Author: Christof Koch Source: MIT Press Reader Publication Date: 14 March 2022 (used) Link: Is Consciousness Everywhere?
Stephan: If you read me regularly, or have read any of my books or papers you know that I strongly believe that the experimental data confirms what Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics told us almost a century ago: Consciousness is causal and fundamental spacetime, and everything in it, arises from consciousness not consciousness from spacetime. Materialism, in my view, is a dying paradigm, not because it is wrong, simply because it is inadequate because it does not recognize the causal and fundamental nature of consciousness. Paradigms change because so many anomalies arise that cannot be explained by the old paradigm that a new one that does incorporate those anomalies arises. This article published by MIT is one sign that consciousness is slowly being recognized for what it is.
Honey bees can recognize faces, communicate the location and quality of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and navigate complex mazes with the help of cues they store in short-term memory. Credit: Boba Jaglicic/Unsplash
What is common between the delectable taste of a favorite food, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the fullness after a heavy meal, the slow passage of time while waiting, the willing of a deliberate act, and the mixture of vitality, tinged with anxiety, just before a competitive event?
All are distinct experiences. What cuts across each is that all are subjective states, and all are consciously felt. Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive, with many claiming that it cannot be defined at all, yet defining it is actually straightforward. Here goes: Consciousness is experience.
That’s it. Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted. Some distinguish awareness from consciousness; I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably. I also do not distinguish between feeling and experience, although in […]
It is indeed – I can’t wait to see what happens in the next 20 years in postmaterialist sciences!