There are roughly 200,000 patients in the United States trapped in the borderlands between consciousness and oblivion. Until recently, most doctors believed that recovering from this condition was not possible. Vegetative states were considered permanent after three months if the injury was caused by oxygen deprivation, or one year if it was caused by blunt trauma. And since minimally conscious patients did not fare much better than those who were vegetative, most doctors did not bother to draw the distinction.
But in the past decade, a series of developments have coalesced into a far more complicated picture than previously imagined. In 2003, an Arkansas man named Terry Wallis emerged, after 19 years, from a minimally conscious state. Neuroimaging suggested that his brain had essentially reconfigured itself — surviving neurons bypassed dead ones and forged new connections to one another.
It's hard to know what to make of these claims. On the one hand, we know that the brain is easily coaxed into hallucinatory states that are taken to be reality: just think of your visually rich, bizarre-but-fully-believed nighttime dreams. On the other hand, although we know a great deal about the details of neurobiology, we have little scientific insight into the existence of private subjective experience -- that is, how cells and chemicals achieve consciousness.
Things about consciousness, spirituality and psychic research.
Mavericks of the Mind and Voices from the Edge contain thought-provoking interviews with over forty of the leading thinkers of our time on the subject of consciousness.
How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? And why do we value it so highly? In Soul Dust, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, a leading figure in consciousness research, proposes a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the "soul niche."
The hundredth monkey effect is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behavior spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number is reached. By generalization it means the instantaneous, paranormal spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lawrence Blair and Lyall Watson in the mid-to-late 1970s, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the myth is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources who have themselves misrepresented the original observations.
J.W.Dunne ("Intrusions?," "The Jumping Lions of Borneo," "Serial Universe") first published his ground-breaking theory of time in 1927. Spurred by dreams and other personal experiences to an intense interest in the nature of time and human perception, Dunne designed an experiment whose purpose was to isolate the barrier dividing our knowledge of the past from that of the future. Conversant with the concepts and language of physics - which he deemed inadequate to describe a world that is largely experiential - Dunne weaves an intriguing, intelligent, and convincing theory that has earned him a place of honor among the twentieth century's brightest minds
Dunne's theory, elaborated from years of experiments into precognitive dreams and induced precognitive states, is that in reality all time is eternally present, that is, that past, present and future are all happening together in some way. Human consciousness, however, experiences this simultaneity in linear form. Dunne posits that in the dreaming state this way of interpreting time ceases to be as concrete as when we are awake. Thus we are capable of having what we call precognitive dreams as consciousness finds itself free to roam across past, present and future. From this Dunne posited that we exist on two levels ourselves, both inside and outside time, thus suggesting the notion of Immortality contained in his later books The New Immortality and Nothing Dies.
This TOE is not about uniting gravity with the other forces of nature. There is no mention of gravity at all. It is about a much bigger picture than that: exploring how Consciousness is at the heart of reality -indeed, how Consciousness is reality, and how our Physical Matter Reality (PMR) is a very small Virtual reality (VR) within the larger consciousness system. At its core, MBT is a work of metaphysics built on scientific principles.
If the conscious self is an illusion – who is it that's being fooled?
Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of The Illuminati (ISBN 1-56184-003-3) is the first book in the Cosmic Trigger series, first published in 1977 and the first of a three-volume autobiographical and philosophical work by Robert Anton Wilson.
Predating all organized religion, the belief in an afterlife is fundamental to the human experience and dates back at least to the Neanderthals. By the mid-19th century, however, spurred by the progress of science, many people began to question the existence of an afterlife, and the doctrine of materialism--which believes that consciousness is a creation of the brain--began to spread. Now, using scientific evidence, Chris Carter challenges materialist arguments against consciousness surviving death and shows how near-death experiences (NDEs) may truly provide a glimpse of an awaiting afterlife.
Closer To Truth is the definitive series on Cosmos, Consciousness and God, a global journey in search of the vital ideas of existence. It is the most complete, compelling, and accessible series on Cosmos, Consciousness and God ever produced for television.
But Dr. Tononi’s theory is, potentially, very different. He and his colleagues are translating the poetry of our conscious experiences into the precise language of mathematics. To do so, they are adapting information theory, a branch of science originally applied to computers and telecommunications. If Dr. Tononi is right, he and his colleagues may be able to build a “consciousness meter” that doctors can use to measure consciousness as easily as they measure blood pressure and body temperature. Perhaps then his anesthesiologist will become interested.
In Mind in Life Evan Thompson aims to assemble a framework for cognitive science that will begin to harmonize biology and phenomenology so as to help close the notorious "explanatory gap" between consciousness and nature. Thompson does not claim to close this gap completely, but to "enrich the philosophical and scientific resources we have for addressing" it (p. x). It may not yet be easy to tell how much headway has been made on the problem of the gap. But we should acknowledge what Thompson has clearly achieved: a remarkable and complex synthesis, in which phenomenology as he understands it is joined with what he calls "embodied dynamicism" in a manner that helps define an important emerging vision of the place of consciousness in nature.
In this clip, philosopher John Searle discusses his approach to the mind-body problem known as "biological naturalism." Searle believes that neither dualism nor materialism can adequately account for consciousness, but that the mind can still be studied as a purely biological phenomena.
Patricia Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher working at the University of California, San Diego. She is associated with a school of thought in the philosophy of mind called eliminativism (or eliminative materialism), which argues that folk-psychological concepts such as belief, free will, and consciousness will likely need to be revised as science understands more about the nature of brain function.
The last great mystery of science; the most baffling problem in the science of the mind; this is how scientists talk about consciousness, but what if our conscious experience is all a grand illusion?
The "user illusion" in computing is the desktop graphical user interface (GUI): the friendly, comprehensible illusion presented to the user to conceal all the bouncing bits and bytes that do the actual work. Tor Nrretranders writes that "our consciousness is a user illusion for ourselves and the world ... one's very own map of oneself and one's possibilities of intervening in the world." Much of Nrretranders' evidence comes from comparing the wide bandwidth of experience to the narrow bandwidth of consciousness, and from examining how much of our brain function is never consciously acknowledged. Although slightly out of date (the book was written in 1991; it was a bestseller in Europe), The User Illusion has been well translated and gives a refreshing, non-Anglophone take on a problem that is not likely to go away anytime soon.
OpenSourceScience is a public space for managing controversial scientific experiments in a way that provides open access to of all phases of the research. We provide a centralized resource for scientific collaboration, and help underwrite scientifically rigorous experiments that may contribute to an improved understanding of human consciousness.
Chalmers is known for being an avid critic of physicalism, believing that reductive approaches to the mind fail to appreciate the fundamental nature of consciousness. He is most widely known for sparking a revival of interest in property dualism, philosophical zombies, and for his formulation of the "Hard Problem of Consciousness."
Knowledge of the brain is increasing exponentially. We are currently gathering as much information on the brain's structure and function each year as was gained in the entire 20th century. Neuroscientists are currently producing about 50,000 peer-reviewed articles per year. The Blue Brain project was launched in part to organize and coordinate this research.
A Campbell River man has received $63,000 in damages for an "out-of-body experience" in which he said he saw God after being accidentally overdosed with the painkiller Ketamine while recovering from back surgery in Vancouver General Hospital.
Richard Dawkins speaks about subjective consciousness.
The answer appeared to be that our unconscious responses are far quicker than our conscious ones. A stimulus applied to the skin produces an 'evoked potential' or EP in the brain within tens of milliseconds, and that seems to be enough for it to register unconsciously but effectively. A series of experiments have shown that we register unconsciously a whole host of things which may influence our response to events but which never cross the threshold into consciousness. Among other evidence, Libet quotes experiments which show that a conditioned response - a blink - can be created to events which the subject is never actually conscious of. The remarkable phenomenon of blindsight might perhaps be seen as a related case.
Quantum weirdness: What we call 'reality' is just a state of mind A lifetime studying quantum mechanics has convinced Bernard d'Espagnat that the world we perceive is merely a shadow of the ultimate reality
High levels of brain energy are required to maintain consciousness, a finding which suggests a new way to understand the properties of this still mysterious state of being, Yale University researchers report.
According to Theosophy, nature does not operate by chance. Every event, past or present, happens because of laws which are part of a universal paradigm. Theosophists hold that everything, living or not, is put together from basic building blocks evolving towards consciousness.
The classic response to this mental wrangling -- whether relatively trivial or deadly serious -- is to try and forget about it, push it to the back of our minds or some other variation on the theme. Unfortunately counter to our intuition about what should work, psychological research has discovered in the last twenty years that this approach is not just wrong, but has the potential to make the situation worse.
Now, I still think there is a very large accumulation of evidence supporting the after-death survival of the individual's personality. I'm not disputing that evidence or the most parsimonious conclusion to be drawn from it -- namely, that personal survival is a reality in many (possibly all) instances. I'm just wondering how much it really matters.
But consider: the refrigerator, stove, and everything else are composed of a shimmering swarm of matter/energy. Quantum theory ... tells us that not a single one of those subatomic particles actually exists in a definite place. Rather, they merely exist as a range of probabilities that are unmanifest. In the presence of an observer -- that is, when you go back in to get a drink of water -- each one's wave function collapses and it assumes an actual position, a physical reality.
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness -- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
A blog dedicated to philosophical musings.
One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human braina mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vaultcan contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. "Who am I" is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems.
A physician and cell biologist who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work describing the structure of antibodies, Edelman is now obsessed with the enigma of human consciousness—except that he does not see it as an enigma. In Edelman’s grand theory of the mind, consciousness is a biological phenomenon and the brain develops through a process similar to natural selection. Neurons proliferate and form connections in infancy; then experience weeds out the useless from the useful, molding the adult brain in sync with its environment.
A study published last year in neurology journal Brain re-examined these experiences by deliberately triggering them by electrically stimulating the brain. The participants were all patients with epilepsy who were having neurosurgery to treat their otherwise untreatable seizures and the researchers, led by neurologist Jean-Pierre Vignal, specifically stimulated areas in the mesial [inner] temporal lobes.
Greenfield's own theory of consciousness is influenced by her experience working with drugs and mental diseases. Unlike some other scientists -- most notably the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague Christof Koch, a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech -- who believed that different aspects of consciousness like visual awareness are encoded by specific neurons, Greenfield thinks that consciousness involves large groups of nonspecialized neurons scattered throughout the brain.
Philosophers have always been concerned with the mind. What is consciousness? Representation? Emotion? Now that neuroscience is making headway on these same questions, we should ask: how should philosophy and neuroscience relate? John and Ken discuss this question and more as they delve into neuroscientifically-minded philosophy.
The New Scientist has the skinny on the latest salvo in the war on Darwin: a resurrection of Cartesian dualism, with the idea that the brain is a physical object, but the mind that inhabits it is made from some kind of ghostly jesusite-235 that conclusively proves the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy in a white robe and beard:.
Given that the brain has about 100 billion neurons, consciousness is most likely an emergent property of these hierarchical and combinatoric neuronal connections. How, precisely, the NCC produce qualia remains to be explained, but Koch’s scientific approach, in my opinion, is the only one that will solve the hard problem.
Buddhist Geeks is a weekly audio show that presents ground-breaking interviews and discussions with Buddhist teachers, scholars, and advanced practitioners. Combining ancient wisdom with modern technology, Buddhist Geeks aims to catalyze a community of practice committed to awakening. Discover the emerging face of Western Buddhism.
Crick's controversial message, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules" [2] has caused some controversy over the physiological approach.
An interview with 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons.
While musing over yesterday's post on the use of psychological language as a form of a magician's misdirection, I remembered Dennett's 2003 article [pdf] on consciousness where he uses exactly this as a metaphor for why consciousness doesn't exist as some scientists think it does. Dennett argues that the 'hard problem' is a red herring - the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.
It's been more than a year since John Hayes, a professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola College, ingested psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. He claims that the series of three eight-hour highs, administered—in a laboratory-turned-living room at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore—have made him a calmer, less fearful person. "It gave me this sense that space and time are human constructions that can collapse," says Hayes, 59. "The ultimate reality is something beyond those constructions, and more importantly, everything in the world is connected."
Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry—but even before studying the scientific literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be.
The article looks at how the self has been related to our ability to make narratives out of the disconnected events in our lives, and particularly focuses on the theories of philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur.
Warren is an engaging field guide in these adventures, and The Head Trip will interest anyone curious about the black box of consciousness. In the interview below, he explains why dreaming is bananas, why we shouldnt listen too seriously to the evolutionary psychologists Just-So stories, and why we should think more explicitly about our habits of mind.
Seed (subtitled Beneath the Surface, then Science Is Culture) is a science magazine published bimonthly by Seed Media Group and distributed internationally. Each issue looks at big ideas in science, important issues at the intersection of science and society, and the people driving global science culture.
IEEE Spectrum magazine is the flagship publication of the IEEE, the world's largest professional technology association. It is a monthly magazine for technology innovators, business leaders, and the intellectually curious. Spectrum explores future technology trends and the impact of those trends on society and business.
Neuromythology is the shibboleth of cognitive science that the mind is a machine, and that somehow our theories of information, complexity, patterns or representations are sufficient to explain consciousness. Tallis accuses cognitive scientists, and philosophers of cognitive science such as Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett, of the careless use of words which can apply both to thinking and to non-thinking systems ('computing', 'goals', 'memory', for example). This obfuscation "provides a framework within which the real problems can be by-passed and the illusion of progress maintained".
Many scientists have denied any evolutionary significance to human consciousness, dismissing it as illusory smoke dancing above the fire of real neurochemistry. But Donald sees in consciousness the very key to understanding how humankind developed. After assaulting (with great panache) the arguments commonly deployed to remove it from the research agenda, Donald presents a natural history for consciousness, focusing particularly on its astonishing and clearly unique complexity among human beings-- Why does the human brain so closely resemble those of other primates yet so dramatically outstrip them in capacity?
Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.
Shaun Gallagher is a philosopher of mind who has made it his business to study and meet with leading neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod and Chris Frith. The result is this unique introduction to the study of the mind, with topics ranging over consciousness, emotion, language, movement, free will and moral responsibility. The discussion throughout is illustrated by lengthy extracts from the authors many interviews with his scientist colleagues on the relation between the mind and the brain.
The Phenomenological Mind is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include: * What is phenomenology? * naturalizing phenomenology and the empirical cognitive sciences * phenomenology and consciousness * consciousness and self-consciousness, including perception and action * time and consciousness, including William James, Edmund Husserl and temporal disorders in psychopathology * intentionality * the embodied mind * action * knowledge of other minds * situated and extended minds * phenomenology and personal identity. Interesting and important examples are used throughout, including phantom limb syndrome, blindsight and self-disorders in schizophrenia, making the Phenomenological Mind an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind.
"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the Mind at Large this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual," he said. But LSD was, by 1968, becoming available to all, and seemed, for a time, a thing that could change the world.
Despite Steve Paulson's gushing over the Ken Wilber he still inadvertently shows us what most rational folks already know; that this new age emperor has no clothes. Take this question: So where does God fit into this picture? Do you believe in God? I won't torture you with his answer because you can read it your self but Ken Wilber goes into a 166 word mealy-mouthed reply that confirms his new age credentials despite any criticism he may have of the mainstream Pooh-Bahs of the movement.
As several letter-writers have pointed out, Wilbur confuses feelings of transcendence that can arise from meditation/religious experiences, as well as from mind-altering substances, with primary evidence for some sort of reality. Such experiences ARE evidence for something -- the way in which the brain reacts to certain types of stimuli/contexts -- and more critically, the kinds of subjective experiences that result. As such, the study of trans-rational states of consciousness can be extremely useful in understanding brain function and the neural bases of consciousness.
Welcome to Spelkeland, or, to give it its proper name, the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, run by the cognitive psychologist Prof Elizabeth Spelke, which is dedicated to understanding what shapes the most powerful known learning machine - the infant mind. Great philosophers have mused for millennia about human consciousness and how it makes sense of its surroundings. Like any good scientist, Spelke has turned philosophical hot air into firm experimental data that suggests that we are born with a significant amount of 'core knowledge' hardwired into our brains.
The sociology of knowledge a la Berger and Luckmann is not about the history of ideas, the economic origin of ideologies, the social process of education, the study of intellectuals, religious Gnostics, or secret societies, or social theories per se. Rather, the intriguing concern of the authors is what they call everyday knowledge or common sense knowledge that is constructed at different levels of society all the way from language, to family history and memories, to children's folk tales, proverbs, and legends, to workplace and professional ideologies, to formal theories and paradigms, and finally to what they call symbolic universes or over-arching world views.
Berger is perhaps best known for his view that social reality is a form of consciousness. Central to Berger's work is the relationship between society and the individual. In his book The Social Construction of Reality, Berger develops a sociological theory: 'Society as Objective Reality and as Subjective Reality'. His analysis of society as subjective reality describes the process by which an individual's conception of reality is produced by his or her interaction with social structures. He writes about how new human concepts or inventions become a part of our reality (a process he calls reification)
"Consciousness Studies" has a problem with its boundaries. If you're trying to get a science of consciousness going, what do you leave out? There has been some good rigorous stuff here at the Tucson conference: brain imaging, neuroscience, experimental psychology of a pretty traditional sort, solid philosophy. Obviously, though, a topic like this is going to attract some New Ageism, magic-mushroom types, and the sort of people whose claims get lengthily debunked in Skeptic magazine. How many of them should you let in?
Our brains are shaping our decisions long before we become consciously aware of them. That's the conclusion of a remarkable new study which shows that patterns of activity in certain parts of our brain can predict the outcome of a decision seconds before we're even aware that we're making one.
Quantum consciousness and research into the mechanism of consciousness.
Burgeoning advancements in brain science are opening up new perspectives on how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, it is now possible to explore consciousnessthe very center of human concernby scientific means. In this illuminating book, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a new theory of knowledge based on striking scientific findings about how the brain works. And he addresses the related compelling question: Does the latest research imply that all knowledge can be reduced to scientific description?
Take a trip through the topography of the brain, and you're likely to get lost somewhere around the medulla oblongata. Zen can lose you before you've even pretzeled your legs into the lotus position. But a unique neurologist-Zen Buddhist has written a tome that is a map to all the mysteries of meditation and mind. Take breathing out, for example. We spend just over half of our breathing time exhaling. For meditating monks, it's a full three-quarters. EEGs show us that the act of exhaling helps physically quiet the brain. Many other causal connections can be found between Zen practices and the physiology of the brain, and James H. Austin lays them out one by one, drawing from his own Zen experiences and the latest in neurological research.
Program for the Quantum Mind conference in Salzburg, Austria.
The eighth biennial Tucson conference continues an interdisciplinary tradition of intense, far-ranging and rigorous discussions on all approaches to the fundamental issue of how the brain produces conscious experience.
Promoting open, rigorous discussion of all phenomena related to conscious experience.
Nat Bletter, an ethnobotanist and herbal healer, speaks from his experiences with the shamanic Amazonian plant medicine, Ayahuasca, the all "spirit vine." This video was shot on January 25, 2007 at Eyebeam, in NYC.
The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.
The latest evidence shows that, when it comes to consciousness, the brain simply doesn't work the way computer scientists think it does. Almost nothing is known about how the brain produces awareness, and current models of brain function don't accord with the little that is known.
First published more than 20 years ago and now with a new introduction by the author, this classic work presents the methods and conclusions of more than 25 years of experimentation with the isolation tank meditative experience. Drawing on the personal testimony of many who tried it, including Burgess Meredith, Gregory Bateson, E. J. Gold, and Jerry Rubin, the evidence shows how, by eliminating the presence of shifting physical input patterns, the tank allows participants to dive deep into their subconscious and focus immediately on their inner perceptions. The different domains of reality and how various experiences with solitude affect different people are discussed along with practical details on the standards for isolation tank manufacture and use.
Zeroing in on a group of cells in a high layer of the cortex, a team of researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute may finally have found the cause of the swirling textures, blurry visions and signal-crossing synesthesia brought on by hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, peyote and "'shrooms." The group, which published its findings in this week's issue of Neuron, may have settled a long-simmering debate over how psychedelic drugs distort human perception
Alexander Shulgin is the world's foremost "psychonaut." The 82-year-old chemist has not only created more of the 300 known consciousness-altering (or psychoactive) compounds than anyone living or dead, he has, by his own account, sampled somewhere between 200 and 250 of them himself—most of them cooked up in the musty lab behind his home in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif., where he has shared many a chemical voyage with his wife of 26 years, Ann.
Psychologist Robert Ornstein's wide-ranging and multidisciplinary work has won him awards from more than a dozen organizations, including the American Psychological Association and UNESCO. His pioneering research on the bilateral specialization of the brain has done much to advance our understanding of how we think.
This is a book that shows, in simple detail, one of the most startling findings of modern science: We dont experience the world as it is, but as virtual reality. And while much of the latest scientific work demonstrates this, as do many of the classical psychological illusions, it is an important meeting point for students of the mind, brain, philosophy and religion because, as we can now see in light of this book, all these disciplines begin at the same place.
Karinthys book is, to my mind, a masterpiece. We are inundated now with medical memoirs, both biographical and autobiographicalthe entire genre has exploded in the last twenty years. Yet even though the technology may have changed, the human experience has not, and Journey Around My Skull, the first autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain, remains one of the very best.
Jill Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist when a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of a curious scientist, she watched her mind deteriorate whereby she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Because of her understanding of the brain, her respect for the cells in her body, and an amazing mother, Jill completely recovered.
Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained and published brain scientist when a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of a curious neuroanatomist, she watched her mind completely deteriorate whereby she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Because of her understanding of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and an amazing mother, Jill completely recovered her mind, brain and body. Having lost the categorizing, organizing, describing, judging and critically analyzing skills of her left brain, along with its language centers and thus ego center, Jill’s consciousness shifted away from normal reality. In the absence of her left brain’s neural circuitry, her consciousness shifted into present moment thinking whereby she experienced herself “at one with the universe.
In 1991, Daniel Dennett published his tome, Consciousness Explained.1 Yet, ten years later he penned an article titled “Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?”2 If he had to ask the question, the answer seems obvious. English-speaking philosophers and psychologists have been trying to understand consciousness at least since John Locke introduced the word into the English language in the 17th century. But despite the best efforts of those who’ve thrown their hats into the ring, we haven’t made much progress. Obviously, a different approach is needed.
The (so-called) hard problem is the problem of explaining the relationship between consciousness and the brain. Flanagan believes that that problem is really not so hard. The really hard problem, he suggests, is the problem of explaining how meaningful lives are possible in an entirely natural world, without gods and without invoking anything spooky.
The scientists have made a significant step into the understanding of conscious perception, by showing how single neurons in the human brain reacted to certain images.
This is part of Dennett's campaign to overcome the mind-body split bequeathed to us by Descartes, who identified his existence with his self-consciousness (his Cogito) and believed that the thinking portion of the self was attached almost accidentally to the body. Like many in cognitive science, Dennett wants to show that mind and matter are not necessarily opposed. Mind is not made of different stuff than body -- not if body is understood to be an enormously complex information-processing system of which the brain is a part.
Firstly, I suggest that we view consciousness as “the process of observing.” Now, “observation,” of course, is a psychological and subjective concept, but it also has a physical correlate. I suggest the following characterization of the physical substrate of observation: Subjective acts of observation physically correspond to events involving the registration of something in a memory from which that thing can later be retrieved.
But these signals are more ambiguous than those he spotted in newborn babies and far more controversial in their implications. Even as some research suggests that fetuses can feel pain as preterm babies do, other evidence indicates that they are anatomically, biochemically and psychologically distinct from babies in ways that make the experience of pain unlikely. The truth about fetal pain can seem as murky as an image on an ultrasound screen, a glimpse of a creature at once recognizably human and uncomfortably strange.
A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity which arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos. The Boltzmann brains paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains.
In 1987 Daniel Dennett invited me to join him as a Visiting Fellow in his Center for Cognitive Studies at the Department of Philosophy, Tufts University. As well as providing a route back to mainstream academic research, this allowed me to catch up on and immerse myself in recent developments in the philosophy of mind. Dennett and I set out explore the possibility of an empirically based theory of consciousness, which would do justice to both third-person and first-person facts about the human mind. Besides working on purely theoretical issues, we undertook a field-study of the sociology and symptomatology of Multiple Personality Disorder, and published our preliminary conclusions in a long essay, "Speaking for Our Selves".
The mind is the brain. Each mental state -- each hope, fear, thought -- can be identified with a particular physical state of the brain, without remainder. So argues Nicholas Humphrey in this readable yet scholarly essay. He offers strong support for his identity theory from evolutionary psychology.
"How can we explain the existence of these qualia as we experience them?" So here, again, it will only be if we undergo a radical shift in perspective and realize that the "qualia as we experience them" could be a mental fantasy, that we shall move on to asking what may be the good question: "How can we explain why we have the impression that such fantastic qualia exist even if they do not?" But, here is why it is likely to be so difficult to make this move: In the case of consciousness, we cannot simply change our perspective to see the solution. We are all stuck with the first-person point of view. So, the result is we persist with questing for the qualia as such. [via
mymindonbooks]
New Brain-New World presents cutting edge brain research regarding Altered States of Consciousness, the awakened brain, and neurofeedback training for the transformation of consciousness. Using EEG methods we have studied the effects of meditation, feeling release therapy and the drinking of ayahuasca - a mind expanding tea. We have also studied EEG changes in people who were in a higher state of consciousness. [via
mymindonbooks]
Ex-monk B. Alan Wallace explains what Buddhism can teach Western scientists, why reincarnation should be taken seriously and what it's like to study meditation with the Dalai Lama.
Sleeping, Dreaming, And Dying is an exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama edited and narrated by Francisco Varela. Sleeping, Dreaming, And Dying is the account of an historic dialogue between leading Western scientists and one of the foremost representatives of Buddhism today, the Dalai Lama of Tibet. Revolving around the three key moments of consciousness of sleep, dreams, and death.
The experiments, described last August in studies by H. Henri Ehrsson and Olaf Blanke and colleagues in Science, demonstrate that out-of-body experiences, previously confined to the realms of psychiatry, fiction and the occult, occur when the normal processing of sensory information is disrupted. This research provides an important tool to understand how the feeling of self is generated by the brain. Sherlock would approve.
Reality Sandwich is a web magazine for this time of intense transformation. Our subjects run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies.
Ultimately what is important for Dennet is the functional claim rather than the anatomical claim (in personal correspondence, he has admitted as much). That is, the claim that there is no Cartesian Theatre is orthogonal to the anatomical claim that there is no place (in the brain) where it all comes together. Since the functional arguments never really convinced me, and there doesn't seem to be evidence for the anatomical side of the claim, I am not convinced there is no Cartesian Theatre. As Dennett says "It sure seems as if there is a Cartesian Theater" (italics mine).
The contents of consciousness are a model of events that are currently evoking activity in a subject’s sensory receptors. The model at a given time is called the perspectival world model, or PWM.
A few years ago a psychologist and a philosopher got into an argument over whether we can accurately describe our thoughts. "Yes," said the psychologist; with training and the help of my special technique, we can accurately describe our thoughts. The philosopher doubted it. To resolve their argument, they recruited a young woman who agreed tell them her thoughts, so that they could argue over whether she was credible.
Freud introduced the West to the unconscious, but the last half-century of psychology has reinvented it, argues University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson. In Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, Wilson attempts to explain why there's so much about ourselves that we fail to understand, which can lead to misdirected anger. He points to a revised, post-Freudian understanding of how the mind works: the reason that their own judgments, feelings, [and] motives remain mysterious to people is not repression, as Freud argued, but efficiency so that the mind can process and analyze multiple things at once.
Gary Lachman argues that this view of consciousness is misguided and unfounded. He points to another approach to the study and exploration of consciousness that erupted into public awareness in the late 1800s. In this "secret history of consciousness," consciousness is seen not as a result of neurons and molecules, but as responsible for them; meaning is not imported from the outer world, but rather creates it.
Consciousness probably isn't that big a deal. A simple pair of facing mirrors exhibit a kind of endlessly regressing self-awareness, and this type of pattern can readily be turned into computer code.
So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy. Perhaps, they say, mind is not limited to the brains of some animals. Perhaps it is ubiquitous, present in every bit of matter, all the way up to galaxies, all the way down to electrons and neutrinos, not excluding medium-size things like a glass of water or a potted plant. Moreover, it did not suddenly arise when some physical particles on a certain planet chanced to come into the right configuration; rather, there has been consciousness in the cosmos from the very beginning of time.
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mymindonbooks. Describing Inner Experience? explores in unprecedented detail the inner experience of one person (Melanie) as she goes about her ordinary day, using a random beeper to 'sample' moments of her experience. Psychologist Russ Hurlburt has decades of experience in sampling and interviewing people about the details of their experience. In this book, he teams up with philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, a prominent skeptic about the accuracy of people's reports about their experience. Together, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel examine the believability of Melanie's reports.
Now we know that the brain is a finite physical object, containing roughly 100 million neurons and 100 billion synapses linking the neurons together. But by consciousness being finite, I mean something stronger: that there are only finitely many lives that could possibly be lived; and that therefore free will, if it exists, must at some level be simply the selection of an element from a finite set.
A new blog from the BBC about the mind, neuroscience, consciousness and so forth.
Here are a few very general thoughts about how I see the shape of a science of consciousness, focusing on the issue of first-person methodology. At the end I will make a few remarks about how this might apply to the study of emotion.
The Kentucky researchers believe that NDEs are actually REM intrusions triggered in the brain by traumatic events like cardiac arrest. If this is true, then this means the experiences of some people following near-death are confusion from suddenly and unexpectedly entering a dream-like state.
Head Trip is an amazing book. Jeff Warren manages to be funny while packing in tons of fascinating science. Rather than sticking to conventional boundaries, Warren follows his own formidable curiosity, producing a book that is quirky, refreshing, and nothing short of groundbreaking.
Associated web site with the 'Head Trip' book.
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mymindonbooks. Review of an interesting new book by Jeff Warren where the author explores different states of consciousness including lucid dreams, meditation and other hypnagogic states.
A heartfelt and incredibly powerful meditation on Alzheimer's and how it effects both the individual who has the condition and everyone around that individual. It's not a date movie, but one that firmly plants you in the here and now of life and why you really need to enjoy every minute of what you have.
An incredible video demonstrating what happens when a person has the connection between the left and right brains severed. It demonstrates that the brain still processes information that the consciousness is not aware of.
Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case for what many in scientific fields are loath to considerthat it is God who creates our spiritual experiences, not the brain.
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
An overview of the mysteries of consciousness by Steven Pinker.
A super heavy duty list of books on consciousness from David Chalmers
A librarian in San Francisco who has a 'reading blog' that is a guide to books about consciousness.
he brain stem may orchestrate the basics of awareness.
Highly rated book on the philosophy of self. "Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator."
A page long interview with Hofstadter, some very poignant and sad comments about the death of his wife.
The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.
A very short entry on Metzinger.
A nice overview of his life and philosophies.
Schrödinger concludes this chapter and the book with philosophical speculations on determinism, free will, and the mystery of human consciousness. He is sympathetic to the view, common in Indian mysticism, that each individual's consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe.
A rebuttal of some of Metzinger's ideas about the existence of self, in particular that there is no self but a process. Not conclusive, but gives some good points.
A monster 700 page book by Metzinger that some call one of the most important books on consciousness and first person subjectivity of this decade.
A fantastic video lecture by Thomas Metzinger about the nature of the self.
A journal that brings together diverse fields including cognitive science, neurophysiology and philosophy.
Classic Dennett. "Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are protein machines."
Hofstadter blends a surprising array of disciplines and styles in his continuing rumination on the nature of consciousness. Eschewing the study of biological processes as inadequate to the task, he argues that the phenomenon of self-awareness is best explained by an abstract model based on symbols and self-referential "loops," which, as they accumulate experiences, create high-level consciousness. Theories aside, it's impossible not to experience this book as a tender, remarkably personal and poignant effort to understand the death of his wife from cancer in 1993and to grasp how consciousness mediates our otherwise ineffable relationships. In the end, Hofstadter's view is deeply philosophical rather than scientific. It's hopeful and romantic as well, as his model allows one consciousness to create and maintain within itself true representations of the essence of another.
The original recordings of Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett and V.S. Ramachandran talking about consciousness for Susan's book.
McTaggart has a dazzling genius for bringing together cutting-edge research in the field of quantum physics in a stunningly direct, accessible way.
Levitin's fascination with the mystery of music and the study of why it affects us so deeply is at the heart of this book.
In philosophy of mind, Cartesian materialism is the idea that at some place (or places) in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience.
Daniel Dennett's explanation of consciousness.
An entry in Mind Hacks about the difference between attention and consciousness.
In Radical Nature, philosopher Christian de Quincey explores how mind and matter are related, and he proposes a radical and surprising answer: Consciousness goes all the way down! Recommended by Andy Zink.
Susan Blackmore interviews prominent scientists and philosphers about the nature of consciousness.
Since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Now science suggests that our emotions are what make thought possible.
The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?
Excellent resources for a wide variety of articles about consciousness and the mind.
This post is the culmination of a month-long chronicling of the major brain computation insights of all time.
An article from the NYTimes reprinted in Dawkin's web site about how science is putting to rest the idea of a soul (in other words, dualism).
This study, announced today and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, indicates the brain reacts to mistakes before information even gets processed consciously.
Dennett's tome on consciousness.
An outstanding source recent developments and thoughts in the the various fields of evolution, consciousness and philosophy.
A highly intelligent and entertainment talk by Jeff Hawkins about the brain theory and how he is working to develop artificial brain-like intelligence.
Robert Wright interviews Daniel Dennett about quantum weirdness.
Daniel Dennett pontificates about consciousness at TED.
A wide range of video interviews with many intellectuals about hard philosophical questions.
Quick overview on Dennett, not a lot of new information.
Short overview of the book describing the more controversial aspects of the book.
In earlier work, Raymond Tallis defends the distinctive nature of human consciousness against the misrepresentations of many philosophers and cognitive scientists who aimed to reduce it to a set of functions understood in evolutionary, neurobiological, and computational terms. This book continues to investigate these implications of human nature advanced in his earlier works for our understanding of the nature of truth, of language, of the mind, and of the self.
There has been an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the enigma of human consciousness among neuroscientists, psychologists, and professional philosophers. Much work is aimed at accommodating consciousness within the currently dominant physicalist world picture. This book is a comprehensive and sometimes impassioned attack to "biologize" consciousness by explaining its origin in evolutionary terms and identifying mental phenomena with brain processes; to "computerize" it by identifying mind with the supposed computational activity of the brain; and to empty or eliminate it by denying the reality of qualia. Raymond Tallis's critique concludes with a long look at man--"the explicit animal"--that makes the irreducible mystery of human consciousness impossible to overlook or deny.
In an important, gracefully written exploration of the neurochemical basis of mind, neurologist Damasio rejects the Cartesian notion of the human mind as a thinking organ more or less separate from bodily processes. Emotions and feelings, he argues, are essential to reasoning and decision-making. The human brain, he further contends, has a specialized region in the frontal lobes for making personal and social decisions, and this region works in concert with deeper brain centers that store emotional memories.
Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
The extremely erudite Standford definition.
Intellectual and author who was known for philosophical skepticism in particular that lucid dreaming is a hallucination