![]() Then, I proceed to Banks’s early mainstream novel, "The Bridge" (1986), in order to explain why for Banks dreams are not the products of a Freudian unconscious, but an altered state of awareness. First, I focus on "The Player of Games"(1988), Banks’s early science-fiction novel, in order to argue that the Scottish writer perceives visceral sensations and affects as the building blocks of “higher,” autobiographical self-awareness. ![]() In my analysis I discuss Iain Banks’s ideas concerning the genesis and the function of consciousness. ![]() Scientists, artists, writers, and philosophers alike began to inquire about the substrates of self-awareness, asking whether a gap really exists between what is natural and what is cultural. Publications like, for instance, Jean-Pierre Changeux’s "Neuronal Man" (1985), Antonio Damasio’s "Descartes’ Error" (1994) or Joseph LeDoux’s "Synaptic Self" (2002) incited a paradigm shift in the ways we think about the mind, finally bringing the studies of consciousness into the biological context (Nalbantian 2011, 3). ![]() By rejecting dualisms and transcendent qualities of the mind promoted by philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes, Kant or Freud, in the late 1980s neuroscientists and philosophers began to define themselves as both materialists and monists. ![]()
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