Friday 14 April 2017

Consciousness, Dualism, And Are We Alone in the Universe?


Dear All

Humans continue to explore the understanding of the Universe with more sophisticated explanations than Physical Science. In Philosophy of mind , Dualism  is the central schools of thought on the mind–body problem,   property dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance. And that we can  awake into higher levels of consciousness, and  have a deeper sense of Life.

It is said that Modern consciousness researchconducted in the last five decades has cast doubt hat Consciousness is inseparable to the body and it is possible that the brain mediates consciousness, but does not actually generate it. 

At this stage, Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolutionconsciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value.  Critics of the SAP ( the strong anthropic principle) claim that it is neither testable nor falsifiable, and thus is not a scientific statement but rather a philosophical one. 

And  the 11-page typed draft by Winston Churchill has now be promoted to ask  "Are We Alone in the Universe ? " That We Are NOT Alone in the Universe,  and there are intelligent observers in the Universe.  These visitors use the technologies of consciousness, they use toroids, they use co-rotating magnetic disks for their propulsion systems, that seems to be a common denominator of the UFO 

phenomenon” (source) – Dr. Brian O’Leary, Former NASA Astronaut and Princeton Physics Professor

Bill


The Evidence For Non-Local Consciousness: Beyond the Brain
The topic of personal identity and the nature of the “self” has been investigated by philosophers, theologians, mystics, scientists, and psychologists throughout human history and centers on one of life’s biggest questions: Who Am I? one can obtain authentic self-knowledge and conduct effective self-research.

There are new insights regarding the nature of non-local consciousness and its relationship to matter. According to Western neuroscience, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, a by-product of the complex neurophysiological processes in the brain and thus an intrinsic and inseparable part of the body. Modern consciousness research conducted in the last five decades has made this hypothesis highly questionable.

Very few people, including most scientists, realize that we have absolutely no proof that consciousness is actually produced in the brain and by the brain. There is no doubt that there exists vast clinical and experimental evidence showing significant interconnections and correlations between the anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry of the brain, on the one hand, and states of consciousness, on the other. However, it represents a major logical jump to infer from the available data that these correlations represent a proof that the brain is actually the source of consciousness. It is now considered  that the data largely points to the fact that consciousness is non-local. Such a deduction would be tantamount to the conclusion that the TV program is generated in the TV set, because there is a close correlation between functioning or malfunctioning of its components and the quality of the sound and picture.

It should be obvious from this example that the close connection between cerebral activity and consciousness does not exclude the possibility that the brain mediates consciousness, but does not actually generate it. 




The research of holotropic states has amassed ample evidence for this alternative—that consciousness is non local to the body.
Lack of Evidence for Brain-Based Theories
There exist no scientific theories explaining how consciousness is generated by material processes, nor does anybody have even a remote idea how something like that could possibly happen. The gap between consciousness and matter is so formidable that it is impossible to imagine how it could be bridged. In spite of the lack of convincing evidence that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain or matter, this basic metaphysical assumption remains one of the leading myths of Western materialistic science. While there exists no scientific proof for the fact that the brain generates consciousness, there are numerous observations indicating that consciousness can under certain circumstances function independently of the brain and of the world of matter. This philosophy is referred to as non-local consciousness.

The Evidence For Non-Local Consciousness: Beyond the Brain
Stan Grof, M.D., Ph.D. is a psychiatrist with more than fifty years experience researching the healing and transformative potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness. His groundbreaking theories influenced the integration of Western science with his brilliant mapping of the transpersonal dimension. Find him at stanislavgrof.com.

You Presume You AreThe Body
Your problems and your questions only arise because you forget Consciousness. 
You presume you are the body—but, in reality, you are only witnessing the body. 
You are aware of the body as something in Consciousness. 
You do not experience the body itself as a "thing" in and of itself. 



 Winston Churchill revealed that he was open to the possibility of life on other planets.
In 1939, the year World War Two broke out, Churchill penned a popular science article in which he mused about the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life.
The 11-page typed draft, probably intended for a newspaper, was updated in the 1950s but never published.  In the 1980s, the essay was passed to a US museum, where it sat until its rediscovery last year,  2016.
As Einstein said: "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." 
Copernican Principle  states that humans (the Earth, or the Solar system) are not privileged observers of the universe.  The anthropic principle is a philosophical consideration that observations of the Universemust be compatible with the conscious and sapient lifethat observes it. 

 The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler states that  the universe is in some sense compelled to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it. Some critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe's ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing and reflecting upon fine tuning. Further Carter disagreed with using the Copernican principle to justify the Perfect Cosmological Principle, which states that all large regions and times in the universe must be statistically identical. The latter principle underlay the steady-state theory, which had recently been falsified by the 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This discovery was unequivocal evidence that the universe has changed radically over time (for example, via the Big Bang).  
Michael Frayn describes a form of the Strong Anthropic Principle in his 2006 book The Human Touch, which explores what he characterises as "the central oddity of the Universe":  It's this simple paradox. The Universe is very old and very large. Humankind, by comparison, is only a tiny disturbance in one small corner of it - and a very recent one. Yet the Universe is only very large and very old because we are here to say it is... And yet, of course, we all know perfectly well that it is what it is whether we are here or not.  Barrow and Tipler propose the final anthropic principle (FAP): "Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out."   In his review of Barrow and Tipler, Martin Gardner ridiculed the FAP by quoting the last two sentences of their book as defining a Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP):
"At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end."


The anthropic idea that fundamental parameters are selected from a multitude of different possibilities (each actual in some universe or other) contrasts with the traditional hope of physicists for a theory of everythinghaving no free parameters. 

In 2002, proponents of the leading candidate for a "theory of everything", string theory, proclaimed "the end of the anthropic principle"[33] since there would be no free parameters to select. Ironically, string theory now seems to offer no hope of predictingfundamental parameters, and now some who advocate it invoke the anthropic principle as well.

Anthropic principle - Wikipedia

consciousness
For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods.  Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of experimental work  along with regular conferences.

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.  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.

Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolutionconsciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value.  Donald Griffin suggests in his book Animal Minds a gradual evolution of consciousness.  William James  in his essay Are We Automata? by stated an evolutionary argument for mind-brain interaction implying that if the preservation and development of consciousness in the biological evolution is a result of natural selection, it is plausible that consciousness has not only been influenced by neural processes, but has had a survival value itself; and it could only have had this if it had been efficacious

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). Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms.  The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on psychology and neuroscience. Theories proposed by neuroscientists  and by philosophers such as  seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligencehave pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can simulate or embody consciousness.
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. 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. 
Problem of other minds
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. 
Animal consciousness
The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell us about their experiences. Some people have a strong intuition that some animals, such as cats and dogs, are conscious, while others, such as insects, are not; but the sources of this intuition are not obvious, and are often based on personal interactions with pets and other animals they have observed

Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known.  Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive. 

States of consciousness
There are 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
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.  Edmund Husserl  original concept gave rise to two distinct lines of inquiry, in philosophy and psychology.  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. 

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 thalamusand 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.  Gerald Edelmanexpressed this point vividly by titling one of his books about consciousness The Remembered Present. 
Consciousness - Wikipedia

Dualism (philosophy of mind)
One argument against Dualism is with regard to causal interaction. If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical reality (the brain), one must explain how physical memories are created concerning consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality. One of the main objections to dualistic interactionism is lack of explanation of how the material and immaterial are able to interact. Varieties of dualism according to which an immaterial mind causally affects the material body and vice versa have come under strenuous attack from different quarters, especially in the 20th century. Critics of dualism have often asked how something totally immaterial can affect something totally material—this is the basic problem of causal interaction.

Many physicistsand consciousness researchers have argued that any action of a nonphysical mind on the brain would entail the violation of physical laws, such as the conservation of energy.

Best Regards


Bill


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Posted by: Bill I Ho <billonho@yahoo.com.au>

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