An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges's essays and poems.Borges's paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to the vision, while the natural wonder gives substance to those idealist concepts derived from Berkeley.As a reader of Borges's fictions, I yield up my personal identity to an impersonal...
The many metaphors used by the dying are interpreted as an analogical symbolic language from our dream-consciousness (C.G. Jung, St.Grof), in contradiction to our everyday logical rational thinking and waking consciousness. Metaphors are not accidental, and important metaphors of dying are listed according to the three stages of transition.
Despite much social‐scientific work on the neurosciences, little ethnographic and historical attention has been paid to the field of neurophilosophy. Yet anthropologists studying brain research occasionally critique neurophilosophers for reducing the mind to the brain while affirmatively citing philosophers of mind who present the mind as emerging from interactions between brain, body, and...
To what extent do I have a sense of agency over my thoughts while I dream? The sense of agency in dreams can alter in a variety of interesting ways distinct from normal, waking experience. In fact, dreams show many similarities to the experiences of individuals with schizophrenia. In this paper I analyze these alterations with a focus on distinguishing between reduced sense of agency and other...
Chapter 9 proposes a conceptual framework for describing instances of thinking, self-reflection, and metacognition in dreams and analyzes their relationship to insight and control in lucid dreams. It also discusses the question of whether dreams involve beliefs. A preliminary result is that existing hypotheses that cast dreaming as a state of cognitive deficiency in which the phenomenology of...
The chapter confronts the epistemological problem of dream deception with evidence of scientific dream research with the aim of investigating the empirical plausibility of different scenarios of dream deception. I argue that a majority of dreams do not fulfill the conditions for counting as deceptive experiences in any interesting sense. At the same time, a number of real-world candidates for...
Sleep paralysis is a relatively new term to describe what for hundreds of years many believed to be a visitation by a malevolent creature which attacked its victims as they slept. The first clinical description of sleep paralysis was published in 1664 in a Dutch physician’s case histories, where it was referred to as, ‘Incubus or the Night-Mare [sic]’. In 1977, it was discovered more than 100...
In this paper I overview my previous work concerning a multilevel framework for consciousness science. Constitutive, etiological and contextual dimensions of explanation are described. The multilevel framework is then applied to current issues within consciousness science including understanding the convergence of top-down and bottom-up constraints, the level of measurement problem and sorting...
Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural...
At a moment when site-specific installations, urban soundwalks, immersive environments, and participatory experiences have (yet again) become popular, Jim Findlay’s Dream of the Red Chamber stands in sharp contrast, embracing what seems like the most passive state—sleep. Is it possible, via a sleep-inducing performance, to become conscious of our own letting go?