This paper argues that there is no such thing as “phenomenal intentionality”. The arguments used by its advocates rely upon an appeal to “what it is like” (WIL) to attend on some occasion to one’s intentional state. I argue that there is an important asymmetry in the application of the WIL phenomenon to sensory and intentional states. Advocates of “phenomenal intentionality” fail to recognize...
The study of consciousness being rather broad, its more science-oriented practitioners quickly become adept at glancing through promising-looking new books to discern whether they partake a little too much of the ‘cosmic’. This isn’t usually difficult, but Susan Blackmore’s new book almost seems to have been intentionally designed to thwart such attempts at classification. Consciousness: An...
Complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies include chiropractic, acupuncture and traditional Oriental medicine, massage therapy, and herbal remedies; mind-body therapies (such as meditative practices and visualization); and folk practices and religious healing. Of these, modalities based on spiritual healing create a number of conundrums for the clinician, including legal,...
The author attempts to integrate the concepts of self used in psychoanalytic theory with the understanding of the nature of self as explained within the Buddhist meditative tradition. He divides different concepts of self in psychoanalytic theory into three major levels of consciousness and abstraction: self as experience, representational self and self as system. The representational level is...
This paper proposes an approach to framing and answering fundamental questions about consciousness. It argues that many of the more theoretical debates about consciousness, such as debates about "when does it begin?", are misplaced and meaningless, in part because "consciousness" as a word has many valid and interesting definitions, and in part because consciousness qua mind or intelligence...
When using the phenomenological method, one aims to capture the essential structures of lived experiences. It has been my experience that phenomenology does this well, when researching experiences that are lived through our bodily senses and understood with our minds. When trying to capture and describe experiences that are beyond the understanding of the body and the mind, namely experiences...
The Mind-Body Problem, which constitutes the starting point for a large part of the speculations about consciousness and conscious experience, can be re-stated in an equivalent way, using the `brain duplication' argument described in this paper. If we assume that consciousness follows from a peculiar organization of physical matter and energy, namely that it does not transcend physical reality,...
Solitary in the Voortrekker community: Ascesis and religious experience in the theology of the Voortrekker woman Susanna Smit (1799-1863) An evaluation of Susanna Smit’s commitment to introspection, meditation and solitary contemplation necessarily has to be undertaken in the light of the major impact of the theological pietism of the Dutch Second Reformation on the Voortrekker community....
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS-- At a conference last month called Investigating the Mind, held here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neuroscientists and Buddhist scholars discussed attention, mental imagery, emotion, and collaborations to test insights gleaned from meditation.
Abstract: In this paper, I talk about several issues in regard to self and consciousness. I do so from a developmental perspective, since such a perspective may provide a framework to help understand consciousness as seen in the adult human. Briefly, the two processes I will call the machinery of the self and the mental state of the idea of me develop over the first two years of the child's...