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Contrary to popular rumor, brain science has not shown that souls are an illusion – not if by soul we mean what it is about a person that acts and thinks, often creatively, what makes choices and takes responsibility. The human self, as theories of emergence and complexity are teaching us, is among those complex realities not reducible to the sum of their humbler parts and predecessors. Neuropsychology and cognitive science make a powerful case for the soul, not as a wisp of smoke but as a dynamic reality emergent from our bodily capabilities. Examining perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity Goodman and Caramenico argue for a new humanism rooted in the philosophical and intellectual traditions of the West – and the East – but anchored in the latest scientific findings. Coming to Mind does not pit soul against body or body against soul, as though the work of understanding were a zero-sum game. They argue not for a separable soul, spiritual in name yet mysteriously able to pass through walls. Rather, they lay out a groundwork for understanding the intimate relation between the body (above all, the brain) and an integrated self capable of language and thought, discovery, caring, and love.

For over thirty years, the author of this book has studied the paranormal in everyday life, from extrasensory perception and psychokinesis to mediumship and materialization. The book is an account of his most memorable encounters with such phenomena. Here the author recounts in detail five particular cases—some that challenge our most fundamental scientific beliefs and others that expose our own credulousness—beginning with a south Florida woman who can make thin gold-colored foil appear spontaneously on her skin. He then travels to New York and California to test psychokinetic superstars—and frauds—such as Joe Nuzum, who claim to move objects using only their minds. Along the way, the author also investigates the allegations of K.R., a policeman in Annapolis who believes he can transfer images from photographs onto other objects—including his own body—and Ted Serios, a deceased Chicago elevator operator who could make a variety of different images appear on Polaroid film. Ultimately, the author considers his wife's surprisingly fruitful experiments with astrology, which she has used to guide professional soccer teams to the top of their leagues, as well as his own personal experiences with synchronicity—a phenomenon, he argues, that may need to be explained in terms of a refined, extensive, and dramatic form of psychokinesis.

Imagine these essays as cross-disciplinary field trips exploring the inscrutable digital networks and ineffable Big Data characterizing our uncertain times. Taken together, they trace a dark thread running through the bright techno-utopian rhetoric on AI, Alternative Realities, gene editing, cognitive enhancement. Addressing opaque inventions and ambiguous concepts—involving the technological, the theological, the neurological, the cultural—this book questions whether key contemporary arts and sciences have embraced a misunderstood “romantic” ideal of creativity without constraint or forethought, one resulting in enigmatic productions that are incomprehensible to a non-expert public. Seeking to fill a practical as well as a philosophical gap, these reflections ask, among other things, what are the ethical repercussions of the laboratory sciences becoming increasingly speculative or aestheticized while the experimental BioArts and computational New Media risk losing the qualitative self in the fathomless coding sciences. As an ensemble, then, these essays trace an arc from jewelry to robotics, painting to textiles, the chromatics of passion to projected displays. They demonstrate how artists shape cognizability by configuring shadowy experiences for which there are no ready words or numbers.

Princess Diana's death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, this book offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, the book reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In this historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes's rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. The book follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement this argument, the book also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances.