Human Consciousness

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

The discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in the nineteenth century led to the shocking realisation that humans have been creating art for over 30,000 years. Episode two reveals how the very first pictures were created, and how images may have triggered the greatest change in human history.

To discover the first two dimensional paintings we need to look at the art created in caves such as Altamira, Chauvet and Lascaux; these were created roughly 35,000 years, the time Archeologists identify with a ‘creative explosion’.

The first of these cave paintings were discovered in Altemira by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, and his 8yr old daughter Maria, in 1879. The paintings they discovered on the walls of the caves were of animals such as aurochs, a long extinct relative of the bison. As these matched similar stone-age images he had seen, Sautuola concluded they were prehistoric. When the caves were opened to the public, however, they were considered a hoax, and unfortunately despite trying to clear his name, his discovery was not scientifically accepted until long after his death. Following this the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet came to light, and it is said that when Picasso saw images of the caves he declared “we have learned nothing”.

Today artists create images of every aspect of life, but back then the images were almost exclusively of animals,  in particular horses, bison and reindeer. The expert Henri Breuil believed the paintings to be linked to rituals that increased the chances of a successful hunt, however more recent archeology has shown that the animals depicted were not those eaten by the people of the time. In addition some of the paintings were in very hard to reach areas of the caves and featured dots and lines. However, it is easy to take a modern view such as this and miss the point completely, that being how did we learn to project our 3D world into 2D.

There are very similar paintings to be found in the Drakensburg Mountains of South Africa, however unlike their European cousins, these were not produced thousands of years ago, but much more recently. These images were produced by the San “bush men” and although they do not produce paintings like this today, Professor David Lewis Williams discovered papers from the late nineteenth century by a German settler that documented the life and rituals of the San people. It became clear to Williams that their religion was based around traveling in a trance state to a spirit world and that they documented in these pictures their experiences of the trance. Often these transitory states involved animals, and the animals depicted were normally large or powerful, such as the Eland, that were respected by the San people. Williams also noticed another similarity with their European counterparts, that of the dots and lines.

Research into altered states, such as the trances of the San people, show that on entering these states, visual disturbances similar to migraine aura that involved lines and dots occur. Furthermore, these images can also be produced through sensory deprivation, for example from being placed deep in a cave for a long time. Prehistoric people, it appears, had hallucinations , which took the form of things that were close to them, such as the horses, bison and aurochs. These hallucinations were remembered and prehistoric people then recreated them on the walls of their caves.

Returning to the European palaeolithic caves, it seems that 12,000 years ago people stopped painting. We don’t know why, but the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, in Southern Turkey may hold the answer.  When excavated the site revealed monolithic pillars built around 12,000 years ago, dated to just the time that the paintings in caves seem to stop. These stone pillars feature carvings of animals such as those in the caves. The effort in creating these stone pillars would have required considerable  labour and organisation, the workers for example, all needed feeding. Recent research has shown that modern wheat can be traced to wild wheat that grows within 20 miles of this site, which has lead scholars to speculate that this was the birthplace of agricultural farming and, in turn, complex society,'civilisation', itself.

Dualist and Reductionist theories of mind disagree about whether or not consciousness can be reduced to a state of or function of the brain. They assume, however, that the contents of consciousness are separate from the external physical world as-perceived. According to the present paper this assumption has no foundation either in everyday experience or in science. Drawing on evidence for perceptual projection in both interoceptive and exteroceptive sense modalities, the case is made that the physical world as-perceived is a construct of perceptual processing and, therefore, part of the contents of consciousness. A finding which requires a Reflexive rather than a Dualist or Reductionist model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world. The physical world as-perceived may, in turn be thought of as a biologically useful model of the world as described by physics. Redrawing the boundaries of consciousness to include the physical world as-perceived undermines the conventional separation of the 'mental' from the physical', and with it the very foundation of the Dualist-Reductionist debate. The alternative Reflexive model departs radically from current conventions, with consequences for many aspects of consciousness theory and research. Some of the consequences which bear on the internal consistency and intuitive plausibility of the model are explored, e.g. the causal sequence in perception, representationalism, a suggested resolution of the Realism versus Idealism debate, and the way manifest differences between physical events as-perceived and other conscious events (images, dreams, etc.) are to be construed.

Говорить об ошибке в когнитивной эволюции Homo позволяет наблюдаемая в прогнозе реальность и многовековой опыт жизнедеятельности человечества: ни обширное научное знание, ни фундаментальные духовные учения, ни гуманистическая технологизация не изменили взаимоотношений человека с окружающей реальностью и метавоздействия на действительность.  Пока что наша когнитивная эволюция носит характер стихийного бедствия, которое терпит человечество и среда его обитания, как результат прямого воздействия человека, уже более 5 столетий к ряду (становление классической науки).

This ongoing research explores the psychological associated with the attempts of individuals who attempt to beneficially influence physiology of living organisms through such methods as wishing, laying-on of hands, prayer, and the purported transfer of subtle "energy." Participants met specific criteria of social and/or scientific acceptability. A multiphasic research approach is explored in which the writings of a variety of healers were analyzed. A content analysis of the writings of 3 scholarly healer-researchers clarified and objectified healers' esoteric language, and an experiential inventory was developed. A systematic analysis was then performed using 10 books wrinen by well known healers in combination with 10 taped interviews of individuals who demonstrated healing (or biological influencing) under controlled conditions. Interviewees also ranked the importance of each major area of consciousness.
Ranked averages indicate that the principal features of Transpersonal Healing (TH) are alterations in attention, cognitive processes and sense of self. Qualitative analysis reveals that TH involves self-regulation of attention, physiology, and cognition, the induction of altered awareness and reorganization of the healer's construction of cultural and personal realities. Attention is directed towards intrapsychic processes, resulting in (1) increased accessibility of subconscious materials, (2) enhanced empathy, (3) heightened emotional responses. (4) modified aHirudes. (5) altered meanings, and (6) distortions in time sense. Most significant among ontologic changes is a modification. or transcendence. of the healers' ordinary sense of self and absorption within functional beliefs. TH healer types appear to represent a range of contemporary subtypes of "pure" shamanic practice, the core process of TH being described as encompassing methodologies used to intentionally activate an endogenous healing potential. A taxonomic system is proposed and recommendations for future research are presented.

By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realisation of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as the world — as opposed to our immediate natural environment and that of other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness.

This essay is to facilitate an appreciation for the psychoanalytic conception of language from other fields of inquiry, especially American philosophy and the various branches of the cognitive sciences and psychology that inter-disciplinary philosophers such as John Searle regularly interact with. It will also serve as a reminder to psychoanalysts themselves that their practice is based on sound and intelligible reasoning in the first place.

When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim here to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium.

Herein, you will find a list of published articles and papers by Dr. Mohsen Paul Sarfarazi. As this list is constantly evolving and expanding, please use frequent visits to see the latest published papers on consciousness by the author. Happy Reading and self-discovering!

The meme is an evolutionary replicator, defined as information copied from person to person by
imitation. I suggest that taking memes into account may provide a better understanding of human
evolution in the following way. Memes appeared in human evolution when our ancestors became
capable of imitation. From this time on two replicators, memes and genes, coevolved. Successful
memes changed the selective environment, favouring genes for the ability to copy them. I have called
this process memetic drive. Meme-gene coevolution produced a big brain that is especially good at
copying certain kinds of memes. This is an example of the more general process in which a replicator
and its replication machinery evolve together. The human brain has been designed not just for the
benefit of human genes, but for the replication of memes. It is a selective imitation device.
Some problems of definition are discussed and suggestions made for future research.

Gustav Fechner, the German experimental psychologist, coined the term psychophysics in 1860, publishing the first mathematical equation to model human consciousness.  Fechner assumed that any future approaches to consciousness would include mathematical and physical underpinnings. In 1995, the cognitive scientist and philosopher David Chalmers coined the phrase "the hard problem" as being that of connecting consciousness with some physical substrate.  According to Chalmers, "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Most existing theories of consciousness either deny the phenomenon, explain something else, or elevate the problem to an eternal mystery."  As Chalmers points out, unfortunately, the modern scientific community has not yet produced a model of consciousness supported by mathematics and physics, thus no progress in Fecher's "psychophysics." 
However there is growing interest among the scientific community in string theory, the only branch of mathematical geometry that has successfully explained recent discoveries in high energy particle physics. The mathematical proof of string theory requires the existence of a ten dimensional universe.  But in trying to map consciousness, science continues to limit its data search within time and the three spatial dimensions, ignoring six of string theory's ten dimensions  Perhaps because mainstream science tacitly limits itself to four of the ten dimensions, progress has come to a dead end. Accordingly, the most widely accepted theory among neurophysiologists is that consciousness is somehow a "byproduct" of the electrical sparking of neurons, an accidental epiphenomenon of the activities of nerve-filled wet meat.
This paper considers data beyond the four dimensional constraints of the scientific establishment. It is my contention that many recorded accounts of philosophers, mystics, and shamans can and should be considered as data. My thesis is that these accounts express experience and observation within one or more of the additional dimensions predicted by string theory. Any advance in understanding consciousness must take into account not only the language and domains of mathematics, particle physics, and neurobiology, but also the experiential domains of philosophers and mystics. It is in regarding data from these multiple domains of inquiry that a new model of consciousness will emerge. In this paper I hypothesize a psychophysics of consciousness, woven of strands from mathematics, mysticism, and physics, as well as contemplative participatory practice, to address and solve "the hard problem."

When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim here to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium.

There have been various attempts to apply Darwinian evolutionary theory to an understanding of the human condition within psychology and the social sciences. This paper evaluates whether Darwinian Theory can explain human consciousness. Starting with a brief definition of phenomenal consciousness and the central features of evolutionary theory, the paper examines whether random variations in the genome that confer a selective, reproductive advantage can explain both the emergence of consciousness and its varied forms. To inform the discussion, the paper reviews what is known about the conditions for consciousness within the human mind/brain, understood in both structural (neural) terms and functional terms (in terms of human information processing), and concludes that “random variations in the genome” provide no explanatory mechanism for why some neural activities (but not others) are accompanied by consciousness. The paper then evaluates the many functional advantages that have been proposed for various forms of phenomenal consciousness once they emerge, and concludes that, on close examination, phenomenal experiences themselves do not carry out the information processing functions attributed to them, which challenges the Darwinian requirement that they could only have persisted (once emergent) it they enhanced reproductive fitness. The paper turns finally to what can be said about wider distribution of consciousness in non-humans, contrasting discontinuity theories with continuity theories. Discontinuity theories argue for a critical functional transition that “switches on consciousness” while continuity theories argue for a gradual transition in consciousness from unrecognisable to recognisable. All theories accept that there is an intimate, natural relationship of conscious experiences with their associated material forms. Consequently, as the material forms evolve, their associated experiences co-evolve—suggesting an indirect mechanism by which the emergence of species-specific forms of consciousness can be influenced by Darwinian evolution. It also allows a non-reductive understanding of human consciousness within the social sciences.

Preface/Introduction

The question under discussion is metaphysical and truly elemental. It emerges in two aspects — how did we come to be conscious of our own existence, and, as a deeper corollary, do existence and awareness necessitate each other? I am bold enough to explore these questions and I invite you to come along; I make no claim to have discovered absolute answers. However, I do believe I have created here a compelling interpretation. You’ll have to judge for yourself.

What follows is the presentation of three essays I have worked on over the past several years seeing publication for the first time. “Hollows of Experience” was written first as an invited chapter for a collection on the ontology of consciousness. However, when cuts became necessary, my chapter got the knife. Its length has prohibited it from publication in any print journal. “Myth and Mind” was written next as a journal article, but as my involvement with it grew so did its length, so it has also idled on my websty awaiting its call. “From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience” was written most recently, but it is the only one to have been available to the public elsewhere than my own website. Under the name, “The Continuum of Experience”, it was Target Article #95 on the recently closed Karl Jaspers Forum (for discussion purposes only).

I have put them in a different sequence here, for reasons of logical sense. Up first, “Panexperientialism” deals with an idea difficult for many to accept, namely that conscious experience is a particular mode of symbolically reflected experience that is largely unique to our species. However, I aver that experienced sensation in itself (as found, for example, in autonomic sensory response systems) goes “all the way down” into nature, and thus the title, panexperientialism.

Understanding this idea is helpful to dealing with the focus on language in Part I of “Hollows”, next, since here speech and general symbolic interaction in general are found to be the catalysts for the creation of our consciously experienced world (our “lived reality”). In Part II, however, I explore how experienced sensations must be coeval with existence, and, with even greater temerity, how all this sensational existence might have arisen within some literally inconceivable background of awareness-in-itself that yet has a dynamism that occasionally breaks into existence as experiential events and entities. (The latter may sound wacky, but physicists and cosmologists are themselves attempting to come to terms with that which seethes with vast potential energy in what they refer to as the quantum vacuum.)

“Myth and Mind” was put third since it deals with a major lacuna in “Hollows” — that presumed prehistoric period when members of our species made the painful crossing of the symbolic threshold into the beginnings of cultural consciousness. Speech plays a central role here, too, but I look more at narrative structures from the dawn of self-awareness when ritual and myth became vital to human survival. Why would fantastic stories and bizarre rituals be necessary? I speculate that growing foresight led to the unavoidable realization of certain mortality, from which, in turn, emerged the secondary realization that we were now alive. In con-trast to our yet-to-come death, we have life here and now, and by ritually identifying with a symbolically expanded mythic, i.e., sacred, reality, we may continue to live on after bodily death, just as our ancestors and loved ones are assumed to do. Language and mythmaking are necessary to avoid mortal despair and they remain at the core of human consciousness.

As Ernst Cassirer (1944) has noted, language and myth are “twin creatures”, both metaphoric webs over a reality we can never wholly comprehend. We live in the symbolic and construct our works of imagination and wars of conquest to make life meaningful, to feel immortal, and to sense that we ourselves participate in a reality greater than ourselves. No doubt we do, but this does not mean our culturally constructed self-identities survive the death of our bodies, and it does not imply that our symbolic concepts can ever indicate the ultimate truth. We simply must symbolize an extended reality that was sacred to our ancestors: “Is it not our way, as illusory as it may be, to force continuance on our world and our life in the face of their inevitable ending? Are we not compelled to extend those imagi-nary horizons as far as we can despite the terror and the sometime joy their extension incites? Is their closure not a form of death?” (Crapanzano, p. 210)

Of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of being forced to admit that this venture of mine must inevitably be another attempt at meaningful mythmaking. But what else could it be? This is certainly not a scientific proof though it is indeed an academically rigorous exploration. (Just try to count the citations!) I hope the reader will judge my thesis on the basis of its coherence, the sense of meaning it evokes, my intellectual responsibility, and, finally, the engagement it inspires. If you have read my expositions and found yourself immersed in the timeless questions I here call forth, I would call these writings successful (even if you violently disagree with my answers).

I am very grateful to Huping Hu, editor, for granting me this special issue of JCER in which to present my ideas in some detail. He has patiently dealt with my exuberant approach and allowed the many changes I kept coming up with right until the final publication date. I also wish to thank the many potential commentators who politely replied to my invitation, and, even more, I thank those who made time to write actual commentaries.

References

Cassirer, E. (1944). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Hu-man Culture. New Haven/London: Yale UP.

Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.

Gregory M. Nixon
University of Northern British Columbia
Prince George, British Columbia, Canada

Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in recent decades, been resurrected in modern form. In this paper I discuss how some of its basic features differ from both dualism and variants of physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current Western thought. I pay particular attention to the ontological status and seeming “out-thereness” of the phenomenal world and to how the “phenomenal world” relates to the “physical world”, the “world itself”, and processing in the brain. In order to place the theory within the context of current thought and debate, I address questions that have been raised about reflexive monism in recent commentaries and also evaluate competing accounts of the same issues offered by “transparency theory” and by “biological naturalism”. I argue that, of the competing views on offer, reflexive monism most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings of science, and common sense.

Advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience claim to have begun to undermine the assumptions of the arts and educational theory community by explaining consciousness through either a reduction to mathematical functionalism or an excrescence of brain biology.  I suggest that the worldview behind such reductionism is opposed to the worldview assumed by many educational practitioners and theorists.  I then go on to outline a few common positions taken in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies that suggest that—though many attributes of consciousness have been identified and explained—individual consciousness itself remains as much of an enigma to scientists as to the rest of us who experience it.  However, I do suggest the necessity of intersubjectivity for conscious evolution.

Proposes an understanding of the human being as inherently spiritual and thus
sketches a psychological treatment of spirituality that would be relevant to all religions

Spirituality has recently become an acceptable topic of popular discussion and even of academic interest outside religious circles--in psychology, philosophy, medicine, nursing, social work, education, politics. Yet most discussions of spirituality are loose and merely suggestive. Moreover, the frequent implication of God and differing religions complicates and befuddles this already difficult topic. This book, a companion to Religion and the Human Sciences (SUNY Press, 1998), sorts out these issues and presents a coherent understanding that could ground rigorous study of spirituality.

The basic argument is that spirituality is a human thing, grounded in the very make-up of the human being. To be sure, most spirituality expresses itself through religious belief and pious practice. Still, in essence, spirituality can be treated apart from religion and theology--and initially it needs to be if a coherent and accurate understanding of spirituality is the goal. And this is the goal here. This may also be what our contemporary, pluralistic world needs.

Part I teases apart the theological and the human facets of the matter and, bracketing the theological temporarily, focuses attention on the human. The key is an understanding of human mind as double. Mind entails two dimensions, psyche and spirit, so the standard bipartite models of the human as "body and mind" or "body and soul" gives way to a tripartite model: body (organism), psyche, and spirit.

Part II explains what the human spirit is and how its unbounded unfolding grounds spirituality. This explanation begins with a suggestive description, moves through an account of scientific definition, and then provides such definition for spirit in terms of Bernard Lonergan's four "levels" of consciousness: awareness, understanding, judgment of fact, and decision or judgment of value. This Part concludes by pointing out how spirit, so understood, can account for most of what people mean by spirituality. Though not banished, theology need never yet enter the discussion.

Part III elaborates the human psyche. Granted a delineation of spirit as a distinct aspect of human mind, this second aspect emerges in clarity. Psyche entails familiar things: emotions, imagery, memory, and personality patterns. Discussion shows how, for better or worse, psychological issues affect the functioning of the human spirit.

Part IV, turning finally to the biological organism, says what constitutes fully healthy humanity, namely, on-going personal integration that, attending to the needs of the organism and the psyche, is nonetheless ever respectful of the self-transcending dynamism of the human spirit.

A precise and careful exposition intertwines the recent wisdom of psychological studies and psychotherapeutic practice and the long-standing concerns of the spiritual traditions. Said in psychological terms, this book presents a new theory of personality, a theory that posits spiritual concerns as essential to healthy humanity. Indeed, the spiritual, the leading edge of human growth and development, becomes the prime determinant of what "healthy" means. Accordingly, comparison with major psychological figures--Freud, Jung, Frankl, Maslow, Grof, Premack--contributes to the exposition at various points. Finally, a discussion of sexuality summarizes the book, provides an extended example of what spiritual integration would actually mean, and also indicates what difference it would make to bring God, and then again concern for union with God, back into the picture. Religion and the Human Sciences elaborates the integration of theology with psychology in extensive detail.

This book itself represents in part the promised scientific treatment of spirituality. Emphasizing the significance of Lonergan's "human authenticity"--openness, insight, honesty, and good will--this scholarly presentation details an account of objective meaning and value, the true and the good, on which our pluralistic society is foundering.

Coherently treating spirituality as a matter inherent to humanity, this approach to spirituality challenges religion, human science, and secular society. This approach calls the religions to focus on what they share in common and, through interdenominational cooperation, to help heal the fragmentation of the human family. This approach calls social science to take seriously the universal human realities that it has tended to ignore as "religious." And this approach calls contemporary communities and nations to attend to the spiritual issues that undergird any human society, whether religious or fully secular.

This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I chapter is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural proto-language learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and in-tersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object — of self and world — the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being.

Looking beyond human self-consciousness to investigate the origin and nature of awareness itself in Part 2, reductive objective materialism is found to be of little use. Direct experience also falls short in that, in order to be transformed into objective knowledge about itself, it must always be interpreted through and limited by the symbolic contexts of culture and the idiosyn-cratic conceptualizations of the individual. Awareness in itself must thus be considered ultimately unexplainable, but this may more indicate its inexpressible transcendence of all symbolic qualifiers than its nonexistence. It is suggested that awareness is not “self-aware” (as in deity) but is instead unknowing yet identical with the only true universal: the impetus of crea-tive unfolding. Our human knowledge, as an expression of this unfolding, is seen to emerge from our conscious experiencing and, in turn, to have the power — and enormous responsibility — of directing that experience. Our underlying symbolic worldviews are found to be autopoietic: They limit or open our conscious experience, which, in turn, confirms those worldview expectations. As we explore a future of unforeseeable technological breakthroughs on an ailing planet who patiently copes with our “success,” truly vital decisions about the nature, meaning, and future of conscious experience will have to be made.

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche tries to sketch a way of living in the face of nihilism.  By outlining the conditions of his society’s nihilism, he mounts a radical attack on epistemology and metaphysics, but also prepares a solution. He argues that there is no “reality” in the traditional sense: there are no “things.” For us, reality is made up of appearances, of surfaces that we constitute. Language and communication on the one hand, and consciousness on the other, are key tools in Nietzsche’s critique of epistemology and of the solution that he offers. The insight that relates these tools to one another, is that consciousness is not individual, but developed under the pressure of the need to communicate. This will serve as a lens through which we will try to glimpse a cluster of ideas at or near the centre of his thought. Nietzsche’s critique is so radical that it challenges the possibility of both knowledge and consciousness. On the other hand, Nietzsche wants to refine a higher form of consciousness: amor fati (love of fate), a “Yes” to reality as such. I argue that this problem can be resolved by distinguishing two kinds of consciousness. Nietzsche says that consciousness penetrates and merges with its object, but this cannot yield self-consciousness, and so does not make consciousness possible. But a prior shape of the mind allows us to grasp what is impenetrable and unique, to remain outside the object. I argue that this is the meaning of Nietzsche’s metaphor of distance, in which his project of incorporating consciousness into the human creature, of “life as a means to knowledge”  intertwines with the idea of writing one’s life.

Data for the dating of the earliest human art from cave sites at Maros in Sulawesi, Indonesia; Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Chauvet in southern France, and Altamira and El Castillo in Spain are reviewed. Arguments that western Europe was the locus for the development of artistic expression are evaluated and challenged in the light of the dates obtained for Maros cave. The weight of evidence now points to the widespread presence of parietal art across the Eurasian continent from c.40,000 BP, the ultimate origin of which may lie in the African continent c.60,000 BP. This contradicts the Eurocentric notion that a creative explosion took place uniquely in western Europe c.40,000, leading to the establishment of human culture. A further consequence of the dating evidence from Maros cave is to undermine the theory that Neanderthals were the creator of the earliest cave art. As the distribution of Neanderthals was limited to Europe they cannot be relied upon to explain paintings in Asia, which either predate or are contemporary with those found in Europe.

KEYWORDS
PLEISTOCENE, UPPER PALAEOLITHIC, ORIGINS OF ART, PARIETAL ART, CAVE ART, MAROS CAVE, LASCAUX CAVE, PECH MERLE CAVE, CHAUVET CAVE, ALTAMIRA CAVE, EL CASTILLO CAVE, NEANDERTHAL, CREATIVE EXPLOSION, COGNITION

The question of origins continues to captivate human thought and sentiment, despite the postmodern insistence that knowledge of origins is impossible since it must lie beyond the boundaries of the origin of knowledge. Knowledge cannot seek causes that precede its own existence, it is said. Still, theoretical narratives continue to arise accounting for such things as the origin of the universe, of our star and solar system, of Earth, of life on the planet, of the human species, of self-aware human cultures, and so on down into the origins of the local and particular. This should not be surprising; we sense that knowing our origins will tell us who we are.

The first speakers could only have spoken a meaningful word or made a meaningful sign in the context of a larger semiotic, i.e., a meaning-making system. Even if syntactic possibility had been called forth, there could not have yet existed isolated centres of subjectivity, that is, reflective selves, to speechify or more likely tell a story. There was as yet no sense of oneself as a mind that imagines and creates images or asserts words and tells a story. The images to provide a semiotic context would have been experienced as arriving from parts unknown, as communal revelation, even as the words to conjure them were laboriously brought forth.

The images could only have been received as revelation, simultaneously conjured by spellbound phrases, awaken a new reality, the dimension of the sacred: the imagined but experienced realm beyond sensory immediacy. The working out of the first syntactically arranged phrases and sentences from the flotsam and jetsam of protolinguistic pidgin would have taken the form of narrative, though the first narrative must have been a painful birth indeed, involving numbers of people struggling together to form concepts.

The question under discussion is metaphysical and truly elemental. It emerges in two aspects – how did we come to be conscious of our own existence, and, as a deeper corollary, do existence and awareness necessitate each other? I am bold enough to explore these questions and I invite you to come along; I make no claim to have discovered absolute answers. However, I do believe I have created here a compelling interpretation. You’ll have to judge for yourself.

What follows is the presentation of three essays I have worked on over the past several years seeing publication for the first time. “Hollows of Experience” was written first as an invited chapter for a collection on the ontology of consciousness. However, when cuts became necessary, my chapter got the knife. Its length has prohibited it from publication in any print journal. “Myth and Mind” was written next as a journal article, but as my involvement with it grew so did its length, so it has also idled on my website awaiting its call. “From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience” was written most recently, but it is the only one to have been available to the public elsewhere than my own website. Under the name, “The Continuum of Experience”, it was Target Article #95 on the re-cently closed Karl Jaspers Forum.

Executive Summary
The use of power in a leadership role is a multi-faceted process. Understanding the types of power available and the tactics that support them can create a more efficient leadership role. Ethical leadership can be reflected in the use of power and the motivations that are utilized by that power. Locus of control, Machiavellian Personality, and Narcissism assists in defining leadership performance. Myers-Briggs Type Leaders (MBTI) can reveal responses to leadership and predict certain outcomes and successes. The use of power, influence, and tactics are aspects of leadership that can empower workers and leaders to create an interaction that leads to resolving some common worker issues. Understanding these factors can create a strategy for success. Understanding where these factors can be inappropriate can also ensure that a strategy can be found to re-center the leadership perspective.

For David Hodgson, human beings must be free—in some sense adequate to ground personal responsibility—and it becomes the work of his book to demonstrate how. The premises he starts with, however, simply do not lead to the conclusion he would like us to draw. Or they do not without smuggling in a trainload of assumptions all along the way. Hence, although the project sets out with great promise, the reader is left with little more than a sort of “free-will-of-the-gaps.”

Definitions of consciousness need to be sufficiently broad to include all examples of conscious states and sufficiently narrow to exclude entities, events and processes that are not conscious.  Unfortunately, deviations from these simple principles are common in modern consciousness studies, with consequent confusion and internal division in the field. The present paper gives example of ways in which definitions of consciousness can be either too broad or too narrow. It also discusses some of the main ways in which pre-existing theoretical commitments (about the nature of consciousness, mind and world) have intruded into definitions. Similar problems can arise in the way a “conscious process” is defined, potentially obscuring the way that conscious phenomenology actually relates to its neural correlates and antecedent causes in the brain, body and external world. Once a definition of “consciousness” is firmly grounded in its phenomenology, investigations of its ontology and its relationships to entities, events and processes that are not conscious can begin, and this may in time transmute the meaning (or sense) of the term.  As our scientific understanding of these relationships deepen, our understanding of what consciousness is will also deepen.  A similar transmutation of meaning (with growth of knowledge) occurs with basic terms in physics such as "energy", and "time."

The following is an email interchange that took place between Dan Dennett and myself in the period 14th to 28th June, 2001. The discussion tries to clarify some essential features of the “heterophenomenology” developed in his book Consciousness Explained (1996), and how this differs from a form of “critical phenomenology” implicit in my own book Understanding Consciousness (2000), and developed in my edited Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness: new methodologies and maps (2000). The departure point for the discussion is a paper posted on Dan’s website that summarises a related debate between Dan, David Chalmers and Alvin Goldman (Dennett, 2001). To make the discussion easier to follow, the multiple embeddings have been removed (restoring the sequence in which the comments were written). I have also corrected a few typos and grammatical errors. However, the text of the emails remains exactly the same.
In Round 1, I suggest that scientific investigations of consciousness are better described as a form of “critical phenomenology” that accepts conscious experiences to be real rather than as a “heterophenomenology” which remains neutral about or denies their existence. Dan replies that I have misunderstood his position - he doesn’t deny that conscious experiences exist. Conscious experiences just don’t have the first-person phenomenal properties that they are commonly thought to have and, in his view, science remains neutral about the nature of such properties.
In Round 2, I agree with Dan that science initially remains neutral about how to understand the nature of conscious experiences. Nevertheless, the phenomenology of consciousness provides the data that scientists are trying to understand. A better understanding of data does not, in general, make the data disappear. I also ask, “if you remove the phenomena from phenomenal consciousness, in what sense is whatever remains “consciousness”? And, if one removes all the phenomenal content from what one takes consciousness to be, doesn’t this amount to a denial of the existence of “consciousness” in any ordinary sense of this term? Dan’s reply likens beliefs in phenomenal properties to the belief in evil spirits causing disease. He has no doubts that diseases such as whooping cough and tuberculosis are real, but this doesn’t require him to believe in evil spirits. And, what’s left, once one removes phenomenal properties, is what a zombie and a so-called conscious person have in common: a given set of functional properties that enable them to carry out the tasks we normally think of as conscious.
In Round 3, I summarise our similarities and differences. We agree that first-person reports are not incorrigible and that third-person information may throw light on how to interpret them. We also agree that first-person reports are reports of “something”, although we disagree about the nature of that something. I suggest that Dan is sceptical about first-person reports rather than heterophenomenologically “neutral” (e.g. when he likens belief in phenomenal properties to belief in evil spirits). While we agree that science is likely to deepen our understanding of consciousness, I repeat that, unlike the replacement of old theories by better theories, a deeper understanding of phenomena does not in general replace the phenomena themselves. Rather than third-person data replacing first-person reports, the former are required to make sense of the latter, making their relationship complementary and mutually irreducible. In fact, there are many cases where science takes the reality of first-person phenomenology seriously, for example in the extensive literature on pain and its alleviation. If this can’t be squeezed into an exclusively third-person view of science, then we will just have to adjust our view of science - something that a “critical phenomenology” achieves at little cost. At the time of this editing, Dan has not replied.

Viewed from a first-person perspective consciousness appears to be necessary for complex, novel human activity—but viewed from a third-person perspective consciousness appears to play no role in the activity of brains, producing a "causal paradox". To resolve this paradox one needs to distinguish consciousness of processing from consciousness accompanying processing or causing processing. Accounts of consciousness/brain causal interactions switch between first- and third-person perspectives. However, epistemically, the differences between first- and third-person access are fundamental. First- and third-person accounts are complementary and mutually irreducible.

This article focuses on the controversy over the transracial adoption (TRA) of African-American children by Caucasian parents. Arguments favoring and opposing TRA are presented, with accusations among researchers including bias, methodological problems, paradigmatic issues, and “cultural genocide.”
Conceptual confusion over the meanings associated with terms such as
transracial, interracial, transcultural, or biracial adoption contribute to the
quandary. The roles of mental health and racial identity are explored and forensic and treatment considerations are presented. Although the TRA process appears to result in general adjustment and positive personal self-esteem, developmental aspects and the significance of racial identity with respect to group-esteem appear to be significant, yet overlooked aspects of TRA research. It is suggested that TRA among African-Americans may be unique in its complexity based upon
longstanding racial attitudes. Interdisciplinary and multiracial cooperative research is suggested as a means of more accurately approaching the investigation of TRA.

Executive Summary:  Chapter 15--African Hermeneutics of Illuminating Consciousness:The Intercultural Problem of Language and Hermeneutics

This work is simply set to relate Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach to hermeneutics with African philosophical reflections and narrative texts that ‘capture the emergence’ of African illuminating consciousness. The intercultural problem of language strictly focuses on the written tradition (literature) and the linguistic implications of African narrative texts like Chinua Achebe’s use of English language in Things Fall Apart, and why Igbo African language could have been better used in advancing African intellectual consciousness. Each language is able to communicate meaning through dialogue rather than in the use of exact words or similar words in translations. There is understanding in the act of dialogue itself. The intercultural problem of hermeneutics addresses understanding the hermeneutical meanings in Achebe’s Igbo African (tragedy) narrative, without focusing solely on language (linguistic re-presentation) but also on meaningfulness, hermeneutical re-presentation and the communication of communitarian understanding of African tragedy (of losing their frame of mind) as part of African hermeneutics of self-consciousness or African intellectual/intercultural experience communicated through a Western culture/colonial language agency in Achebe. The continued emergence of this self-consciousness should be at the basis of a global ethics of authenticity (Professor Charles Taylor), especially if there is no morality without an authentic self-consciousness and disclosure.

Many of the arguments about how to address the hard versus the easy questions of consciousness put by Chalmers (1995) are similar to ones I have developed in Velmans (1991a,b; 1993a). This includes the multiplicity of mind/body problems, the limits of functional explanation, the need for a non-reductionist approach, and the notion that consciousness may be related to neural/physical representation via a dual-aspect theory of information. But there are also differences. Unlike Chalmers I argue for the use of neutral information processing language for functional accounts rather than the term "awareness." I do not agree that functional equivalence cannot be extricated from phenomenal equivalence, and suggest a hypothetical experiment for doing so—using a cortical implant for blindsight. I argue that not all information has phenomenal accompaniments, and introduce a different form of dual-aspect theory involving "psychological complementarity." I also suggest that the hard problem posed by "qualia" has its origin in a misdescription of everyday experience implicit in dualism.

Time is a significant part of the human consciousness. The human consciousness has
its very own time framework, which registers the length of emotions and experience. It
doesn't depend on division of time into minutes and hours. Time keeping has constantly
assumed a significant role in human culture, and its systems have experienced numerous
progressions consistently. The Industrial Revolution realized impressive change, and the
constant procedure of progress even in the public arena today. The thoughts of Taylorism
presented remarkable perspective on industrialization. Psychological time is a term that
alludes to the pace of the time arrangement of the mind. The interior time arrangement of the
human mind turned out to be progressively significant, in light of the fact that outer time
turned out to be incredibly organized and inflexible. One of the most conspicuous topics in
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is time. Time has a significant influence in Cunningham's
The Hours, as he has employed Woolf's novel as a foundation of motivation. This paper tries
to attempt psychology of time is part of human mind and consciousness in the light of Mrs
Dalloway and The Hours.

The current interest in interdisciplinary study calls for a search for a common pattern that connects the many and varied disciplines to one another. This paper proposes such a pattern. This inquiry, which began as " What is art? " in 1983, led beyond the boundaries of art toward a deeper underlying reality of existence itself, and this added both a spiritual and a scientific dimension to the inquiry. An early finding was that the same form-building rules (patterning) that apply to artistic composition also apply to the forms of living and nonliving systems (science). Subsequent research revealed that this form-building geometry, which underlies human sight, exists in the depths of the human unconscious mind as a unifying Archetypal figure, as the " pattern that connects. " It stands for the concept of wholeness or spirituality. Finally, it became apparent that this unifying pattern is the source from which is derived the known dynamical patterns associated with symmetry. Symmetry is the active governor of the structures and processes that exist in both art and nature's varied systems. Thus this paper begins with several explanatory diagrams that show how symmetry governs form. Having discussed symmetry's organizing powers, first in art and then in nature, these discussions then show that symmetry, as an operation (action), involves the relationship of part to part, of each part to the whole, and of the whole to each of the parts. This principle, which is represented here as the " pattern that connects, " echoes an important spiritual idea: Love God (whole), and love one another (part). Résumé L'intérêt actuel pour l'étude interdisciplinaire requiert la recherche d'un modèle commun qui relie des disciplines diverses et variées l'une à l'autre. Cet article propose un tel modèle. Notre enquête, qui a débuté en 1983 dans « what is art » (qu'est-ce que l'art), nous a conduit au-delà des frontières de l'art vers une réalité plus profonde, sous-jacente, de l'existence elle-même : cela a ajouté une dimension spirituelle et en même temps scientifique à notre enquête.

Spiritual Intelligence is a reflection of what humanity is and what we can strive to be. Join this journey of hope and realization about the human spirit and understand what part the physical world plays in our journey to love, grow and learn. Death is not the end and our life has purpose beyond our everyday experiences. Understanding who we are in this reality allows our lives to progress in a positive manner. Empower yourself to be consciously aware. There is a growth shift in the human population at present. This shift is a realization that as a community, we can take personal responsibility and begin to embrace the positive aspects of life. Humanity is at an exciting time in history. Those who are focusing on their efforts on possibilities will begin to understand more of whom they are and that we are all connected. Science is beginning to understand that the supernatural is natural. Physics, philosophy, NDE, and psychology are explored. What is consciousness? It is an awareness of life, thoughts, sense of self, and the elements of life. It is an awareness of others. It is an awareness of the sacredness of life. It is acknowledging life through thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions and reactions.

This paper replies to the first 36 commentaries on my target article on “Is human information processing conscious?” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1991, pp. 651-669). The target article focused largely on experimental studies of how consciousness relates to human information processing, tracing their relation from input through to output, while discussion of the implications of the findings both for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind was relatively brief. The commentaries reversed this emphasis, and so, correspondingly, did the reply. The sequence of topics in the reply roughly follows that of the target article. The discussion begins with a reconsideration of the details of the empirical findings, whether they can be extrapolated to non-laboratory settings, and the extent to which one can rely on their use of subjective reports. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of what is meant by “conscious processing” and of how phenomenal consciousness relates to attentional processing. We then turn to broader philosophical and theoretical issues. I point out some of the reasons why I do not support epiphenomenalism, dualist-interactionism, or reductionism, and elaborate on how first- and third-person views of the mind can be regarded as complementary and mutually irreducible. I suggest how the relation of conscious experiences to their neural correlates can be understood in terms of a dual-aspect theory of information, and how this might be used to resolve some of the paradoxes surrounding the causal interactions of consciousness and brain. I also suggest that, viewed from a first-person perspective, consciousness gives purpose to existence, which allows a different way of viewing its role in evolution.

This paper argues that within consciousness studies, dualist vs. reductionist debates typically characterise experience in ways which do not correspond to ordinary experience, and that to understand consciousness one must start with an accurate description of its phenomenology. Only then can one develop an understanding of how experiences viewed from a first-person perspective relate to events in the brain viewed from a third-person perspective. The paper then lists some common arguments for conscious experiences (accurately described) being nothing more than brain states along with their fallacies. It concludes that there are fundamental problems with ontological reductionism of conscious experiences to brain states that cannot be resolved.

A human's ultimate arrival in life is something that is not associated with achievements. It all comes down to a foundation of one journey no matter the details. The greatest journey for every human spirit is the journey of love. We have come to be students of time and spirits in flesh with the purpose of becoming unconditional love.

This paper suggests that it is largely a want of notional distinctions which fosters the "explanatory gap" that has beset the study of consciousness since T. Nagel's revival of the topic. Modifying Ned Block's controversial claim that we should countenance a "phenomenal module" which exists in its own right, we argue that there is a way to recuperate the intuitions he appeals to without engaging in an onerous reification of the facet in question. By renewing with the full type/token/tone trichotomy developed by C. S. Peirce, we think the distinctness Block (rightly) calls attention to can be seen as stemming not from any separate module lurking within the mind, but rather from our ability to prescind qualities from occurrences.