Uncle John died about one-thirty this morning without regaining consciousness. Gayle called with the information about six this morning. - Amorella
Afternoon. You, Carol and Kim are at the new Tanger’s Outlet off St. Rt. 37 and I-71 about twelve miles north of Polaris Shopping. You are sitting in south lot waiting while they shop. Earlier the three of you had lunch at Ann’s Cafe in north Powell off Liberty Street. Jen flew back to Tampa a few hours ago and Linda is shopping at Polaris with her friend Patty. Paul is watching the boys while readying to cook ribs for supper. – Amorella
1414 hours. I am ready to work.
Go back to the classical research you did
yesterday and I’ll pull specific material and place it here. – Amorella
****
Psychopomps (literally meaning in Greek the "guide of souls") are
creatures, spirits, angels, or dieties in many religions whose responsibility
is to escort newly deceased souls from Earth to the afterlife. Their role is
not to judge the deceased, but simply to provide safe passage.
In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator
between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in
dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful animal. In many
cultures, the shaman also fulfills the role of the psychopomp. This may include
not only accompanying the soul of the dead, but also to help at birth, to
introduce the newborn child's soul to the world.
Classical examples of a psychopomp are the ancient
Egyptian god Anubis, the Greek ferryman Charon and dieties Hermes and Hecate, the
Roman god Mercury, and the Etruscan deity Vanth. The form of Shiva as Tarakesshwara
in Hinduism performs a similar role, although leading the soul to moksha rather
than an afterlife. . . .
**
Diana
In Roman
mythology, Diana was the goddess of the hunt, the moon, and nature being
associated with wild animals and woodland, and having the power to talk to and
control animals. . . . Diana was known to be the virgin goddess of childbirth
and women. She was one of the three maiden goddesses, along with Minerva and
Vesta, who swore never to marry. Oak groves were especially sacred to her as
were deer. According to mythology (in common with the Greek religion and their
deity Artemis), Diana was born with her twin brother, Apollo, on the island of
Delos, daughter of Jupiter and Latona.
James G. Frazer links Diana with the male god Janus as
a divine couple. . . . Frazer identifies the two with the supreme heavenly
couple Jupiter-Juno and additionally ties in these figures to the overarching
Indo-European religious complex. This regality is also linked to the cult of
trees, particularly oaks.
**
Selene / Luna
In Greek mythology, Selene is the goddess of
the moon. She is the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, and sister of
the sun-god Helios and Eos, goddess of the dawn. She drives her moon chariot
across the heavens. Both Selene and Artemis were also associated with Hecate, and
all three were regarded as lunar goddesses, although only Selene was regarded
as the personification of the moon itself. Her Roman equivalent is Luna.
In Hesiod’s Theogony,
the sun-god Hyperion espoused his sister Theia, who gave birth to
"great Helios and clear Selene and Eos who shines upon all that are on
earth and upon the deathless Gods who live in the wide heaven."
**
Hecate or Hekate is a goddess in Ancient Greek religion and
mythology . . . in later periods depicted in triple form. She was variously
associated with crossroads, entrance-ways, light, magic, witchcraft, knowledge
of herbs and poisonous plants, ghosts, necromancy, and sorcery. She was also
one of the main deities worshiped in Athenian households as a protective
goddess and one who bestowed prosperity and daily blessings on the family. In
the post-Christian writings of the Chaldean Oracles (2nd–3rd century CE) she
was regarded with (some) rulership over earth, sea and sky, as well as a more
universal role as Saviour (Soteira), Mother of Angels and the Cosmic World
Soul. Regarding the nature of her cult, it has been remarked, "she is more
at home on the fringes of Greek polytheism. Intrinsically ambivalent and
polymorphous, she straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition.
Hesiod emphasizes that Hecate was an only child, the
daughter of Perses and Asteria, a star-goddess who was the sister of Leto (the
mother of Artemis and Apollo).
Hecate also came to be associated with ghosts,
infernal spirits, the dead and sorcery. Shrines to Hecate were placed at
doorways to both homes and cities with the belief that it would protect from restless
dead and other spirits. Likewise, shrines to Hecate at three way crossroads
were created where food offerings were left at the new moon to protect those
who did so from spirits and other evils.
Hecate was generally represented as three-formed,
which probably has some connection with the appearance of the full moon, half
moon, and new moon. Triple Hecate was the goddess of the moon with three forms:
Selene the Moon in heaven, Artemis the Huntress on earth, and Persephone the
Destroyer in the underworld.
Classical examples of a psychopomp are the ancient Egyptian god Anubis, the Greek ferryman Charon
and dieties Hermes and Hecate, the Roman god Mercury, and the Etruscan deity
Vanth. The form of Shiva as Tarakesshwara in Hinduism performs a similar role, . . .
The most common contemporary example of a psychopomp
appearing in popular culture is the Grim Reaper, which dates from 15th-century
England and has been adopted into many other cultures around the world over the
years; . . .
In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator
between the unconscious and conscious realms.
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
****
You moved this modified description to a new
document titled “Psychopomps” from which to continue work. – Amorella
1442 hours. I assume there is more work to
be done here. I don’t see this focus being uplifted to Mexito, Friendly and
Diplomat and their connection with the
Soki. – Is the Soki a psychopomp? or
(though however unlikely) Are Mexito, Friendly and Diplomat psychopomps?
The Soki is the individual’s whispering
voice of unconsciousness. The psychopomp is the mediator of consciousness and
unconsciousness. – Amorella
1450 hours. So, Soki is the voice of the
unconsciousness, and the conscious voice is another, and then the psychopomp –
thus, there are three main voices in the story?
How
about incorporating the three phases of the Moon and the reflection from the
sun? - Amorella
Kim just called and wants me to pick them
up.
Post, when applicable. – Amorella
1458 hours. It seems we are in the middle
of something here.
You
napped then had excellent short ribs and salad for supper whipped up by Kim and
Paul after which you did your thirty-minute exercises. This month you have
completed four a week each week, so you are back on a schedule.
Gayle
got word that the graveside service for Uncle John is Wednesday at eleven.
Afterwards everyone is meeting at a nearby Der Dutchman for lunch then
dispersing. – Amorella
2117 hours. The boys are asleep, Kim’s
working in her office, Carol’s taking a shower, Linda’s reading and Paul is
watching the Indians and Cubs. I’m ready to work.
Here is the earthly metaphysics of the
psychopomps – the mental space between the unconscious and conscious minds. –
Amorella
2121 hours. First, I need definitions.
As you are running into too little or too
much data I will edit from Wikipedia. - Amorella
** **
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists
of the processes in the mind which occur automatically and are not available to
introspection, and include thought processes, memories, interests, and
motivations.
Even though these processes exist well under the surface of
conscious awareness they are theorized to exert an impact on behavior. The term
was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling
and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor
Coleridge.
Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed
feelings, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, thoughts, habits, and
automatic reactions, and possibly also complexes; hidden phobias and desires.
The concept was popularized by the Austrian neurologist and
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.. In psychoanalytic theory, unconscious processes
are understood to be directly represented in dreams, as well as in slips of the
tongue and jokes.
Thus the unconscious mind can be seen as the source of dreams
and automatic thoughts (those that appear without any apparent cause), the
repository of forgotten memories (that may still be accessible to consciousness
at some later time), and the locus of implicit knowledge (the things that we
have learned so well that we do them without thinking).
It has been
argued that consciousness is influenced by other parts of the mind. These
include unconsciousness as a personal habit, being unaware, and intuition.
Phenomena related to semi-consciousness include awakening, implicit memory,
subliminal messages, trances, hypnagogia and hypnosis. While sleep,
sleepwalking, dreaming, delirium and comas sleep, may signal the presence of unconscious processes,
these processes are seen as symptoms rather than the unconscious mind itself.
Jung's view
Carl Gustav
Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, developed the concept further. He agreed with Freud
that the unconscious is a determinant of personality, but he proposed that the
unconscious be divided into two layers: the personal unconscious and the
collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is a reservoir of material
that was once conscious but has been forgotten or suppressed, much like Freud's
notion. The collective unconscious, however, is the deepest level of the
psyche, containing the accumulation of inherited psychic structures and
archetypal experiences. Archetypes are not memories but images with universal
meanings that are apparent in the culture's use of symbols. The collective
unconscious is therefore said to be inherited and contain material of an entire
species rather than of an individual. Every person shares the collective
unconscious with the entire human race, as Jung puts it: [the] "whole
spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of
every individual".
Research
While, historically, the psychoanalytic research tradition was
the first to focus on the phenomenon of unconscious mental activity, there is
an extensive body of conclusive research and knowledge in contemporary
cognitive psychology devoted to the mental activity that is not mediated by
conscious awareness.
Most of that
(cognitive) research on unconscious processes has been done in the mainstream,
academic tradition of the information-processing paradigm. As opposed to the
psychoanalytic tradition, driven by the relatively speculative (in the sense of
being hard to empirically verify) theoretical concepts such as the Oedipus
complex or Electra complex, , the cognitive tradition of research on
unconscious processes is based on relatively few theoretical assumptions and is
very empirically oriented (i.e., it is mostly data driven). Cognitive research
has revealed that automatically, and clearly outside of conscious awareness,
individuals register and acquire more information than what they can experience
through their conscious thoughts.
Unconscious processing of information about frequency
For example, an
extensive line of research conducted by Hasher and Zacks has demonstrated that
individuals register information about the frequency of events automatically
(i.e., outside of conscious awareness and without engaging conscious
information processing resources). Moreover, perceivers do this
unintentionally, truly "automatically," regardless of the
instructions they receive, and regardless of the information processing goals
they have. Interestingly, the ability to unconsciously and relatively
accurately tally the frequency of events appears to have little or no relation
to the individual's age, education, intelligence, or personality, thus it may
represent one of the fundamental building blocks of human orientation in the
environment and possibly the acquisition of procedural knowledge and
experience, in general.
Selected and
edited by Amorella from - Wikipedia
** **
The unconscious in the Soki’s Choice is
basically based on the above with perhaps an exception or two when warranted. –
Amorella
2147 hours. I feel much better being
consciously aware of the above.
** **
Consciousness
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an
external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience,
awareness, subjectivit, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness,
having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many
philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about
what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The
Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of
at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience
at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."
Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke,
have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and identify its
essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness
include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness
can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists
and if so how can it be recognized; how consciousness relates to language;
whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require dualistic
distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it
may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be
conscious, a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence.
Thanks to recent developments in technology, consciousness has
become a significant topic of research in psychology, neuropsychology and
neuroscience within the past few decades. The primary focus is on understanding
what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in
consciousness—that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates
of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness by
asking human subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g.,
"tell me if you notice anything when I do this"). Issues of interest
include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of
impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other
drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.
In medicine, consciousness
is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and can be
seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension,
through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally
loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. Issues of practical concern
include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill,
comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which
consciousness is impaired or disrupted.
Philosophy of mind
The philosophy of mind has given rise to many stances regarding
consciousness. The Routledge Encyclopedia
of Philosophy in 1998 defines consciousness as follows:
Consciousness—Philosophers have used the term 'consciousness' for four main
topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge
it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience... Something within one's
mind is 'introspectively conscious' just in case one introspects it (or is
poised to do so). Introspection is often thought to deliver one's primary
knowledge of one's mental life. An experience or other mental entity is
'phenomenally conscious' just in case there is 'something it is like' for one
to have it. The clearest examples are: perceptual experience, such as tastings
and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles
and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of one's own actions or
perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking 'in
words' or 'in images'. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or
dissociable, although this is controversial.
In a more skeptical definition of consciousness, Stuart
Sutherland has exemplified some of the difficulties in fully ascertaining all
of its cognate meanings in his entry for the 1989 version of the Macmillan
Dictionary of Psychology:
Consciousness—The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness.
The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible
without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of
equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only
necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but
elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or
why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.
Most writers on the philosophy of consciousness have been
concerned with defending a particular point of view, and have organized their
material accordingly. For surveys, the most common approach is to follow a
historical path by associating stances with the philosophers who are most
strongly associated with them, for example Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc. An
alternative is to organize philosophical stances according to basic issues.
The coherence of the concept
Philosophers and non-philosophers differ in their intuitions
about what consciousness is. While most people have a strong intuition for the
existence of what they refer to as consciousness, skeptics argue that this
intuition is false, either because the concept of consciousness is
intrinsically incoherent, or because our intuitions about it are based in
illusions. Gilbert Ryle, for example, argued that traditional understanding of
consciousness depends on a Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly
distinguishes between mind and body, or between mind and world. He proposed
that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or
persons, acting in the world.
Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we end up
misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as
consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings. More
generally, many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the
difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or
fuzziness.
Types of consciousness
Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary
concept that is understood intuitively by the majority of people in spite of
the difficulty in defining it. Others, though, have argued that the level of
disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means
different things to different people (for instance, the objective versus
subjective aspects of consciousness), or else is an umbrella term encompassing
a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common.
Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of
consciousness that he called phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access
(A-consciousness). P-consciousness, according to Block, is simply raw
experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and
feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences,
considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia.
A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby
information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the
control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive
is access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is
access conscious; when we remember, information about the past is access
conscious, and so on. Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have
disputed the validity of this distinction, others have broadly accepted it.
David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood
in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness is much more challenging:
he calls this the hard problem of
consciousness.
Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of
consciousness are not the end of the story. William Lycan, for example, argued
in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly
distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness;
control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness;
reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness;
self-consciousness)—and that even this list omits several more obscure forms.
There is also debate over whether or not a-consciousness and
p-consciousness always co-exist or if they can exist separately. Although
p-consciousness without a-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have
been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block for instance suggests the
case of a “zombie” that is computationally identical to a person but without
any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I don’t
know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without
P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility."
Forms of consciousness
While philosophers tend to focus on types of consciousness that
occur 'in the mind', in other disciplines such as sociology the emphasis is on
the practical meaning of consciousness. In this vein, it is possible to
identify four forms of consciousness:
1. Sensory experience, "the phenomenal sense that something
exists in relation to, or has an impact on, a person". The concept of ‘affect’
attests to this kind of consciousness, as does ‘sense data' "
2. Practical consciousness, or "knowing how to do things,
knowing how to ‘go on’. As writers as different as Wittgenstein and Marx have
elaborated, it is "basic to human engagement"
3. Reflective consciousness, "the modality in which people
reflect upon the first two forms. It is the stuff of ordinary philosophy and day-to-day
thinking about what has been done and what is to be done"
4. Reflexive consciousness, or "reflecting on the basis of
reflection, and interrogating the nature of knowing in the context of the
constitutive conditions of being".
Mind–body problem
Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes
(such as brain events) seem to be correlated: but what is the basis of this
connection and correlation between what seem to be two very different kinds of
processes?
The first influential philosopher to discuss this question
specifically was Descartes, and the answer he gave is known as Cartesian
dualism. Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial
domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain
of material things, which he called res extensa (the realm of extension). He
suggested that the interaction between these two domains occurs inside the
brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the pineal gland.
Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the
problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and
his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed. However, no
alternative solution has gained general acceptance. Proposed solutions can be
divided broadly into two categories: dualist solutions that maintain Descartes'
rigid distinction between the realm of consciousness and the realm of matter
but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and
monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of
which consciousness and matter are both aspects.
Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants. The
two main types of dualism are substance dualism (which holds that the mind is
formed of a distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics) and
property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid
but cannot be used to explain the mind).
The three main types of monism are physicalism (which holds that
the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way), idealism (which
holds that only thought or experience truly exists, and matter is merely an
illusion), and neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are
aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them).
There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot
cleanly be assigned to any of these schools of thought. . . .
A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics
is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness,
but that quantum theory may provide the missing ingredients. Several theorists
have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness.
Notable theories falling into this category include the holonomic
brain theory of Karl Pribram and DavidBohm, and the Orch-OR theory formulated
by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Some of these QM theories offer
descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of
access consciousness. None of the quantum mechanical theories has been
confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi, J. Cia, S.
Popescu, and H. Briegel could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff,
which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many
scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of
quantum phenomena to be unconvincing.
Apart from the general question of the “hard problem” of
consciousness, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience arises
from a physical basis, a more specialized question is how to square the
subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some
small measure) with the customary view of causality that subsequent events are
caused by prior events. The topic of free will is the philosophical and
scientific examination of this conundrum.
Problem of other minds
Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of
consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the
inside, subjectively. But if consciousness is subjective and not visible from
the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that other people are
conscious, but rocks and trees are not? This is called the problem of other
minds. It is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of
philosophical zombies, that is, people who think it is possible in principle to
have an entity that is physically indistinguishable from a human being and
behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness.
Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the
University of Illinois and Colin Allen a professor at Indiana University
regarding the literature and research studying artificial intelligence in
androids.
The most
commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people
because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that
if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways,
including having experiences of the sort that we do.
There are,
however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems
to violate the principle of parsimony, by postulating an invisible entity that
is not necessary to explain what we observe. Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett
in an essay titled The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue
that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying.
More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies
generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal
behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on the basis of behavior. A more
straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people
because of what they can do, including the fact that they can tell us
about their experiences.
States of consciousness
There are some brain states in which consciousness seems to be
absent, including dreamless sleep, coma, and death. There are also a variety of
circumstances that can change the relationship between the mind and the world in
less drastic ways, producing what are known as altered states of consciousness.
Some altered states occur naturally; others can be produced by drugs or brain
damage. Altered states can be accompanied by changes in thinking, disturbances
in the sense of time, feelings of loss of control, changes in emotional
expression, alternations in body image and changes in meaning or significance.
The two most widely accepted altered states are sleep and
dreaming. Although dream sleep and non-dream sleep appear very similar to an
outside observer, each is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity,
metabolic activity, and eye movement; each is also associated with a distinct
pattern of experience and cognition. During ordinary non-dream sleep, people
who are awakened report only vague and sketchy thoughts, and their experiences
do not cohere into a continuous narrative. During dream sleep, in contrast,
people who are awakened report rich and detailed experiences in which events
form a continuous progression, which may however be interrupted by bizarre or
fantastic intrusions. Thought processes during the dream state frequently show
a high level of irrationality. Both dream and non-dream states are associated
with severe disruption of memory: it usually disappears in seconds during the
non-dream state, and in minutes after awakening from a dream unless actively
refreshed.
Research conducted on the effects of partial epileptic seizures
on consciousness found that patients who suffer from partial epileptic seizures
experience altered states of consciousness. In partial epileptic seizures,
consciousness is impaired or lost while some aspects of consciousness, often
automated behaviors, remain intact. Studies found that when measuring the
qualitative features during partial epileptic seizures, patients exhibited an
increase in arousal and became absorbed in the experience of the seizure,
followed by difficulty in focusing and shifting attention. . . .
There has been some research into physiological changes in yogis
and people who practise various techniques of meditation. Some research with
brain waves during meditation has reported differences between those
corresponding to ordinary relaxation and those corresponding to meditation. It
has been disputed, however, whether there is enough evidence to count these as
physiologically distinct states of consciousness. The most
extensive study of the characteristics of altered states of consciousness was
made by psychologist Charles Tart in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tart analyzed a
state of consciousness as made up of a number of component processes, including
exteroception (sensing the external world); interoception (sensing the body);
input-processing (seeing meaning); emotions; memory; time sense; sense of
identity; evaluation and cognitive processing; motor output; and interaction
with the environment. Each of these, in his view, could be altered in multiple
ways by drugs or other manipulations. The components that Tart identified have
not, however, been validated by empirical studies. Research in this area has
not yet reached firm conclusions, but a recent questionnaire-based study
identified eleven significant factors contributing to drug-induced states of
consciousness: experience of unity; spiritual experience; blissful state;
insightfulness; disembodiment; impaired control and cognition; anxiety; complex
imagery; elementary imagery; audio-visual synesthesia; and changed meaning of
percepts.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a method of inquiry that attempts to examine
the structure of consciousness in its own right, putting aside problems
regarding the relationship of consciousness to the physical world.
This approach was first proposed by the philosopher Edmund
Husserl, and later elaborated by other philosophers and scientists. Husserl's
original concept gave rise to two distinct lines of inquiry, in philosophy and
psychology. In philosophy, phenomenology has largely been devoted to
fundamental metaphysical questions, such as the nature of intentionality ("aboutness").
In psychology, phenomenology largely has meant attempting to investigate
consciousness using the method of introspection, which means looking into one's
own mind and reporting what one observes.
This method fell into disrepute in the early twentieth century
because of grave doubts about its reliability, but has been rehabilitated to
some degree, especially when used in combination with techniques for examining
brain activity.
Introspectively, the world of conscious experience seems to have
considerable structure. Immanuel Kant asserted that the world as we perceive it
is organized according to a set of fundamental "intuitions", which
include object (we perceive the world as a set of distinct things); shape;
quality (color, warmth, etc.); space (distance, direction, and
location); and time. Some of these constructs, such as space and time,
correspond to the way the world is structured by the laws of physics; for
others the correspondence is not as clear.
Understanding the physical basis of qualities, such as redness
or pain, has been particularly challenging. David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness. Some
philosophers have argued that it is intrinsically unsolvable, because qualities
(“qualia") are ineffable; that is, they are "raw
feels", incapable of being analyzed into component processes. Most
psychologists and neuroscientists reject these arguments. For example, research
on ideasthesia shows that qualia are organised into a semantic-like network.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the relationship between a physical entity such
as light and a perceptual quality such as color is extraordinarily complex and
indirect, as demonstrated by a variety of optical illusions. . . .
In neuroscience, a great deal of effort has gone into
investigating how the perceived world of conscious awareness is constructed
inside the brain. The process is generally thought to involve two primary
mechanisms: (1) hierarchical processing of sensory inputs, and (2) memory.
Signals arising from sensory organs are transmitted to the brain and then
processed in a series of stages, which extract multiple types of information
from the raw input. In the visual system, for example, sensory signals from the
eyes are transmitted to the thalamus and then to the primary visual cortex;
inside the cerebral cortex they are sent to areas that extract features such as
three-dimensional structure, shape, color, and motion.
Memory comes into play in at least two ways. First, it allows
sensory information to be evaluated in the context of previous experience.
Second, and even more importantly, working memory allows information to be
integrated over time so that it can generate a stable representation of the
world—Gerald Edelman expressed this point vividly by titling one of his books
about consciousness The Remembered Present. In computational
neuroscience, Bayesian approaches to brain function have been used to
understand both the evaluation of sensory information in light of previous
experience, and the integration of information over time. Bayesian models of
the brain are probabilistic inference models, in which the brain takes
advantage of prior knowledge to interpret uncertain sensory inputs in order to
formulate a conscious percept; Bayesian models have successfully predicted many
perceptual phenomena in vision and the non-visual senses.
Despite the
large amount of information available, many important aspects of perception
remain mysterious. A great deal is known about low-level signal processing in
sensory systems, but the ways by which sensory systems interact with each
other, with "executive" systems in the frontal cortex, and with the
language system are very incompletely understood. At a deeper level, there are
still basic conceptual issues that remain unresolved. Many scientists have
found it difficult to reconcile the fact that information is distributed across
multiple brain areas with the apparent unity of consciousness: this is one
aspect of the so-called binding problem.
There are also
some scientists who have expressed grave reservations about the idea that the
brain forms representations of the outside world at all: influential members of
this group include psychologist J. J. Gibson and roboticist Rodney Brooks, who
both argued in favor of "intelligence without representation".
Stream of consciousness
William James is
usually credited with popularizing the idea that human consciousness flows like
a stream, in his Principles of Psychology of 1890. According to James,
the "stream of thought" is governed by five characteristics:
"(1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. (2)
Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. (3) Within each
personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. (4) It always appears to
deal with objects independent of itself. (5) It is interested in some parts of
these objects to the exclusion of others". A similar concept appears in
Buddhist philosophy, expressed by the Sanskrit term Citta-saṃtāna, which
is usually translated as mindstream or "mental continuum".
Buddhist
teachings describe that consciousness manifests moment to moment as sense
impressions and mental phenomena that are continuously changing. The teachings
list six triggers that can result in the generation of different mental events.
These triggers are input from the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting or touch sensations), or a thought (relating to the past, present or
the future) that happen to arise in the mind. The mental events generated as a
result of these triggers are: feelings, perceptions and intentions/behaviour.
The
moment-by-moment manifestation of the mind-stream is said to happen in every
person all the time. It even happens in a scientist who analyses various
phenomena in the world, or analyses the material body including the organ
brain. The manifestation of the mindstream is also described
as being influenced by physical laws, biological laws, psychological laws,
volitional laws, and universal laws. The purpose of the Buddhist practice of
mindfulness is to understand the inherent nature of the consciousness and its
characteristics.
Spiritual approaches
To most
philosophers, the word "consciousness" connotes the relationship
between the mind and the world. To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it
frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the
relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more
fundamental than the physical world. Krishna consciousness, for example, is a
term used to mean an intimate linkage between the mind of a worshipper and the
god Krishna.
The mystical
psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke distinguished between three types of
consciousness:
Simple
Consciousness, awareness of
the body, possessed by many animals;
Self
Consciousness, awareness of
being aware, possessed only by humans; and
Cosmic
Consciousness, awareness of
the life and order of the universe, possessed only by humans who are
enlightened.
Many more
examples could be given. The most thorough account of the spiritual approach
may be Ken Wilber’s book The Spectrum of Consciousness, a comparison of
western and eastern ways of thinking about the mind. Wilber described
consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at one end, and more
profound types of awareness at higher levels.
Selected and
edited by Amorella from Wikipedia - Consciousness
Higher consciousness
Higher
consciousness is the
consciousness of a higher Self, transcendental reality, or God. It is "the
part of the human being that is capable of transcending animal instincts".
The concept developed in German Idealism, and is a central notion in
contemporary popular spirituality.
Religion
19th century movements
The idea of a "wider self walled in by the habits of
ego-consciousness" and the search for a "higher consciousness"
was manifested in 19th century movements as Theosophy, New Thought, Christian
Science, and Transcendentalism.
The 19th century Transcendentalists saw the entire physical
world as a representation of a higher spiritual world. They believed that
humans could elevate themselves above their animal instincts, attain a higher
consciousness, and partake in this spiritual world.
According to Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Movement, By
that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia - or God-knowledge, which carried
the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man has been
sometimes enabled in every age and every country to perceive things in the
interior or invisible world.
Blavatsky refers to Fichte in her explanation of Theosophy:
Theosophy [...] prompted such men as Hegel, Fichte and Spinoza
to take up the labors of the old Grecian philosophers and speculate upon the
One Substance - the Deity, the Divine All proceeding from the Divine Wisdom -
incomprehensible, unknown and unnamed.
Modern spirituality
The idea of "lower" and "higher consciousness"
has gained popularity in modern popular spirituality. According to James
Beverley, it lies at the heart of the New Age movement.
Ken Wilber has tried to integrate eastern and western models of
the mind, using the notion of "lower" and "higher
consciousness". In his book The Spectrum of Consciousness Wilber
describes consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at one end, and
more profound types of awareness at higher levels. In later works he describes
the development of consciousness as a development from lower consciousness,
through personal consciousness, to higher transpersonal consciousness.
Cognitive science
Gerald Edleman,
in his 'Theory of Consciousness', distinguishes higher consciousness, or “secondary
consciousness” from “primary consciousness”, defined as simple awareness that
includes perception and emotion. Higher consciousness in contrast,
"involves the ability to be conscious of being conscious", and
"allows the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts and
affections". Higher consciousness requires, at a minimal level semantic ability,
and "in its most developed form, requires linguistic ability, or the
mastery of a whole system of symbols and a grammar".
Selected and
edited by Amorella from Wikipedia – Higher consciousness
** **
2213 hours.
Consciousness has even more material. I am glad you edited Amorella.
What is represented from the above serves as
definition, the two environments through which the psychopomp mediates. –
Amorella
2218 hours. This is pretty complex.
It serves as a base ‘metaphysical’ human orientation.
Humanity, in here, is a form of metaphysics. – Amorella
2219 hours. Okay. Now I am gaining an
understanding.
Clean up the ‘consciousness’ selection and
post. Tomorrow we will continue with simplification, that is, I will begin with
‘humanity is metaphysics’. – Amorella.
2313 hours. This reading and cleaning up
took some time to do. This is all very interesting but I wonder how it fits
within Soki’s Choice. I’m open for your thoughts and concepts here,
Amorella.
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