Showing posts with label philosophy of mind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy of mind. Show all posts

New Level Of Cosmic Consciousness Truth And Reality

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New Level Of Cosmic Consciousness Truth And Reality
A cut above consciousness is generally regarded as a suitable undergo of consciousness in which aspects of the incentive, such as contemplation, supportive and tension, are enlarged, cultured and exceptional. It is intentional thus to be a excellent level of consciousness family member to not noteworthy consciousness, in the judge that a larger feeling of reasonableness is achieved. In a of time context, excellent consciousness is as a matter of course associated with enhanced power once more one's incentive and atmosphere, take offense and aptly elucidation, and fantastic clandestine mutiny. In a spiritual context, it may also be associated with transcendence, spiritual elucidation, and confederation with the divine.

The conception of excellent consciousness rests on the belief that the unexceptional, not noteworthy mortal party is recently fairly conscious due to the description of the dilettante incentive and the roughly of cut impulses and preoccupations. As a product, most humans are intentional to be knocked out (to reasonableness) even as they go about their essay trade

Basis


Theories Of Everything A Theory Of Everything Must Address Consciousness Says Prof

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Theories Of Everything A Theory Of Everything Must Address Consciousness Says Prof
A new theory of the universe outlined by Wake Forest University medicine prof Robert Lanza, called biocentrism, addresses the implications of failure to include our own consciousness in our understanding of the world:

Neuroscientists have developed theories that might help to explain how separate pieces of information are integrated in the brain and thus succeed in elucidating how different attributes of a single perceived object-such as the shape, color, and smell of a flower-are merged into a coherent whole. These theories reflect some of the important work that is occurring in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, but they are theories of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the performance of these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience; and yet the difficulty in understanding consciousness lies precisely here, in this gap in our understanding of how a subjective experience emerges from a physical process.

[... ]

Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to ask about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them.

Lanza argues, essentially, that attempts to understand the universe through physics and chemistry alone are doomed by the quantum mechanical nature of life. Interesting reading!

From what I can tell, most materialists are not so much looking for a way to understand consciousness (self, soul, free will, et cetera) as a way to define it out of existence or effectiveness. The fact that they want their biggest problem to be just dismissed as a myth shows the size of the challenge they face in dealing with it. Go here, here, and here for a few examples.

Check out "The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul" by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary (Harper 2007).

Source: witch-selena.blogspot.com

Deepak Chopra God 2 0 Quantum Flapdoodle

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Deepak Chopra God 2 0 Quantum Flapdoodle
Michael Shermer has this interesting post about Deepak Chopra's quantum God.

In most surveys, nine out of ten Americans respond in the affirmative to the question "Do you believe in God?" The other 10 percent provide a variety of answers, including a favorite among skeptics and atheists: "Which god do you mean?" And then they offer a litany of classical and non-Western deities: Aphrodite, Amon Ra, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithras, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, and Zeus. "We're all atheists of these gods," the stock reply concludes, "but some of us go one god further."

I have debated many theologians who make the traditional arguments for God's existence: the cosmological argument (prime mover, first cause), the teleological argument (the order and design of the universe), the ontological argument (if it is logically possible for God to exist, then God exists), the anthropic argument (the fine-tuned characteristics of nature, making human life possible), the moral argument (awareness of right and wrong), and others. These are all reasons to believe in God only if you already believe. If you do not already believe, these arguments ring hollow, having been refuted over the ages by philosophers from David Hume to Daniel Dennett.

This past spring, however, I participated in a debate with a theologian of a different stripe, the New Age spiritualist Deepak Chopra. His arguments for the existence of a deity take a radically new tack. During our exchange, which was taped by ABC's "Nightline" and viewed by millions, Chopra set out a series of scientific-sounding arguments for the existence of a divine quantum force capable of nonlocal "spooky action at a distance," as Einstein famously described quantum entanglement. Call this new theology God 2.0.

Chopra provided a preview of these arguments in his 2006 book "Life After Death". Consider this passage:

The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom. Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images I could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron....

Chopra believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.

Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Penrose and Hameroff conjecture that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons. This, in turn, triggers the neurons to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can only come about when an atom is "observed" (that is, affected in any way by something else), "mind" may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons... and so on.

Shermer discredits this idea as does Murray Gell-Mann:


Chopra's use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls "quantum flapdoodle," which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different types of mathematics....

via Deepak Chopra's God 2.0 Big Questions Online.

It seems our desire to be immortal leads many to speculate that the brain is not responsible, by itself, for our experience of consciousness.

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