Posted inConsciousness

Sartre’s view of consciousness makes a lot of sense

When I was at San Jose State College from 1966 to 1971, I enjoyed my reading in existentialism. That happened when I was a student in the Tutorials in Letters and Sciences program, which was a way-cool experimental approach to learning. Instead of taking the usual required courses in my freshman and sophomore years, I had a single 12 unit Tutorials class each semester where a small number of us students, eight to ten or so, would meet with a professor and discuss from the perspective of four key periods in human history: Ancient Greece/Rome, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment,…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Feeling religiously special can be enjoyable, but it’s dangerous

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note. I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from. It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious…
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Posted inConsciousness Personal/Stories

Drugs as an avenue to exploring consciousness

First, I've made some progress in understanding what Sam Harris means when he says "Consciousness is not inside your head," a semi-perplexing statement that I wrote about recently.  After writing that post, I've listened to a couple of other guided meditations by Harris on his Waking Up app. In one, he talked about how consciousness is akin to the familiar metaphor of waves and the ocean. The waves aren't separate from the ocean, just as consciousness isn't separate from the things that we're conscious of. In the guided meditation I heard today, Harris made a similar point about being aware…
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Posted inConsciousness

Sam Harris says “consciousness is not inside your head.” Huh?

Today I heard Sam Harris say on a guided meditation on his Waking Up app, "Consciousness is not inside your head. Everything is just appearing." I've heard Harris say this many times. I don't understand that notion.  The brain is inside the head. The brain generates consciousness. If you doubt that, have general anesthesia. Have someone hit you on the head with a baseball bat, hard. Have your brain surgically removed. No brain, no consciousness. But we can lose an arm, a leg, or some other non-essential organ and still be conscious.  If someone can make a good argument for…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Important truth: what we need isn’t God, but our own being

Well, today I finished a book I've been blogging about for a while, Seth Gillihan's Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As is the case with most books I read, I liked almost all of it, finding just a few parts annoying. I'll mention the annoying parts first, to get them out of the way. Gillihan doesn't mention religion or his own faith very often in the book. But given his subject, even a few times seemed too many to me. I was OK with him using "spirit" as a way to describe the deeper aspect of life. Here he describes his…
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Posted inConsciousness Personal/Stories

Anesthesia with propofol raises interesting consciousness questions

Because I'm prone to getting non-cancerous polyps, which could turn into cancer if not removed, I've had colonoscopies every five years or so since I was around fifty. The most recent ones have involved anesthesia with propofol, a frequently-used drug with few side effects but potential for abuse. Because it induces euphoria in many people. One study found about half.  In 2011 I wrote "Finding enlightenment through a colonoscopy (and propofol)." After talking about a disturbing conversation I had with a nurse about whether propofol truly prevents a patient from feeling discomfort/pain, or merely takes away the memory of discomfort/pain,…
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Posted inConsciousness

Experience is part of physical reality

Sometimes -- well, actually, quite a lot of times -- I find people arguing on this blog, and in other places, that science doesn't know how to deal with personal experience. Further, that because experience seems to be something ineffable, as is consciousness (likely there's no difference between experience and consciousness), this means that the most intimate part of our being is outside the domain of science, which deals with physical reality. Galen Strawson, a philosopher, disagrees. I wrote about his take on consciousness in "The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter."  Many make the same…
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Posted inConsciousness

The hard problem isn’t the nature of consciousness, but of matter

The Portland Oregonian sometimes has the New York Times Book Review section in its Sunday online edition. Looking it over last weekend, I noted an ad for a book containing 133 essays from the Times' award-winning philosophy series. I gave "Question Everything" to myself as a belated Christmas present. It arrived recently, and I read one of the essays by Galen Strawson this morning: Consciousness Isn't a Mystery. It's Matter. Wow. Really interesting and thought-provoking. Strawson presented a fresh view of consciousness that I'd never come across before. This is the power of philosophy, which to me simply means clear thinking…
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Posted inConsciousness God Reality

God, like money, is real only because of the human mind

As I noted in a previous post about Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, I'm enjoying the book more now that I'm past the introductory chapters. One reason is that Barrett doesn't just describe how emotions are made. She embeds that description in larger issues. For example, her "Emotions As Social Reality" chapter starts off with the classic question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound? Even though I should know better, when I ponder this question my first…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

Tools for reducing undesirable mental chatter

Having finished Ethan Kross' book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, I want to share some tools listed at the end of the book for dealing with the voice in our head when it gets too annoying. These are the tools that Kross says can be implemented on your own. They're in order of how easily each can be implemented when chatter strikes. A basic theme is that they're aimed at stepping back from the echo chamber of our own mind. The last two involve embracing a superstition or performing a ritual.…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

I’m pretty sure Sam Harris’ “pure awareness” doesn’t exist

As much as I like Sam Harris' approach to meditation, which basically is Buddhism (Vipassana variety) minus the Buddhist part, I'm still left with a key question. Which if asked of a Zen master likely would earn me a smack on my head or kick of my butt -- or more mildly, a quizzical look and an admonition to return to my meditation mat and seek more diligently for the true nature of my self. That self, of course, doesn't really exist in Buddhism, nor in Sam Harris' guided meditations on his Waking Up app. So whoever it is who…
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Posted inConsciousness

Our inner voice is linked to our various selves

Most of us have an inner voice speaking to us inside our mind. It can either be voluntary, as when I read "Most of us have an inner voice" and can hear those words silently echo within my brain. It can also be involuntary, as when I do something wrong and hear "You're an idiot" admonishing me without my consciously willing those words. This inner voice generally is taken for granted. It's just part of our mental background.  But a few years ago, when I was into vaping cartridges filled with concentrated cannabis oil (marijuana is legal here in Oregon),…
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Posted inConsciousness

We delude ourselves into believing we’re a conscious “I”

Going through a stack of unread magazines, I came across a Scientific American from September 2018 that was a special issue devoted to the subject "Humans: Why we're unlike any other species on the planet." All of the articles are interesting, but I found Susan Blackmore's Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness: The Hardest Problem to be especially so. Blackmore has an affinity for Zen, which is reflected in the concluding excerpts from her article that I've shared below. I resonate with her leaning toward the illusionist theory of consciousness. Meaning, we certainly do have subjective experience, but our sense…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness Science

What hitting a fastball tells us about the brain

I'm not sure what to make of this seemingly correct fact, but I find it so interesting, I feel that it must have some deep significance to those of us who aren't professional baseball players. In the course of rereading a chapter in Robert Burton's book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, I came across his analysis of baseball pitchers and hitters in the "When Does a Thought Begin?" chapter. Here's the crux of the issue: Professional baseball pitchers throw with velocities in the range of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Elapsed time from…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness Science

How neural networks operate in the hidden layer of our brain

ln my previous post, I referred to the hidden depths of the brain without including much of a description of what goes on in those depths. Neuroscience is still working on that problem. But even though Robert Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, wrote the book I spoke about in the blog post (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not) in 2008, the basic points he makes are still valid. (Neuroscience doesn't evolve that fast.) Here's passages from his chapter on Neural Networks that will give you a good feel for how the hidden layer of the…
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Posted inAwareness Consciousness

A guided meditation by Sam Harris about the open sky of consciousness

Below is a transcript of a guided meditation by Sam Harris that I listened to recently on his Waking Up app. I enjoyed it a lot. His guided meditations last either 10 or 20 minutes, depending on how much non-speaking time you choose. So the words by Harris should be experienced, not just thought about. Of course, there's quite a bit to ponder in how Harris views consciousness and its contents. What he says reminds me of what I read about Descartes and his famous Cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am,  in an intriguing new book by David Chalmers…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness

Sam Harris on the riddle of the self

Figured I might as well continue on with how Sam Harris views meditation, spirituality, and the non-existence of an enduring self, even though I've previously written quite a bit about this. As noted before, Harris is one of my favorite spiritual writers because he both recognizes the downside of religions and believing in a God for which there's no evidence, while also recognizing that there is much to learn about the human mind and how we can live more pleasantly through meditation and mindfulness. Here's a footnote to my recent post about Harris and Dzogchen, the Tibetan form of Buddhism…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

You can’t go beyond mind, because that’s what you are

Yesterday Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, responded to Appreciative Reader, another frequent commenter. I enjoy how Tepper thinks, even when I don't agree with him. Below I've shared in bold italics some observations on his interesting comment. Hi ARYou asked""Please explain in clear words what exactly you were trying to say."Thank you for the clarity of your question. It was a great question. And I appreciate the response from Tepper below, which is pleasingly direct. Beyond mind meaning beyond your own conventional thinking. OK, I agree that it isn't possible to go beyond the mind, because mind isn't…
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Posted inConsciousness

Everybody’s brain is producing a kind of hallucination

Today I finished reading the final pages of Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Here's a provocative passage from the Epilogue. Everything in conscious experience is a perception of sorts, and every perception is a kind of controlled -- or controlling -- hallucination. What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us.  Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real -- these may…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

“Beast machine theory” explains consciousness well

Hate to break this to you, if you're a firm believer in immaterial consciousness, but we humans are animals. Specifically, mammals of the primate variety, close relatives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and such. In his book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness," Anil Seth lays out his well-informed view of consciousness. (He's a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.) Seth gave a TEDx talk about his beast machine theory.  Here's some of what Seth has to say in his book about the beast machine theory. The beast machine theory grounds experiences of world and self…
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