Archive for the ‘Consciousness’ Category

Degrees of variation

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Take any two human brains and compare them. Their coarse structure will be similar: here a gyrus, there the thalamus. The correspondence is pretty good as you look closer and closer, until you get down to a certain scale. The exact scale probably depends on the local ...

What the brain is for

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Allow me a small moment of hubris. We have been fundamentally wrong about what kind of thing the brain is. We have worked with the notion that it was some kind of a controller. This produces the embarrassing question of who is doing the controlling. No. Brains bring forth ...

Experiencing our collective nature

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

In this remarkable talk at TED, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the phenomenology of a stroke.  She gives a very moving and spirited account of what it felt like for her to suffer a major stroke which essentially knocked out the left half of her brain.  The experience was essentially mystical ...

Enaction and the PMF

Monday, February 25th, 2008

More and more, I find that the vision of being I am outlining here and in the sister site is one that aligns well with the enactive approach in Cognitive Science.  I try not to read too much ahead of me, but when I do read in this area, things ...

Werner Heisenberg and the evolutionary transformation of human consciousness

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

I quote this in toto. The page I found it on is a weird mixture of quantum physics and nekkid ladies. Ain't the interwebs great? Throughout the last decade, apocalyptic visions have abounded in response to the increasing fragmentation of knowledge, dehumanization of the individual, and generalized disruption that ...

Dennett vs me on Consciousness

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

I'm listening to an interview with Dan Dennett by Susan Blackmore. I like Dennett a whole lot, though we often disagree. I often find he takes a first promising step towards genuine insight, only to veer off at the last minute, thereby avoiding upsetting the apple cart. So here are ...