A lively and unconventional exploration of our senses, how they work, what is revealed when they don’t, and how they connect us to the world
Over the past decade neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new information about our senses and how they serve as our gateway to the world.
The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human
One of the world’s leading experts on mind and brain takes us on an expedition that reveals a new view of what makes us who we are.
Humans have long thought of their bodies and minds as separate spheres of existence. The body is physical―the source of aches and pains. But the mind is mental; it perceives, remembers, believes, feels, and imagines.
The Mind: Consciousness, Prediction, and the Brain
An accessible and engaging account of the mind and its connection to the brain.
The mind encompasses everything we experience, and these experiences are created by the brain—often without our awareness. Experience is private; we can't know the minds of others. But we also don't know what is happening in our own minds.
“Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson has me thinking about the evolution of consciousness, and the ways biology facilitates it. It makes me even more certain that consciousness is not emergent, but fundamental to the universe.
I realize that the main thesis I have in my books is that "the flesh is not a prison, it is training wheels”. Biology can obviously be overridden by a sufficiently developed mind (the Marshmallow test is a concrete example).
From yesterday’s deep meditation session. Giving the participants a break while preparing for the part of the session where they’ll connect with the field on a deeper level.
The content of our #consciousness depends crucially upon inhibitory processes through which selection and elimination can occur. More and more research (some of my own included) shows that physiological age-related #memory decline is not so much an issue of increasing but in fact decreasing forgetting (i.e. inhibitory "elimination"). Without directed inhibition, discrete memories have difficulty arriving to "consciousness" due to excess noise from overlap with other memories.
Radical qualitative shifts like this in our understanding of fundamental cognitive processes (i.e. poor memory can arise from a deficit rather than an excess of forgetting) are truly fertile ground for future research into the nature, if not of "consciousness" itself, then at least into the processes that determine what enters #consciousness, studying differences between pre-conscious and conscious deliberation, and understanding why only part of deliberation is conscious, etc. @cognition
I'm fairly confident that I won't be writing on panpsychism again any time soon... My interests switched to reevaluating physicalism again, especially in connection with cognitive science and empirically-informed approaches to consciousness in a broader sense. I don't have a strong opinion on which position is 'true' - and maybe that's bad for a philosopher - I just go by what I find worthy of further investigation 🤷🏻♂️
Do you know someone amongst your followers who might benefit from starting a meditation practice? Boost this post now. I normally don’t give courses for free, so grab this unique chance today before it’s too late. Details here: https://go.cosmicnation.co/JMfree