This essay, "a spiritual-theological sinfonietta in five movements of unequal length" is written to draw the reader's attention to a distinctive phase of growth in the affective life with both God and God's entire human family, the latter often referred to as "the neighbour" (i.e., any actual neighbour(s)). Being distinctive, it is possible to describe it; it actually has been described, not...
Near-death life reviews pose a challenge to current memory research in terms of the sheer amount of instantaneous and empathetic information recall. Advances in quantum physics, biomechanics, holographic information theory, and consciousness studies support for the first time a fully realizable quantum biomechanical basis for near-death life reviews. We introduce the unifying paradigm of the...
Altered States of Consciousness is an umbrella term applied in the study of psychological, sociological and religious phenomena that are regularly encountered experientially in the study of trance, possession, and shamanism, all of which have complex and problematic links with music. Beginning with trance, and stressing the pervasive sexual imagery invoked, this paper reviews the role ofASC in...
Can the brain, when stimulated, yield entirely novel experiences? Blanke et al. (2002) describe a patient who reported spontaneous out-of-body experiences during electrical stimulation of her angular gyrus. These findings, although apparently extraordinary, agree with much earlier reports from a patient tested by Wilder Penfield. Such studies can provide clues about the nature of conscious...
The physiological mechanisms that underlie consciousness and unconsciousness are the sleep/wake mechanisms. Deep sleep is a state of physiological reversible unconsciousness. The change from that state to wakefulness is mediated by the reticular activating mechanism. The reverse change from wakefulness to sleep is also an active process effected by an arousal inhibitory mechanism based on a...
Here we summarize our present approach to the problem of consciousness. After an introduction outlining our general strategy, we describe what is meant by the term 'framework' and set it out under ten headings. This framework offers a coherent scheme for explaining the neural correlates of (visual) consciousness in terms of competing cellular assemblies. Most of the ideas we favor have been...
The hypothesis of the Basic Rest Activity Cycle (BRAC), that underlies approximately 90-min fluctuations in states of consciousness, has gained strong documentation during sleep in cyclical occurrence of its REM and NON-REM stages, however, there is no convicting evidence of this rhythm in waking. According to the concept of protective mechanisms of BRAC (Kokoszka, 1990), the rest phase of the...
Abstract There is something fundamentally disturbing about contemporary philosophy of mind and philosophical cognitive science. Almost without exception (exceptions such as Lockwood (1989) and Chalmers (1996, see esp. p. 349) ), the philosophical theories are logically inconsistent with the most well-confirmed theory ever developed by humans, namely, quantum mechanics. Why do philosophers...
Abstract For those of us blessed with sight, colours have been manifest in the scenes before our eyes ever since such scenes first came into focus. Familiarity has not bred understanding, however. The nature of these old acquaintances remains a matter of dispute. The dispute is intimately tied to ‘the hard problem’ of visual consciousness-the problem of determining the nature of visual...
In recent years, there has been much focus on the apparent heterogeneity of schizophrenic symptoms. By contrast, this article proposes a unifying account emphasizing basic abnormalities of consciousness that underlie and also antecede a disparate assortment of signs and symptoms. Schizophrenia, we argue, is fundamentally a self-disorder or ipseity disturbance (ipse is Latin for "self" or...