Books
From Sensing to Sentience
How Feeling Emerges from the Brain
A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain.
Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain.
Emergent properties are broadly defined as features of a complex system that are not present in the parts of a system when they are considered in isolation but may emerge as a system feature of those parts and their interactions. Tracing a journey of billions of years of evolution from life to the basic sensing capabilities of single-celled organisms up to the sentience of animals with advanced nervous systems, including all vertebrates (for instance, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals), arthropods (insects and crabs), and cephalopods (such as the octopus), Feinberg argues that sentience gradually but eventually emerged along diverse evolutionary lines with the evolution of sufficiently neurobiologically complex brains during the Cambrian period over 520 million years ago.
Ultimately, Feinberg argues that viewing sentience as an emergent process can explain both its neurobiological basis as well its perplexing personal nature, thus solving the historical philosophical problem of the apparent “explanatory gap” between the brain and experience.
Consciousness Demystified
Todd E. Feinberg MD and Jon M. Mallatt PhD
Demystifying consciousness: how subjective experience can be explained by natural brain and evolutionary processes.
2018
The Lost Self
Pathologies of the Brain and Identity
Todd E. Feinberg MD and Julian Paul Keenan (eds).
2005
Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology
Todd E. Feinberg MD, Martha J. Farah (eds.)
1st Ed, 1997; 2nd Ed, 2003
The Ancient Origins of Conciousness
How the Brain Created Experience
Todd E. Feinberg MD and Jon M. Mallatt PhD
2017
Biophysics of Consciousness
A Foundational Approach
by Roman R Poznanski (Author, Editor), Jack A Tuszynski (Author), Todd E Feinberg (Author, Editor), Jack Tuszynski (Editor)
2016
From Axons to Identity
Neurological Explorations of the Nature of the Self
Todd E. Feinberg MD
2009
