The quest for a scientific description of consciousness has given rise to new theoretical and empirical paradigms for the investigation of phenomenological contents as well as clinical disorders of consciousness. An outstanding challenge in the field is to develop measures that uniquely quantify global brain states tied to consciousness. In particular, information-theoretic complexity measures...
Cognitive science is a network of interrelated scientific disciplines engaged in researching human cognition and its brain mechanisms. The birth of cognitive science has been the result of numerous integrated processes. Cognitive science is made up of experimental psychology cognition, philosophy consciousness, neuroscience, cognitive anthropology, linguistics, computer science and artificial...
There are numerous ethical theories from which faculty may choose to teach in undergraduate philosophical ethics courses. Whether learning such theories results in ethical behavior change remains an open question. If one of the goals of teaching ethics is to support ethical behavior, then alternative approaches are merited. Within the past decades, there has been a growing emphasis on...
An interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity, investigating how experiential wholes can be characterized and how such characterizations can be analyzed computationally. How can we account for phenomenal unity? That is, how can we characterize and explain our experience of objects and groups of objects, bodily experiences, successions of events, and the attentional structure of consciousness...
The ‘dream of the butterfly,’ which seals the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, is often interpreted as undergirded by the bipolarity of dreaming and awakening or by the elusive interchange of identities between Zhuangzi and the butterfly, dreamer and dreamed. In this paper I argue that the underlying structure of the story may be better interpreted as exhibiting not two, but three stages of...
In the context of the United States, we provide our rationale for infusing mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) into a graduate-level teacher education course. In our philosophy and pedagogical approach we attempt to counterbalance an individualistic, divisive, oppressive, and often dehumanising nature of education. Adopting Richard Davidson’s wellness framework, we describe how our use of...
By employing recent work on epistemology of white ignorance, this article argues that racial prejudice impacts both whites and Blacks in a profound way that extends beyond the cognitive discrimination to the realm of psychological and physical well-being. Given that the mechanism of racial discrimination affects the whole embodied being of both victims and oppressors, theologians need to...
This essay uses neuroscience to reframe the work of filmmaker Luis Buñuel. It shows not only how certain concepts in neuroscience illuminate his narrative experimentation but also how his experimental narratives expand our understanding of human consciousness. Drawing on the translational writings of neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio, who emphasize the role of narrative in...
The global crisis of terrestrial civilization is steadily increasing. A necessary condition for overcoming it is the change in mass consciousness, such negative qualities as irrepressible consumerism, aggressiveness, excessive egoism. As the Dalai Lama emphasizes: “We badly need a fundamental change in human consciousness”. According to him, science is of great importance in solving this...
Thepurpose of the work: to elucidate the features and application of the research approach to the study of consciousness in the educational work with the student-psychologists.The methods that are used in this paper are analysis, synthesis, systematization, specification, generalization.Methodology.The research is based on the works of foreign and domestic scientists, which contain important...