Posted inConsciousness

The mystery of consciousness actually isn’t so mysterious

The history of science shows us that many inexplicable phenomena, which often were considered to have supernatural causes (Thor makes thunder!) actually have natural causes.  I strongly suspect that the same will prove to be true of consciousness. While most scientists view consciousness to be a product of the brain, some, especially those with a philosophical bent, have a dualistic perspective where mind and body are separate entities. This, of course, was how Descartes saw things way back in the 1600s, believing that the mind was nonphysical. Most religions share that opinion, though soul sometimes is substituted for mind, or…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

The delusion of believing in gurus and other gems from Joan Tollifson

In my daily morning reading, I bounce back and forth between books about science and books about spirituality/philosophy, because consuming too much of either is less pleasant for me than a balanced diet. I've been enjoying several of Joan Tollifson's books for my spiritual/philosophical reading. She's become my favorite contemporary writer on Zen, Buddhism, nonduality, meditation, and such. I don't agree with everything she says. Which isn't surprising, since I don't agree with everything I say.  For example, Tollifson considers awareness to be the Key Thing. (The quotes in this post are from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Becoming confused about illusionism, I shift to the simpler topic of many selves

So, I was happily reading along in Eric Schwitzgebel's book, The Weirdness of the World, getting to the last few pages of a chapter where he tries to define consciousness in a defensible fashion, when my attention was captured by a passage about illusionism -- though that term wasn't used by Schwitzgebel. Some philosophers have argued that consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, does not exist. Keith Frankish is the most visible recent advocate, but others include Paul Feyerabend, Jay Garfield, Francois Kammerer, and maybe early Patricia Churchland. The argument is always a version of the following:  The ordinary concept of (phenomenal)…
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Posted inConsciousness Universe

Common sense doesn’t lead very far when it comes to Big Questions

What is the ultimate nature of physical reality?How do relativity theory and quantum mechanics relate?Is our universe unique or one of many?Do we live in a computer simulation?What produces consciousness? How rare is consciousness in the cosmos?Do humans possess free will? These are Big Questions. Some bigger than others, but all are substantial when compared to lesser questions more amenable to being answered, if not now, at least in the not-so-distant future. You'll note that I didn't include any questions about God, spirit, soul, heaven, and such. That's because while there's a non-zero chance supernatural entities exist, it's much more likely…
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Posted inConsciousness

Consciousness arises in the brain (no matter what you may read on this blog)

NOTE (to consciousness geeks): if you've already read this post, I've updated it with an admittedly geeky further description and critique of the "naturalistic dualism" espoused by philosopher David Chalmers. I did this after Googling that term and finding a blog post that I'd written in 2010 on this subject. If you're into zombies, you might find a mention of them interesting. It's kind of weird that I have to distance myself from content on this blog in the title of this post. That's due to me writing blog posts that I do my best to be scientifically and otherwise…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Free will

Some final thoughts on Paul Breer’s books

Whew. I did it. Finished all 495 pages of Paul Breer's second book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. It was interesting reading, though it repeated some of the themes in his first book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will.  I admire authors like Breer who put a lot of time and effort into writing about a subject that, given its nature, isn't going to land their book(s) on best seller lists. It's a labor of love, not of money. I speak as someone who has put a lot of time and effort into writing books of…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Don’t watch yourself. Be yourself. In meditation, and in everything.

I usually listen to a daily guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. But sometimes I enjoy other offerings on the app, which includes a section called Theory. There's also Practice and Life. Now and then Harris correctly says in his guided meditations that listening to a conversation in the Theory section can be just as valuable of meditating. After all, meditation is about paying attention to what's happening in the present moment. If that thing is an interesting conversation between Harris and someone else, and I'm paying close attention to it, then, hey, that's a form of meditation.…
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Posted inConsciousness

Pure Consciousness isn’t what its name implies

I don't like the term pure consciousness. Or its identical twin, pure awareness. I've written about this dislike in some blog posts: here, here, here, and here.  Obviously I've got no problem with talking about consciousness or awareness, which in my view are the same thing. If we're conscious of something we're aware of that thing. It's the pure that rubs me the wrong way. That word conjures us an image of something absolutely clear and transparent, nothing in it except consciousness/awareness. (From now on I'll just speak of consciousness rather than wearing out my laptop's slash key.) Sure, I…
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Posted inConsciousness Free will

Enlightenment: the Cosmic View vs. the Local View (I go with local)

Whew. What a relief. So good to know that I was mistaken. After reading Paul Breer's first book about the illusion of free will, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, I decided to dive even deeper into the Breer waters and bought his follow-up book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment.  This second book has a different structure that I wondered about when I began reading it, but is turning out to be appealing. The book starts by saying that a local library has announced a course about -- no big surprise -- Beyond Self-Realization.  Eight people…
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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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