in the country-wide adoption of Realistic Mathematics Education as the new method of mathematics teaching. This book is important for anyone who is interested in the history of mathematics education. It provides an interesting perspective on the development of mathematics education in a country that, in many aspects, went its own way.
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