The "neural correlates of consciousness" (NCC) is a familiar topic in neuroscience, overlapping with research on the brain's "default mode network." Task-based studies of NCC by their nature recruit one part of the cortical network to study another, and are therefore both limited and compromised in what they can reveal about consciousness itself. The form of consciousness explored in such...
Most if not all research into consciousness in neuroscience and philosophy has dealt with the consciousness we all live within from birth, which in Dennison (2019) I termed the “human default sensory consciousness”. This was to contrast this mode to a quite different form of consciousness that develops in the Buddhist practice of jhāna meditation. This little known practice implicitly requires...
This chapter explores the characteristics of the human default sensory consciousness as it has featured in philosophic thought, in psychoanalysis and mental health, as well as in Buddhist thought and from a modern neuroscience perspective. This default mode of consciousness is then compared and contrasted to the form of consciousness that emerges in jhāna meditation, before extending the...