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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Posted inBooks Consciousness

The teletransportation paradox gives us clues about the “self”

Here's an excerpt from Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." I found it fascinating, even though it echoes ideas Derek Parfit wrote about in one of his books. But Seth describes this thought experiment in an intriguing way. After the excerpt, I'll share some observations about it. Let's begin our exploration of the self with a quick trip into the future. A century or so from now, teletransportation devices have been invented which can create exact replicas of any human being.  Just like the machines in Star Trek, they work by scanning a person in exquisite detail…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

We’re conscious because we are beast machines

I'm enjoying Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Consciousness is fascinating. Without it, we are nothing. Without it, we know nothing. Without it, we experience nothing. So, yeah, consciousness is pretty damn important. Here's passages from the Prologue. They offer a good feel for the approach Seth takes in his book, which is based on a solid grasp of modern neuroscience.  The book jacket says: "Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and codirector of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science." This book is about the neuroscience of…
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Posted inConsciousness Science

Quantum theory doesn’t say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying.  But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts.  I no longer…
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Posted inConsciousness

Brain and conscious mind are linked like two sides of a coin

Here's some excerpts from a story in the June 2021 issue of Scientific American, "The Brain Electric," by Christof Koch.  Koch makes some great points about the current state of science's understanding of the brain/mind. There's no doubt that the mind is the brain in action. Meaning, no brain, no mind.  But even though the physicality of mind is clear, there's plenty of mystery left to be explored in the highly complex three pound hunk of meat that resides between our ears. -- You're headed toward a storm that's a couple of miles away, and you've got to get across…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness Science

Mind and consciousness through the eye of quantum physics

Here's additional excerpts from physicist Carlo Rovelli's wonderful new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." (See here for my first post about the book.) The passages below are from final chapters where Rovelli focuses on the nature of mind and consciousness in light of quantum physics.  Rovelli's take on this subject is very much in line with a post I wrote in 2018, "Awareness is a process, not a thing."  Consciousness isn't a thing. It is a process. Thinking of it as a thing makes us wonder what kind of a thing it is, whereas we should be…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness

Motive of a mass murderer wrongly assumes conscious will

One of the things that comes through loud and clear in the many modern neuroscience and psychology books I've read is that we humans are lousy at knowing why we act a certain way. Experiments on split-brain patients, for example, where the connection between the two brain hemispheres has been severed, shows that even when the left side of the brain (which controls language) is unaware of the reason the right side did something, the patient will make up a "why" story that has no basis in fact. We don't like to admit that we don't know. So the brain…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Consciousness

My #1 problem with Steve Hagen’s “The Grand Delusion”

I'm a big fan of Steve Hagen's books about non-religious Buddhism. "Buddhism Plain and Simple" and "Buddhism is Not What You Think" really resonated with me.  But his new book, "The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don't Believe" elicited a lot of question marks in the margins.  One problem I had with the book is that while Hagen's other books were marked by humility, this one has a heavy dose of grandiosity. Hagen sets out to solve every issue perplexing humanity, or more accurately, scientists.  Consciousness. Quantum theory. Free will. Existence of God. All these topics, and more, supposedly…
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Posted inConsciousness

“Consciousness” might be a meaningless word

Below you can read a letter in New Scientist that raises a question I've pondered. Is there really such a thing as consciousness?  It's clear that, along with other living beings, we humans are aware of both our external surroundings and internal states like hunger, thirst, fear, sexual attraction, thoughts, and such. However, since that awareness is the brain in action when neurons reach a certain level of complexity, is it necessary to call that brain activity by a special name? Perhaps. Perhaps not.  As the letter writer notes, at one point people thought that there must be some medium…
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Posted inConsciousness

Trump’s new crazy idea to kill the coronavirus

Since quite a few people from countries around the world visit this blog, I decided to put this post here rather than on one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark and HinesSight. I'm doing this out of a cry for help. Not a prayer, because I don't believe in God. Just a request that wherever you are in the world, send some kind thoughts in the direction of the United States. I ask for this because today it became clearer than ever -- and believe me, it was exceedingly clear before -- that our president, Donald Trump, is the…
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Posted inConsciousness Science

How the brain fools us into believing consciousness is immaterial

I love it! Because I loved The Matrix movie. There's something wildly appealing about our consciousness being deceived about the nature of reality in such a fashion that it is very difficult to escape the bounds of that deception. The "it" that I'm loving is a book by Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience is one of the best books I've read about the nature of consciousness, and I've read a lot of them. Here's a 13-minute video where Graziano describes the key aspects of his Attention Schema…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

Our essence is more iike a spider web than a diamond

Take a look at these images. Which do you feel best describes your essence? Is the real you more like a complex spider web with lots of gossamer interconnections, or a simple unitary, unchanging diamond? Most people have the feeling that they possess, or are, a core consciousness that often is termed the Self or Soul. This is the dominant religious philosophy, whether Western or Eastern (Buddhism and Taoism excepted). So the goal of a "diamond" perspective is to get in touch with an unchanging essence that remains the same in the midst of an ever-changing world. That perspective almost…
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Posted inConsciousness Science

Quantum theory isn’t needed to explain consciousness

If I wasn't an atheist I would have called out Thank God! when i read the following passages in Christof Koch's book, "The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed." Koch, who is President and Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, doesn't see any need to invoke mysterious quantum phenomena when attempts to understand consciousness are being undertaken. As I noted recently, it irritates me when someone -- who almost always isn't a scientist -- tries to inject quantum theory into a discussion of meditation, consciousness, or such. As Koch…
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