Consciousness and science. In his new book Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey, a distinguished evolutionary psychologist and philosopher, claims to have solved two fairly large intellectual conundrums. One is something of a technical matter, about which you may have thought little or not at all, unless you happen to be a philosopher. This is the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. The problem is how an entity which is apparently immaterial like the human consciousness – it exists, but you can’t locate it, much less measure it – can have arisen from something purely physical, like the arrangement of cells that make up the human body. The second problem Humphrey claims he has solved is a rather more everyday one, about which you may well have puzzled yourself. This is the problem of the soul. If this all sounds a little bit metaphysical or New Agey, too much like one of those tiresome attempts to bring religion and science into cosy alignment, hold fast.
Level 3 of consciousness. Meme Central Books Level 3 Resources Richard Brodie Virus of the Mind What’s New? Site Map Level 3 of Consciousness You are reading about something that most people don’t even know exists. If you told them, they wouldn’t just not believe you—they would have no clue what you were talking about. That’s why I wrote this little essay: so that I could show it to someone when they had no idea what I was talking about and, if they were persistent and open-minded, make some progress in their thinking. And meanwhile I could get on with my other projects. 1. Sometimes like attracts like and sometimes opposite attracts opposite. When like attracts like, it can end there, like an oxygen molecule made up of two oxygen atoms, or it can continue to attract like, like a Carbon atom. 2. Sometimes a self-replicating thing makes a copy of itself with a mistake in it.
The only way for new things to get created is by a complex series of mistakes that turn out to be better after all. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. What things are conscious. From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer To Truth: I am haunted by consciousness: the great mystery of inner awareness, seemingly so commonplace, truly so astounding. When science finally finishes the puzzle of the universe, the riddle of consciousness, many believe, will remain largely unsolved. I search for consciousness. Where to find it? Humans, obviously (though some, like solipsists, may not be sure). Animals? 1) Only human beings are truly conscious—a position often driven by religious belief in an exclusively human soul. 2) Only animals with large brains are conscious—primates, elephants, dolphins. 3) All animals are conscious—with differing degrees of consciousness. 4) All life of any kind is conscious in some way—plant or animal, single cell or multicell. 5) Computational systems of sufficient complexity can become conscious—this means nonbiological systems.
There are two key questions: • Is biology required for the inner-experience phenomenology of consciousness? P.S. Integral options cafe. Consciousness. Search tips There are three kinds of search you can perform: All fields This mode searches for entries containing all the entered words in their title, author, date, comment field, or in any of many other fields showing on OPC pages.
Surname This mode searches for entries containing the text string you entered in their author field. Advanced This mode differs from the all fields mode in two respects. Note that short and / or common words are ignored by the search engine. Mystery of consciousnesss. The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable. So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman.
The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to clear away some red herrings.