my mind on books

From The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology by Jack Kornfield (Bantam Dell, 2008) p. 39-40.

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

“Computer science helps psychiatrist Niall McLaren explain mental disorders”

excerpt:

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.”

Dr. McLaren is the author of Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences.

This is an 85-min discussion on moral realism & I have to admit my mind wandered a bit while listening…
The bloggingheads page has related links, including one to a book by Peter Railton.

Daniel J. Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, has a new book coming out this month (Aug. 19 from Dutton) —The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, one of Amazon’s Best Books of August in nonfiction.

From the book website:

“What was the first song that humans sang and why did music become an integral part of human life from the beginning? Levitin tells the story of the co-evolution of music and of the human brain, how each one influenced the development of the other over tens of thousands of years. An unprecedented blend of science and art, Daniel Levitin’s best-selling debut, This Is Your Brain on Music (translated into 8 languages), changed the way we think about how music gets in our heads. Now in what is being called a tour de force by leading scientists, he shows how six specific forms of music played a pivotal role in creating human culture and society as we know it. Levitin masterfully weaves together the story of human evolution, music, anthropology, psychology and biology from the dawn of homo sapiens to the present.”

from ScribeMedia.org

Speaker Bob Stein is Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book