Through Buddhist analysis, consciousness, like light, is found to have two dimensions. Just as light can be described as both a wave and a particle, consciousness has an unbound wave or sky-like nature and it has particular particle-like aspects. In its sky-like function, consciousness is unchanging, like the sky or the mirror. In its particle-like function, consciousness is momentary. A single state of consciousness arises together with each moment of experience and is flavored by that experience. ….
Here is a description of the two fundamental aspects of consciousness:
Consciousness ……… Consciousness
in its sky-like nature in its particle-like nature
_________________ _____________________
Open Momentary
Transparent Impersonal
Timeless Registering a sense experience
Cognizant Flavored by mental states
Pure Conditioned
Wave-like, unbounded Rapid
Unborn, undying Ephemeral
Dr McLaren says, ‘Like computer processing, a substantial part of human mental life consists of the silent, rapid manipulation of information.
‘Normal mental function falls quite readily into two distinct realms, the phenomenal or experiential, and the psychological or knowledge-based.
‘The differences between what we know and what we experience is exclusive: knowledge is acquired gradually and can be conveyed to another person, whereas the phenomenal contents arrive immediately and are wholly private experiences.”
…
Dr McLaren says, ‘So my theory is that the mind has two irreducibly mental components, cognition and conscious experience, which together account for the whole of mental life.”
An exploration of urbanism, personal identity, and how the space we live in shapes us
According to philosopher and cultural critic Mark Kingwell, the transnational global city—New York and Shanghai—is the most significant machine our species has ever produced. And yet, he says, we fail again and again to understand it. How do cities shape us, and how do we shape them? That is the subject of Concrete Reveries, which investigates how we occupy city space and why place is so important to who we are.
There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Such feelings might be referred to as ‘existential’ because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world. Existential feelings have not been systematically explored until now, despite the important role that they play in our lives and the devastating effects that disturbances of existential feeling can have in psychiatric illness.
Feelings of Being is the first ever philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. In this book, Matthew Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of changed feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.
Written in a clear, non-technical style throughout, it will be valuable for philosophers, clinicians, students, and researchers working in a wide range of disciplines.
In this fascinating discussion of ancient art and religion, Dr. David S. Whitley–one of the world’s leading experts on cave paintings–guides the reader in an exploration of these intriguing questions, while sharing his firsthand experiences in visiting these exquisite, breath-taking sites.
To grasp what drove these ancient artists to create these masterpieces, and to understand the origin of myth and religion, as Whitley explains, is to appreciate what makes us human. Moreover, he broadens our understanding of the genesis of creativity and myth by proposing a radically new and original theory that weds two seemingly warring camps from separate disciplines.
On the one hand, archaeologists specializing in prehistoric cave paintings have argued that the visionary rituals of shamans led to the creation of this expressive art. They consider shamanism to be the earliest known form of religion. By contrast, evolutionary psychologists view the emergence of religious beliefs as a normal expression of the human mind. In their eyes, the wild and ecstatic trances of shamans were a form of aberrant behavior. Far from being typical representatives of ancient religion, shamans were exceptions to the normal rule of early religion.
Whitley resolves the controversy by interweaving the archaeological evidence with the latest findings of cutting-edge neuroscience. He thereby rewrites our understanding of shamanism and its connection with artistic creativity, myth, and religion.
In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen–a cognitive scientist and a logician–argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closely connected, they write, but were “divorced” in the past century; the psychology of deduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespread skepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and van Lambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarranted assumptions about logic.
Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processes of interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequent reasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of this framing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpret results. They draw examples from deductive reasoning, from the child’s development of understandings of mind, from analysis of a psychiatric disorder (autism), and from the search for the evolutionary origins of human higher mental processes.
The picture proposed is one of fast, cheap, automatic but logical processes bringing to bear general knowledge on the interpretation of task, language, and context, thus enabling human reasoners to go beyond the information given. This proposal puts reasoning back at center stage.
Sciousness, ed. by Jonathan Bricklin (Eirini Press, 2007), collects several essays and shorter passages by (or about) William James dealing with the concept of ‘sciousness’ or ‘pure experience,’ along with an essay by Bricklin titled “Sciousness and Con-sciousness: William James and the Prime Reality of Non-Dual Experience.” The book opens with the Zen work Hsin-Hsin-Ming (“On Believing in Mind”), introducing the Eastern expression of nondualism, while Bricklin’s essay brings Eastern thought to bear on James’s views.
William James coined the term ‘sciousness‘ to refer to experience before it is separated into subject and object. However, in the essays collected in this book, James doesn’t commonly use the term ‘sciousness’ but most often just speaks of ‘experience’ or ‘pure experience.’ James holds that an experience, often using a room or a building as an example, becomes mental or physical only by the relations it forms with other experiences:
In so far as experiences are prolonged in time, enter into relations of physical influence — breaking, warming, illuminating, etc., each other — we make of them a group apart which we call the physical world. On the other hand, in so far as they are fleeting, physically inert, with a succession which does not follow a determined order, but seems rather to obey emotional vagaries, we make of them another group which we call the psychical world. …
The two kinds of groups are made up of experiences, but the relations of the experiences among themselves differ from one group to the other. It is, therefore, by addition of other phenomena that a given phenomenon becomes conscious or known, and not by a splitting in two of an interior essence. (The Notion of Consciousness, p. 107-108)
In one of my favorite parts of Bricklin’s essay, he takes Basho’s famous poem
Old pond
Frog jumps in
Sound of the water
and rewrites it to show the effect of ordinary consciousness reacting to the bare succession of experiences:
Old pond!
Feels peaceful
What’s that?!
Wow, a frog!
There goes the silence! (p. 55)
Sciousness will appeal most to readers already interested in non-dual philosophy, who can now find a spiritual ancestor in William James, or to those interested in James’s philosophy, who may discover a new aspect of his thought.
Sciousnessby Jonathan Bricklin explores nondual aspects of William James’s thought, especially his notion of “sciousness.”
More of a review coming soon, but here is an excerpt from Bricklin’s essay (p. 71):
The reverberation of striving for and against, of welcoming and opposing, that generates the sense of self, defines a range within which all emotions arise. Every emotion is found somewhere between them. To focus, however, as James does, exclusively on the movement between the polar opposites of welcoming and opposing is to lose sight of a more fundamental movement between a neutral state of consciousness and all others — that is, the movement between sciousness and con-sciousness. To describe the feeling of self without reference to sciousness is like describing sound without silence — the silence that forms the contour of any sound that is heard. Just as there can be no sense of sound without a sense of silence, there can be no sense of self without a non-self background to give it definition. “The palpitating inward life” of welcoming and opposing cannot itself give rise to self-feeling any more than the change from soft to loud gives rise to sound. As sound is defined by its contrast to silence, so, too, the “reverberation” (second beat) of “I” is defined by its contrast to a first beat non-“I.”
, ed. by Jonathan Bricklin (Eirini Press, 2007), collects several essays and shorter passages by (or about) William James dealing with the concept of ‘sciousness’ or ‘pure experience,’ along with an essay by Bricklin titled “Sciousness and Con-sciousness: William James and the Prime Reality of Non-Dual Experience.” The book opens with the Zen work Hsin-Hsin-Ming (“On Believing in Mind”), introducing the Eastern expression of nondualism, while Bricklin’s essay brings Eastern thought to bear on James’s views.
