Meet Your Mind: A User's Guide to the Science of Consciousness

Sile

The latest from the public radio series, To the Best of Our Knowledge...even though it's produced only feet away from my office, I haven't listened to any of these yet A hazard of the job.

"Your thoughts and feelings, your joy and sorrow....it’s all part of your identity, of your consciousness. But what exactly is consciousness? It may be the biggest mystery left in science."

http://ttbook.org/book/meet-your-mind-series

person

Looks really interesting, can't wait to take a listen.

person

Wow, I just listened to Mind and Brain and I can't believe such a smart and thoughtful report exists in the world. David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Deepak Chopra, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Roger Penrose and others, all the big thinkers on the topic. Hurray public radio. :thumbup:

Vastmind

Ditto! Just finished part 1.

An octopus tasting and song writing using Fibonacci Numbers!
Loved it!

Robyn

Thanks for posting this. Bookmarked - will listen

Daozen

Sounds fascinating. Metta!

sova

Just listening to the first one,

"one of the issues in the philosophy of the mind is, 'is the mind just the brain?' .. is a physical process enough to explain what's in your mind and what's in your consciousness? And I've come, somewhat reluctantly lead to the conclusion, that in fact materialism doesn't truly have the resources to explain consciousness.

The materialist view says basically there's a few fundamental properties in the world: space, and time, and math and charge, and a few laws that connect them. And everything can ultimately be explained in terms of that.

Interviewer: Everything, chemistry, biology, can ultimately be reduced to the properties of physics.

Right, but when it comes to consciousness, this reductionist program doesn't succeed. So my own view is that we should take something like consciousness as a primitive element of the world, a 'fundamental property' if you like, in the way physics takes space and time and math and charge...

Interviewer: that's fascinating! You're suggesting that consciousness may have its own fundamental property of Nature? so-to-speak?

Basically, yes. Maybe some other weird property, some other weird new properties, proto-consciousness, which could, uh, somehow produce consciousness. But we do need to expand the ontology of fundamental properties."



Heck yeah. Sounds like arrows to Dharma if I've ever heard some ^.^

Thanks for posting these links, I look forward to these listenings.

person

@sova That was David Chalmers, my hero on the philosophy of consciousness. I too loved that exchange.

More Chalmers

Sile

Lol, I have some catching up to do, i.e. the doctor's kids always go barefoot! I'm glad it's proving of interest.

sova

@person thanks for the link to the video ^^

I really respect the work Chalmers is doing to help bridge the gap.

Florian

Perhaps Chalmers is bridging the gap but I think he's got a way to go, and still has not got to grips with mysticism. Still, If you check out his 'naturalistic dualism' ( a double aspect theory of information) it's extremely similar to the theory of emptiness, albeit it is nonreductive and stops short of a solution. Unfortunately he does not seem to realise this. I don't rate his recent book, but he's a more honest and imaginative thinker than many in the field.

One very interesting writer is R. Forman. Talks directly about consciousness and mysticism. I think he may be the shape of things to come in consciousness studies, but maybe it's wishful thinking. Some articles here

http://philpapers.org/s/r k c forman