Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007.
DRAFT."Timelineof
Consciousness." > Speechless. Uploaded March 2,
2007.©©Creative
Commons Copyright License 2.5.
The first stage of building a selective timeline on a history of consciousness
is to gather frequently cited quotations, works of art, mythology, scientific
experiments, lectures, conferences, publications, debates and social,
political and/or economic events that contributed to shifts in understanding
of the concept. I attempt to use sources that would be considered legitimate
by academic and wikipedia standards. I mine data from summaries, encyclopedia
entries, etc for their references. The entire phrases are in chronological
order with their references which are sometime double. They include the
original historical reference and the author who provided the summary.
I am not attempting to trace a complete history of the debates around the
concept of consciousness. I am concerned with what is being done in the name
of consciousness studies that may impact on memory work, ethics, self and the
Other-I, at-risk populations and most importantly the political implications
of the study of consciousness on the way mental health is constructed. During
the1970s academic disciplines became increasingly fragmented. With the study
of consciousness various disciplines such as cognitive science, neuroscience,
psychology (qualia, Folk psychology), philosophy (phenomenology),
psychiatry(pharmapsychiatry),psychobiology,pharmacology and literature
(chroniclers of consciousness) will hopefully benefit from more collaborative
inclusive research projects. This will hopefully lead to the dissemination of
useful academic research in stages which will include articles written for
those outside individual distinct disciplines.At the end of the twentieth
century philosophers of the mind have also been more open to investigating
what has been done in the name of consciousness studies in religious practice.
These are some of the questions and debates that are linked to my own
interests:
1637 René Descartes (1596-1650) also "integrated sensations in amputated limbs [the phantom limb] into his dualist theory of mind, and used the phenomenon to support the unity of the mind in comparison to the fragmented nature of the body. [. . .] Throughout medical history the construct of phantom limbs posed a challenge to fundamental folk assumptions regarding the assumed relationship between body and mind (Wade 2006)."Schama suggests that Dr. Tulp is looking at the Creator Himself. The interpretation accords well with the fact that Tulp was a devout Calvinist and with these verses written by Caspar Barleus a few years later after the painting gained renown: "Listener, learn yourself and while you proceed through the parts, believe that, even in the smallest, God lies hid."27 I see Barleus's words as a response to the unease of the discovery, the unease that would have been produced by the inevitable, subsequent thought: If we can explain this about nature, what can we not explain? Why can we not explain everything else that happens in the body, including perhaps, the mind? Will we be able to discover how one's thoughts can will a hand to move. Afraid of his own thoughts, Barleus wished to calm the public, or the deity or both, by saying that, although they are trespassing backstage and discovering how the tricks are done, by no means are they less reverent for the work of the Creator. The intended meaning of Dr. Tulp's facial expression is impossible to decipher, of course, and sometimes when I stand in front of the picture I think that he is simply telling the viewer: "Look what I have done!" Whatever the precise meaning, Rembrandt or Tulp, perhaps both,wanted us to know that no one took in stride what was happening in the Theatrum Anatomicum (Damasio 2003).
Once attention had been drawn to the phenomenon then its phenomenology was examined in more detail; it can also be integrated into prevailing theories. This second phase is found in the speculations of Descartes. In his book on optics,Descartes (1637/1902) argued that all sensation is located in the brain.Objections to this view were expressed by some of Descartes’ correspondents, and he responded by commenting on reports of sensations in amputated limbs; they were used as evidence that all sensations take place in the brain. In subsequent letters concerning such sensations, Descartes attributed them to activity in the brain normally associated with the missing limb. He stated that this was a condition familiar to doctors and surgeons of the day:
“for they know that those whose limbs have recently been amputated often think they still feel pain in the parts they no longer possess. I once knew a girl who had a serious wound in her hands and had her whole arm amputated because of creeping gangrene. Whenever the surgeon approached her they blindfolded her eyes so that she would be more tractable, and the place where her arm had been was so covered with bandages that for some weeks she did not know that she had lost it. Meanwhile she complained of feeling various pains in her fingers, wrist and forearm; and this was obviously due to the condition of the nerves in her arm which had formerly led from her brain to those parts of her body. This would certainly not have happened if the feeling or, as he says, sensation of pain occurred outside the brain.” (Descartes, 1991, p. 64 cited in (Wade 2006).")
In addition, Descartes considered that the phenomenon indicated the unreliability of the senses. In his sixth meditation on the existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body he wished to “see whether the things which are perceived by that mode of thinking which I call ‘sensory perception’ provide me with any sure argument for the existence of corporeal things” (1984, p. 51). The first aspect he considered was the perception of his own body parts, but doubt was cast upon this from examples of sensations in amputated limbs: “And yet I had heard that those who had a leg or an arm amputated sometimes still seemed to feel pain intermittently in the missing part of the body” (p. 53). Finally, Descartes also used the phenomenon to support the unity of the mind in comparison to the fragmented nature of the body: “Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind” (1984, p. 59) cited in (Wade 2006)."
By the word ‘thought’ (‘pensée’) I understand all that of which we are conscious as operating in us (Descartescited in Van Gulick2004).1686 G.W. Leibniz offered a theory of mind in the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) that allowed for infinitely many degrees of consciousness and perhaps even for some thoughts that were unconscious,the so called “petites perceptions”. Leibniz was the first to distinguish explicitly between perception and apperception, i.e., roughly between awareness and self-awareness(VanGulick 2004).
I do not say there is no soul in man because he is not sensible of it in his sleep. But I do say he can not think at any time, waking or sleeping,without being sensible of it. Our being sensible of it is not necessary to anything but our thoughts, and to them it is and to them it always will be necessary (Lockecited in Van Gulick 2004)..17XX Eighteenth century physicians used the phenomenon of the phantom limb to investigate functioning of the senses. William Porterfield (ca. 1696-1771) "described and interpreted the feelings in his own missing leg; he considered that sensations projected to the missing leg were no more remarkable that colours projected to external objects (Wade2006)."
1755 Immanuel Kant advocated a form of the embodied mind theory in his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven.
1787 "The purely associationist approach was critiqued in the late eighteenth century by Immanuel Kant (1787), who argued that an adequate account of experience and phenomenal consciousness required a far richer structure of mental and intentional organization. Phenomenal consciousness according to Kant could not be a mere succession of associated ideas, but at a minimum had to be the experience of a conscious self situated in an objective world structured with respect to space, time and causality (Van Gulick 2004)."
1800 Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) developed a system called phrenology
in which he claimed that emotions were located in the brain not the heart as
was commonly held. According to his systems the brain was divided into
distinct sections that controlled certain mental functions, emotions and
actions.According to Gall, bumps and bulges in the skull provided a scientific
map ofeach individual's personality. Phrenology was particularly popular with
England's ruling class from 1820 to 1850 as these cranial maps were used
toargue that certain colonial subjects like the Irish, were inferior by
'nature'.Phrenology was discredited and is considered to be a racist
pseudoscience. SeeHonore Daumier's humourous caricatures based on phrenology.
Kluger (2007) argued that contemporary neuroscience with its search for
brain localization through such
technology as Magnetic Resonance
Imaging gives Gall's work more legitimacy than Freud's. MFB
1829 James Mill investigated the principles by which conscious thoughts
or ideas interacted or affected each other. His son, John Stuart Mill
continued his father's work on associationist psychology, but he allowed that
combinations of ideas might produce resultants that went beyond their
constituent mental parts, thus providing an early model of mental emergence
(1865)
(VanGulick 2004).
1830 onwards Hegel's course notes were published in the form of Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Lectures on Aesthetics, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In his lectures on the Philosophy of History, described a macro-history in which the idea of freedom developed over three millennia. Hegel contrasted western concepts of the free individual in Greek city-states with the lack of individual freedom of the oriental world exemplified in the absolute ruler, the Persian Emperor vanquished at Salamis. The Christian era marked another important moment in the history of the world of thought, introducing the concept of religious self-consciousness. Hegel credits the Reformation, not the earlier forms of Christianity as experienced in the Holy Roman Empire, with the enlightenment Germanic peoples.
1850 marked a rupture with the literature of the past. Before 1850 the author was a witness to the universal. After 1850 the author had a choice. He could choose to remain in the past. Or he could choose to write in the present. The author became conscious and with his new awareness he became unhappy and dissatisfied. See Barthes, Roland in Le Degré Zéro de l'écriture (1953).
1865 James Mill's son, John Stuart Mill "continued his father's work on associationist psychology, but he allowed that combinations of ideas might produce resultants that went beyond their constituent mental parts, thus providing an early model of mental emergence (Van Gulick 2004).
1866 Thomas H. Huxley's remarked,
How it is that anything so remarkable as astate of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.
1871 Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) coined the phrase
'phantomlimb'.br/>
The term ‘phantom limb’ was coined by Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914). He treatedinjuries received by soldiers during the American Civil War, and set up a ‘StumpHospital’ in Philadelphia for the many amputees. In 1866, he wrote an anonymousand fictitious account of one George Dedlow, who had lost both arms and bothlegs. It created such a stir that donations sent to him. Consequently, Mitchell(1871) wrote a serious account in which he described the sensations thatamputees experienced in their lost limbs, and called the condition phantom limb.Many such cases have since been reported, and phantom limbs pose some perplexingproblems for theories of perception. Damage or loss of other senses results inthe absence of experiences formerly associated with their function. Blindnessand deafness are particularly clear examples. But the sense organs for seeingand hearing – the eyes and ears – are localized in the head, and specializedreceptors for light and sound are not found in other regions of the body. Theskin senses are necessarily diffuse, and the consequences of loss are quiteunlike those for the localized senses.(Wade2006)
1870s Herder argued that the authenticity of each human had his
measure own measure. This concept of authenticity in which the difference
between humans has a moral significance --- entered deep into modern
consciousness. See Taylor(1991).
1870s In post-Civil War
America of the 1870s
fortunes were made during the industrial boom. Suddenly people from ordinary
backgrounds with no heridity of nobility could emulate the lives of European
high society, traveling and settling in
Europe forming colonies
in urban centres such as
Paris and
Rome. Henry James'
1843-1915) novella entitled Daisy Miller 1878 [1974]) provides a
portrait of this encounter between two cultures.
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Henry_James/Daisy_Miller/
1872 Emil du Bois-Reymond presented his lecture entitled,
"About the limits of natural
knowledge."
. . . at some point in the evolution of life - apoint we do not know and need not try to determine - something new appears,something so far unknown, something . . . incomprehensible. The thread ofunderstanding spun in negatively infinite time is disrupted, and our knowledgeof nature reaches a gap to be crossed by no bridge, no wing: We face the limitsof our wits. This . . . incomprehensible thing isconsciousness. I shall now showvery conclusively, as I believe, thatconsciousness cannot be explainedfrom its material conditions, not only - as everyone will admit - at the presentstate of our knowledge, but according to the very nature of things (DuBois-Reymond 1872 [1974:65] translated by Peter Bieri in"Whyis ConsciousnessPuzzling?"
1878 Henry James' 1843-1915) novella entitled Daisy Miller 1878 [1974]) was first published in Cornhill Magazine. Henry James filters his story of the innocent, vulgarity of a young nouveau riche American on her European tour. Daisy Miller's story is observed, analyzed and narrated and therefore filtered through the consciousness of James' fictional character Frederick Winterbourne, an American expatriate. Daisy's infatuation with an poor Italian disturbs the small community of expatriots revealing the anti-Italian racism of the period. James' own transatlantic existence as American writer and expatriot who settled in London after living in New York, Boston, Paris and Rome, member of a family of philosophers, his devotion to Europe and his comparisons between Europe and American culture inspired his long and prolific career. The novella provided an analysis of this wave of the newly rich in post-Civil War America of the 1870s where fortunes were made during the industrial boom. Suddenly people from ordinary backgrounds with no heredity of nobility could emulate the lives of European high society, traveling and settling in Europe forming colonies in urban centres such as Paris and Rome. http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Henry_James/Daisy_Miller/
1883 Wilhelm Dilthey published Introduction to the Human Sciences. In 1883, Wilhelm Dilthey began to make his case for an interpretative or hermeneutic approach to historically oriented human studies, the Geisteswissenschaften, roughly all of the humanities and the social sciences including history taken as a group, as distinguished from the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. Dilthey considered it, "philosophy's task to provide an epistemology that can show that the Geisteswissenschaften, although not as clearly definable in their first principles as the Naturwissenschaften, are no less fundamental, comprehensive, and objective in their results (Makkreel 1992: 38)." According to Richard Lee 1996) "the original experiential foundation in descriptive psychology Dilthey proposed, denied "Ranke's claim that to see history objectively one must 'efface the self'" (Makkreel 1992: 54). Dilthey purposefully rejected the impersonal and abstract Kulturwissenschaften, with its occlusion of conflict and the unstated postulate of progress, in an on-going debate with the Baden neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Windelband and his student Heinrich Rickert (Lee, Richard 1996). Dilthey traced the roots of human sciences to its philosophical foundations to determine the impulse of contemporary science preparing the groundwork for the study of the epistemological foundation of the human sciences. Dilthey traced the emancipation of the scienes to the Middle Ages but noted that the social sciences and history retained a subservient relation to metaphysics until the 18th century. "All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature. We designate as "epistemological" this standpoint which consistently recognises the impossibility of going behind these conditions. To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point" For more see Dilthey1883).
1889 Franz Brentano used the term "phenomenology" to characterize what he called "descriptive psychology". Edmund Husserl then used term for his new science of consciousness.
Originally, in the 18th century, "phenomenology" meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The term seems to have been introduced by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Subsequently, Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called "descriptive psychology". From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history (Smith 2003).
1890 William James' (1830 - 1920?) studied the function of unconsciousness from 1890 onwards, that is functionalism, asking how the mind functions and adapts rather than Titchener's rigid structuralism, which asked, “What is the structure of pyschological thought?” Titchener’s structuralism focused on the "study of the structure of the conscious mind, the sensations, images and feelings that were the very element of the mind's structure. William James proposed memory consisted of different kinds of memory. There is an immediate memory and another larger memory that is a hidden, passive repository for past experience. In the 1950s and 1960s models of human information processing includes two memories that James discussed in 1890. "At the outset of modern scientific psychology in the mid-nineteenth century, the mind was still largely equated with consciousness, and introspective methods dominated the field as in the work of Wilhelm Wundt (1897), Hermann von Helmholtz (1897), William James (1890) and Alfred Titchener (1901)." (Van Gulick 2004).
1891 Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) wrote The Idea of Phenomenology in which he argued for a phenomenology that described the content of consciousness, such as dreams, a view out a window or a scene from a novel. He was a realist but in his later works he abandoned realism - the certitude of truth. He rejected the prevalent psychology turn in 1891. He studied mathematics and wrote about logic. But he rejected the argument that the human mind had a structured matrix upon which thought and language could be predicted with a scientific precision given the right instruments Husserl (1907). Action is intentional consciousness. Was it Husserl who also argued that the word is a semiotic bridge between the inner life and consciousness? Founder of the phenomenological movement in philosophy. Consciousness is intentional. Derrida contends that Husserl, along with almost all other philosophers, relies on the assumption of an immediately available area of certainty. The origin and foundation of most philosophers' theories is presence. edit, i
1897 "At the outset of modern scientific psychology in the mid-nineteenth century, the mind was still largely equated with consciousness, and introspective methods dominated the field as in the work of Wilhelm Wundt (1897), Hermann von Helmholtz (1897), William James (1890) and Alfred Titchener (1901)." (Van Gulick 2004).
1901 "At the outset of modern scientific psychology in the mid-nineteenth century, the mind was still largely equated with consciousness, and introspective methods dominated the field as in the work of Wilhelm Wundt (1897), Hermann von Helmholtz (1897), William James (1890) and Alfred Titchener (1901)." (Van Gulick 2004).nclude the possibility
1911 Henri Bergson published Matter and Memory in which he referred to the work of Pierre Janet on the neurosis of aphasia. Janet's original research results published in 1896 did not explain aphasia, a disease of the personality, in terms of the dislocation of localization of the memory-images of words. Bergson argues that aphasia resultswhen the tie between the psychic life and its motor accompaniment is broken which weakens attention to outward life. Bergson described matter as "an aggregate of `images.' And by 'image' we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing;-an(xii) existence placed half-way between the `thing' and the ` representation.'" Bergson argued that the connexion between a state of consciousness and the brain is like that of a coat and the nail on which it hangs. If the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say,then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung on to a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/Bergson/Bergson_1911b/Bergson_1911_00.html
1913 John B. Watson proposed his theory of behaviourism based on Pavlov’s scientific method using measurement and quantification. Leahey 1992 referred to this as "physics envy." (Ashcroft 1994:22) Watson rejected "mentalism: any concept or idea that could not be quantified, objectified: such as consciousness, memory, mind." (Ashcroft 1994:21).
1913 In Ideas I (1913) Husserl focused squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined phenomenology as "the science of the essence of consciousness", centered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly "in the first person". (See Husserl, Ideas I, ¤¤33ff.) In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the study of consciousness — that is, conscious experience of various types — as experienced from the first-person point of view. In this discipline we study different forms of experience just as we experience them, from the perspective of the subject living through or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing, desiring, willing, and also acting, that is, embodied volitional activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However, not just any characterization of an experience will do. Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain way (Smith 2003 ).
1912-20? After his liberation from prison in Akka, Abdul-Baha traveled to Paris, London, Edinburgh, Montreal, New York and spoke in Christian churches, to Freemasons, Theosophists, Unitarians and many other groups about the nature of consciousness from a Baha'i perspective. He argued against materialist philosophies and described how unlike any other entity in nature, humans have consciousness, volition, memory, intelligent power, divine attributes and virtues.
It is evident therefore that man is ruler over nature’s sphere and province. Nature is inert, man is progressive. Nature has no consciousness, man is endowed with it. Nature is without volition and acts perforce whereas man possesses a mighty will. Nature is incapable of discovering mysteries or realities whereas man is especially fitted to do so. Nature is not in touch with the realm of God, man is attuned to its evidences. Nature is uninformed of God, man is conscious of Him. Man acquires divine virtues, nature is denied them. Man can voluntarily discontinue vices, nature has no power to modify the influence of its instincts. Altogether it is evident that man is more noble and superior; that in him there is an ideal power surpassing nature. He has consciousness, volition, memory, intelligent power, divine attributes and virtues of which nature is completely deprived, bereft and minus; therefore man is higher and nobler by reason of the ideal and heavenly force latent and manifest in him (Abdul-Baha 19?? [1979:70]).
1923 Georg Lukács (1885-1971) in his Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and class consciousness) contributed to the history of consciousness and hermeneutics by reinterpreting Marx through a Hegelian lens in which the key concepts of alienation and reification were developed. This shift in the interpretation of Marx’s writings towards a version of secular humanism was confirmed when Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) were finally published in the 1930s. Georg Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist philosopher disavowed his own theories expounded in History and class consciousness when he encountered Stalinist criticism in the 1930s. Georg Lukács’ “formulation and defence of the doctrine of social realism in literature and the arts was widely influential in the cultural politics of the Soviet bloc.” See Mautner (1997:328-9).
1929 Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. "Perhaps Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “dialogic” (or “polyphonic”) is a useful intellectual framework in examining how “voices” at the Centre were at once conflicting and complementary to the overall discourse (in the most literal sense of the word) of British cultural studies as it emerged from the CCCS. In his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 1929), Bakhtin observes that the characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels are liberated to speak “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” which are not contained by the authoritative control of the author." (cited in Carnie 2002).
1930s Existentialism a concept of the ultimacy of human freedom developed by Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) philosopher, literary figure, and social critic under the influence of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Sartre developed his concept of existentialism as an analysis of self-consciousness in relation to Being. Wrote re Baudelaire, Historical materialism present day society is superior to past cultures. In the 1930s he wrote several phenomenological analysis of the imagination and the emotions, which culminated in his most important philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. In a later Marxist work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he attempted to explain how the freedom of the individual freedom is related to the historical class struggle.
1936 "In the novel Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that moment recovers his sense of his own freedom (Smith 2003)."
1943 Jacques Cousteau described the Rapture of the Deep in his publication The Silent World. http://www.deep-six.com/page74.htm
1943 "In Being and Nothingness (1943), written partly while a prisoner of war, Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) developed his conception of phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had stressed. In Sartre's model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon just is a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their "being-in-itself". Consciousness, by contrast, has "being-for-itself", since each consciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (conscience de soi). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the "I" or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions). For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness (Smith 2003). Sartre's method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations — a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes use of Sartre's great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Smith 2003)."
1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of
Perception in which he emphasized the role of the experienced body in
many forms of consciousness. In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
joined with Sartre and Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In
Phenomenology of Perception (1945)Merleau-Ponty developed a rich
variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role ofthe body in human
experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre,Merleau-Ponty looked
to experimental psychology, analyzing the reportedexperience of
amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Pontyrejected
both associationist psychology, focused on correlations between
sensataion and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focused on
rational construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the
behaviorist and computationalist models of mind in more recent decades
of empirical psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focused on the "body
image", our experience of our own body and its significance in our
activities. Extending Husserl's account of the lived body (as opposed
to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional
Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither
in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my
body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive
including other people
(Smith
2003).
The scope of Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic of the
breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty
drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while
fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His
phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field,
the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility
of the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves,
temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French
existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the cogito (Descartes' "I
think, therefore I am"), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his
embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing: Insofar as, when
I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that
of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as
subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a
body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that
I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this
world. [408]In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and
equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the
world) (Merleau-Ponty cited in Smith 2003).
1950s-a Sartre published Les Temps Moderne.
1951 Graham Greene published his novel The End of the Affair, known for its social and psychological realism in which he chronicles the consciousness and anxiety of his characters enmeshed in a Catholic culture where souls are capable of eternal salvation or damnation. It was later made into two feature films (1955, 1999). According to wikipedia it was "set in London during and just after World War II, the novel examines the obsessions, jealousy and discernments within the relationships between the central characters, writer Maurice Bendrix, Sarah Miles, and her husband, civil servant Henry Miles."
1950s-b Logical positivism, which aimed to make philosophy scientific, contributed to the professionalization of philosophy and increased the distance between professional philosophers and most of nonscientific culture. Burge (1992) claims that in the forty years since logical positivism began to wane (1950 to 1990), "some of the most intense and intellectually powerful discussions in any academic field have taken place in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind (Burge 1992)." The "tradition of ethical and political reflection on issues of justice and political authority was largely ignored by Anglo-American philosophers. Most subscribed to the school of logical positivism that saw only two meaningful types of philosophical inquiry: investigating empirical facts and debating the meaning of words. In this circle, philosophy had little to do with people's need for norms by which to guide their lives or society. Rawls played a major role in reviving substantive questions about civil liberty, the limits of political obligation, and the justice of economic and social inequalities that had exercised philosophers from Plato to Hegel (Sibley 2002).
1950s Human consciousness evolved. In Britain Raymond Williams contributed to adult education producing relevant, respectful tools such as lists of key concepts to help share what had previously been elitist knowledge. Cultural studies opened up new ways of engaging with pluralism. As war veterans returned to their countries they took advantage of housing and education programs but they were not typical students. WWII vets were from First Nations and African Canadian backgrounds in Canada for example. The heightened pluralism of these learners impacted on the institutions they entered --- not as one immediate reaction but in the long-term.
1950s "Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is currently (2007) the most effective nondrug technique dealing with phobias, PTSD and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The idea behind CBT--which first appeared in the 1950s, long before neuroscience could explain such things--is that the patient examines upsetting ideas and consciously assigns new, more positive associations to them. Even old-fashioned Freudian psychotherapy might fit in with this model. By dredging up forgotten memories, it may achieve the same thing, albeit in a much less efficient way (Lemonick 2007)."
1950s - 1960s
James
L. McGaugh Ph.D. in 1959, University of California, Berkeley. "His
early work (in the 1950s and 1960s) demonstrated that memories are not
instantly created in a long-term, permanent fashion. Rather,
immediately after a learning event, the memory is labile and
susceptible to influence. As time passes, the memory becomes
increasingly resistant to external influences and eventually becomes
stored in a relatively permanent manner. This process is called
memory
consolidation. Dr. McGaugh found that drugs, given to an animal
after a learning event, influence the subsequent retention of that
event. The concept of such "post-training" manipulations is one of Dr.
McGaugh's greatest contributions to the field of learning and memory
because it avoids many potential confounds, such as performance
effects of the drug, that may occur when a drug is given prior to the
training
(wikipedia)."
On his
homepage
(2003) he describes his research into Neurobiology of Learning and
Memory. "Findings of other recent experiments indicate that the
amygdala influences memory by modulating the functioning of other
brain regions involved in information storage. Current studies in my
laboratory focus on the interaction of the amygdala with other brain
regions in regulating memory storage." He is the Founding Director of
the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and also
Research Professor of Psychobiology and Pharmacology at the University
of California, Irvine (UCI). His research investigates the effects of
drugs and hormones on memory and the role of brain systems in
regulating learning and memory. He is sometimes "called "Mr. Amygdala"
for his work with this almond-shaped structure in the forebrain.
Intrigued by questions of how memories are made, he has studied the
brain for more than 40 years. Through his experiments, McGaugh has
found that an emotional response can enhance memory retention. Using
PET scans to look inside the brain as memories are formed, McGaugh has
discovered that the amygdala helps the brain remember what matters
(Pieces
of Mind: Remembering what Matters).
Memory and emotion are intimately linked biochemically, with hormones like adrenaline actively involved in forming the neurological patterns we call memories. "Any kind of emotional experience will create a stronger memory than otherwise would be created," says James McGaugh, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Irvine. "We remember our embarrassments, our failures, our fender benders." On the face of it, that doesn't seem especially surprising: we feel strong emotion at important events, which are obviously more memorable than ordinary moments. But the connection is much deeper than that and dates back to our deepest evolutionary past. "The major purpose of memory," observes McGaugh, "is to predict the future." An animal that can remember the significance of that large, nasty-looking thing with the big teeth and sharp claws will survive longer and produce more offspring. What happens biochemically, says McGaugh, is that when faced with an emotion-charged situation, such as a threat, our bodies release the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. Among other things, these signal the amygdala, a tiny, neuron-rich structure nestled inside the brain's medial temporal lobes, which responds by releasing another hormone, called norepinephrine. Norepinephrine does two important things. First, it kicks the body's autonomic nervous system into overdrive: the heart beats faster, respiration quickens, and the muscles tense in anticipation of a burst of physical exertion (Lemonick 2007).
1956-7 John Austin presented his paper, "A plea for excuses" in which he described the performative nature of words. It was published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1956-7. Transcribed into hypertext by Andrew Chrucky, August 23, 2004. http://www.ditext.com/austin/plea.html
1960 In Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press) renowned philosopher W. V. O. Quine denied there were any mental experiences or events at all (Barr 2003:17). There are no conscious processes. Such materialistic philosophy like Quine's denied subjective experience. Free will is an illusion. According to Quine, there is no purpose or teleological explanation for phenomena, only mechanistic laws.
1960s Minimalist artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin turned to factories and industrial materials to produce their work. In so doing they challenged the romantic myth of the artist as the most highly specialized, unique worker in the modern period. Minimal artists introduced the concept of site specific art. Minimal art was intended as a gesture to redirect consciousness to the real world from which it emanated. See Crimp (1993:157).
1960s Consciousness has intersections or vertices. Some suggestive clues concerning the vertices of consciousness come from experiments with the famous robot Shakey in the 1960s. Shakey was programmed to recognize objects in a room, but not by identifying the objects as whole entities. Rather, Shakey could discern a square because of the vertices a square uniquely has at the point where its angles meet. This held similarly for triangles and other objects. Shakey could generalize by recognizing a small part, the part where planes of the object intersected (Henry 1992 ).
1961a Guy Debord presented this paper
entitled "Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life" at a
conference entitled Group for Research on Everyday Life organised by
Henri Lefebvre in
Paris. In his
paper Debord argued that sociologists exclude their own everyday
habits as data. These professional habits with their professional
conventions and concepts mask the privilege and assumptions of
superiority contained within. Lefebvre's description of everyday life
as "whatever remains after one has eliminated all specialized
activities' Implies that the specialized work of sociologists cannot
be itself observed as a sociological phenomenon. In this way the
useless, vulgar and disturbing everyday lives of common people and
workers are considered to be guinea pig-subjects to observe and study.
Debord challenges the modernist assumption that common people are a
product of history over which they have no free or conscious
determination or control versus the notion that common people in
everyday make history happen. "The disappearance in developed
capitalism of all the old values and of all the frames of reference of
past communication; and the impossibility of replacing them by any
others before having rationally dominated, within everyday life and
everywhere else, the new industrial forces that escape us more and
more — these facts give rise not only to the virtually official
dissatisfaction of our time, a dissatisfaction particularly acute
among young people, but also to the self-negating tendency of art.
Artistic activity had always been alone in expressing the clandestine
problems of everyday life, albeit in a veiled, deformed, and partially
illusory manner. Modern art now provides us with undeniable evidence
of the destruction of all artistic expression. An avant-garde cultural
movement, even one with revolutionary sympathies, cannot accomplish
this. Neither can a revolutionary party on the traditional model, even
if it accords a large place to criticism of culture (understanding by
that term the entirety of artistic and conceptual means through which
a society explains itself to itself and shows itself goals of life).
This culture and this politics are both worn out and it is not without
reason that most people take no interest in them. The revolutionary
transformation of everyday
life — which is not reserved for some vague future but is
placed immediately before us by the development of capitalism and its
unbearable demands (the only alternative being the reinforcement of
the modern slavery) — this transformation will mark the end of all
unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of commodities, at
the same time as the end of all specialized politics. This is going to
be the task of a new type of revolutionary organization, from its
inception."
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/6.everyday.htm
1961 Emmanuel Levinas
published
Totalité et infini: essai sur l'extériorité.
However, an explicitly phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who heard Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focused on the significance of the "face" of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience (Smith 2003 ).
1963 Feyerabend (1963) and Rorty (1965) were early proponents of the concept of eliminative materialism. They argue that mental states, such as beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc. do not exist (Searle 1992:6).
1975 "Sociobiology, as Wilson originally called his new synthesis work in 1975, is "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior." By applying evolutionary principles to understanding the social behavior of animals all the way to the order of humans, Wilson established sociobiology as an entirely new field of science. He argued that all animal behavior, even that of humans, is influenced by genes and never entirely of free will. This condition Wilson famously referred to as the genetic leash.[2] The sociobiological view of the facts is that all animal social behavior is governed by certain biologically based rules (i.e. epigenetic rules) worked out by the laws of evolution. This theory and research proved to be seminal, controversial, and influential.[3] The controversy of sociobiological research is in how it applies to humans. The theory established a scientific argument for rejecting the common doctrine of tabula rasa (i.e. "blank slate"), which held that human beings were born without any innate mental content and that culture functioned to increase human knowledge and aid in survival and success. In the final chapter of the book Sociobiology and in the full text of his Pulitzer Prize winning On Human Nature, Wilson argued that the human mind was shaped as much by genetic inheritance as it was by culture (if not more). There were limits on just how much influence social and environmental factors could have in altering human behavior. These ideas managed to offend both liberals and conservatives who both favored the idea that human behavior was culturally based. Sociobiology re-ignited the "nature versus nurture" debate and Wilson's scientific perspective on human nature touched off a firestorm of public debate (wikipedia) ."
1970s
In the late 1970s, faced with the complexity of adult neuronal connectivity, the French neuroscientist John-Paul Changeux stated that it would be impossible for the brain to develop if it was forced to rely on genetic information – there simply wasn’t enough in the genome to specify the myriad of wiring that makes the mature mind. In a memorable comparison, he estimated that the spermatozoa would need to be the size of a golf ball to carry all the extra information needed – a situation that would cause some problems to the continuation of Homo Sapiens. Summarizing the work of a number of philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists before him, Changeux recognized the need for a marriage between nature and nurture: nature could supply the building materials, but the architectural plans must come from nurture. This general idea was gradually refined by experimental work: general principles of development resided in the genome, and specified a chemical landscape of trails and paths that growing fibres could use to pathfind to their targets. Yet the problem of connectivity remained: upon arrival, how would a given axon (cable through which neuron connect to one another) know to connect to a given dendrite (protrusions on neurons cell bodies, contacted by neurotransmitters emitted from axons)? One solution, initially proposed by theoreticians, was to ensure that growing fibers connected to a multitude of targets, and use the environment, through its interactions with the brain via the senses, to ensure that the most useful connections remain whilst others wither and die. Thus nature, through genetics, is taught by nurture, via the environment. While this simple relating of the nature/nurture debate does not do justice to its incredible sophistication, this general principle that more connections are created by the developing brain that survive into adulthood is generally agreed upon – and thus the environment plays a significant part in the initial wiring of the brain. That it could also play a significant part in changing adult brain connectivity is a notion that has only gained prominence in the last twenty years, and continues to court controversy (McGonigle 2005).
1975 Putnam, H. 1975. The meaning of `meaning'. In (K. Gunderson, ed) Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1975 Michel Foucault's history of penal practices, Discipline and Punish (1975) described how punishment has progressed from an external to an internal process. He talks of how modern punishment has transferred its imprint from the outside, the body, to the inside, the soul. http://www2.vuw.ac.nz/adamartgal/chartwell-essays/2001johnston.html
1984 Terminator I was released with its cyborg hero/antihero who looks human but is almost impossible to stop.
1987 Mark Johnson published his book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason which he "maintained that image schema are regularly recurring embodied patterns of experience that are acquired during the course of early child development. Such schemata are image-like in that they are analogic neural activation patterns which preserve the topological contours of perceptual experience as a cohesive whole (wikipedia ). Along with Lackoff, Johnson developed the concept of the embodied mind which which suggest that the mind can only be well understood by taking into account the body and the more primitive underpinnings of the mind. According to Johnson (1999), an embodied philosophy "would show the laws of thought to be metaphorical, not logical; truth would be a metaphorical construction, not an attribute of objective reality."
1988 Eliminative materialism (Quine, Feyerabend, Rorty, Dennett) is the strong version of materialism that rejects the common sense understanding of the mind. The ‘raw feels’ or qualia of folk psychology describing everyday psychological concepts (beliefs, intentions) cannot be verified by neurobiology. Some like Churchland (1988) reduce consciousness to neurobiological phenomena. These strong materialists reject folk psychology’s use of consciousness, belief and desire as much as constructs like vital spirit or élan vital. Of course, strong materialists insist on behavioural criteria for identifying a unique process or state that could be called phenomenal awareness (Allport 1988, Dennett 1988). scientific a
1989 Philosopher Colin McGinn (b. 1950) published an article entitled "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" in which he argued that the "human mind is innately incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity spawns the puzzles of consciousness that have preoccupied Western philosophy since Descartes. Thus, McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans cannot find the answer. This position has been nicknamed the "New Mysterianism". The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (2000) is a non-technical exposition of McGinn's theory." See wikipedia"guments
The specific problem I want to discuss concerns consciousness, the hard nut of the mind-body problem. How is it possible for conscious states to depend upon brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter? What makes the bodily organ we call the brain so radically different from other bodily organs, say the kidneys - the body parts without a trace of consciousness? How would the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness? We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic. Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion. Neural transmissions just seem like the wrong kind of materials with which to bring consciousness into the world, but it appears that in some way they perform this mysterious feat. The mind-body problem is the problem of understanding how the miracle is wrought, thus removing the sense of deep mystery. We want to take the magic out of the link between consciousness and the brain (McGinn 1989:349).
One of the peculiarities of the mind-body problem is the difficulty of formulating it in a rigorous way. We have a sense of the problem that outruns our capacity to articulate it clearly. Thus we quickly find ourselves resorting to invitations to look inward, instead of specifying precisely what it is about consciousness that makes it inexplicable in terms of ordinary properties. And this can make it seem that the problem is spurious. A creature without consciousness would not properly appreciate the problem (assuming such a creature could appreciate other problems). I think an adequate treatment of the mind-body problem should explain why it is so hard to state the problem explicitly. My treatment locates our difficulty in our inadequate conceptions of the nature of the brain and consciousness (McGinn 1989:349)
1989 Roger Penrose published The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Penrose rejects the strong AI argument that there is a usefulness in searching for an algorithm that would initiate and/or simulate consciousness, "a grail quest in the realm of electronic alchemy (Henry 1992)."
Better known is Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, an extended argument against the strong AI position that "mind finds its existence through the embodiment of a sufficiently complex algorithm (Penrose 1989:429)." Penrose eschews computer/mind analogies, preferring to compare the working of the mind to the growth of a crystal: the activation and deactivation of synapses is like the vast number of possible alternative arrangements of a crystal formation and not a machine with its much more limited arrangements (Penrose 1989:438). Part of Penrose's discomfort with the mind/machine analogy is that the use of physical laws in the decipherment of scientific principle is often done through non-algorithmic processes. His own personal introspection and statements by Einstein and Poincare show that innovation and creative thought can be largely non-verbal, highly imagistic and geometrical, and thus not susceptible to algorithmic modeling. Mathematics, a chief source of algorithms, is paradoxical in this regard because many of its hypotheses and subsequent proofs are derived by pictures of "some visual and muscular type," to use Einstein's phrase. It is important to recognize that there are a number of systems that organize reality and interact through a series, however complex, of synaptic firings (Henry 1992).
1990 de Lauretis, Teresa. 1990. "Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness." Feminist Studies 16:p.116.
1991 Daniel Dennett published Consciousness Explained in which he used the computer, a virtual machine, and software as metaphors for describing the mind's functions. Dennett argued that it is desirable and possible to build a robot with consciousness. Dennett "succumbed to a kind of Pygmalion syndrome (Henry 1992)."
1991 Ramachandran published Perceptual correlates of massive cortical reorganization.
It was therefore somewhat surreptitious that the 1991 publication of the Silver Spring follow-up study dove-tailed with the increasing use of non-invasive technologies to map human brains, in particular, with a study by VS Ramachandran and colleagues that linked phantom limb sufferer’s phenomenological perceptions with the remapping of their sensory cortices. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), Ramachandran was able to show that stimulating areas of the face and upper arm activated regions in somatosensory cortex that would previously have received input from the missing limb. It is common to use terms such as ‘invaded’ to describe how face and arm cortex have managed to activate the hand, yet it is equally plausible that previously weak connections (less an invasion - more a fifth column) from arm and face to the hand area actually underlies this effect (McGonigle 2005).
1993 What is
consciousness? Do people
have a more privileged access to their own mental states than to the
mental states of others? Gopnik (1993) argues they don’t.
1993 The argument from qualia (Nagel, Jackson) is the strongest against eliminative materialism. Goldman’s (1993) paper supporting the importance of qualia and the folk psychological conception of consciousness is useful in providing summaries and analysis of debates emerging in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and phenomenology. I agree with Goldman that consciousness as a concept, like existence or truth evades reductionist definitions. Consciousness can be relational and therefore dependent on the larger system. Phenomenal consciousness is one based on its intrinsic properties. Functional consciousness refers to its informational accessibility or access consciousness. We are aware of our thought processes when there is a certain level of uncertainty. Once we reach a zero level of uncertainty regarding for example the law of gravity, our consciousness of it is removed. I agree with Goldman (1993) and Flanagan (1992) that it is productive to seek coherence and resonance between the three lines of inquiries about consciousness: phenomenology, psychology and neuroscience. He suggests that equal respect be given to the self-reporting qualia or raw feels provided by individuals. These subjective phenomenological accounts describe how things seem, how they feel, what they remember and perceive. These accounts can be compared with those provided by psychology and neuroscience. In a sense each discipline provides certain basic components that can be contribute to a rhizomic, organic system of understanding. of the existence of God.
"Does it matter that subjective phenomenological consciousness produces feelings based on faulty memories or perceptions? Is there a need to verify whether or not an experience was interpreted truthfully in a phenomenological account? I maintain that how the individual perceived, remembered, thought, felt and then behaved after his consciousness was awakened, is more significant. The question then is not about a truth claim of the existence of the concept of consciousness; it is a question of what is done as a result of phenomenal consciousness. As Goldman (1993) describes, qualia or the intrinsic properties of the human mind permit us to mentally classify and name conscious sensations. And what is of importance here is that these mental classifications based on phenomenal consciousness affect our behaviour. These mental classifications of sensory perceptual states and propositional attitudes (thinking) have causal consequences and therefore a causal-functional role in our psychological systems (Source Goldman ?)."
1996 Tom Wolfe published his article
"Sorry,
But Your Soul Just Died" in
Forbes in which he predicted neuroscientists working with even
more sophisticated MRI's to reveal biochemical changes in the brain
will confirm certain theories while dismantling others about mind,
self, soul and free will and therefore human consciousness.
"Brain imaging refers to techniques for watching the human brain as it functions, in real time. The most advanced forms currently are three-dimensional electroencephalography using mathematical models; the more familiar PET scan (positron-emission tomography); the new fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which shows brain blood-flow patterns, and MRS (magnetic resonance spectroscopy), which measures biochemical changes in the brain; and the even newer PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe, which is, in fact, so new that it still has that length of heavy lumber for a name. Used so far only in animals and a few desperately sick children, the PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe pinpoints and follows the activity of specific genes. On a scanner screen you can actually see the genes light up inside the brain. By 1996 standards, these are sophisticated devices. Ten years from now, however, they may seem primitive compared to the stunning new windows into the brain that will have been developed. Brain imaging was invented for medical diagnosis. But its far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about "the mind," "the self," "the soul," and "free will" that are already devoutly believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic world, neuroscience. Granted, all those skeptical quotation marks are enough to put anybody on the qui vive right away, but Ultimate Skepticism is part of the brilliance of the dawn I have promised (Wolfe 1996)."
1999he most elegant, robust
1998 Ramachandran, V. S., and Blakeslee. S. 1998.
Phantoms in the Brain. London: Fourth Estate.
1999 Mark Mark and George Lakoff published Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.
2003 Damasio wrote Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain in which he described how Spinoza's ideas were in advance of his time. Spinoza claimed that love, is nothing but a pleasureable state, joy. He separated the process of feeling from the process of having an idea about an object that can cause an emotion. Joy and sorrow along with the idea of the objects that caused either, eventually came together in the mind. But they are distinct processes to begin with. Living organisms react emotionally to different objects and events. The reaction if followed by some pattern of feeling and a variation of pleasure or pain is a necessary component of feeling. Irrational passions are detrimental affects. We can overcome the irrational passion with a more powerful positive affect triggered by reason. Spinoza recommended that we fight a negative emotion with an even stronger but positive emotion brought about by reasoning and intellectual effort. The subduing of the irrational passions should be accomplished by reason-induced emotion not by pure reason alone. Spinoza argued that the mind and body were parallel attributes, manifestations of the same substance. Spinoza equated joy with a perfectioning of one's function, a perservence in one's own being. This natural and necessary endeavour to regulate their lives and permit survival constitutes the essence of each organism. Spinoza was a precurseur then of Darwin, William James, Freud and Claude Bernard. Our knowledge of humanity should come from strengthening contact with God or Nature inside ourselves. Spinoza linked personal and collective happiness; human salvation and the structure of the state. Spinoza prescribed an ideal democratic state. (Damasio LS: JSFB 2003). [Damasio: Feelings are bedrock of our minds, Feelings: pain, pleasure. Feelings are intangible, private, inaccessible, subjective, emotions and feelings are twins, emotion was born first, then feelings; emotion preceded feelings. When neurological patients lost a sector of the brain circuitry due to illness, etc. they could express emotions even though they could not experience certain feelings. Feelings are an expression of human flourishing or distress. Feeling refers to some variant of the experience of pain or pleasure as it occurs in emotions and related phenomena. Feeling also refers to the physical sensations.] Harvest Books
2006 "On the question of God, Wilson has described his position as provisional deism.[7] In the past, he has explained his faith as a trajectory away from traditional beliefs: "I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist no more."[8] Like the famous American pragmatist William James, Wilson argues that the belief in God and rituals of religion are products of evolution.[9] They should not be rejected or dismissed, but further investigated by science to better understand their importance to human nature. In his book, The Creation, (2006) Wilson makes a case for putting aside epistemological differences between religion and science and concentrating on what they have in common; namely, living nature (wikipedia)."
2007
As 21st century science and technology open the brain to us as never before, accepted truths are becoming less true. The brain, we're finding, is indeed a bordered organ, subdivided into zones and functions. But the lines are blurrier than we ever imagined. Lose your vision, and the lobe that processed light may repurpose itself for other senses. Suffer a stroke in the area that controls your right arm, and another area may take over at least some of the job. Specialized neurons are being found that allow us to mirror the behavior of people around us, helping us learn such primal skills as walking and eating as well as how to become social, ethical beings. The mystery of memory is being teased apart, exposing the way we store facts and experiences in addition to the emotional flavors associated with them. Magnetic resonance imaging is probing the brain as it operates, essentially--if crudely--reading our minds, and raising all the attendant ethical questions. Finally and most elusively, we are learning something about consciousness itself--the ghost in the neural machine that gives you the sense of being in the moment, peering out at the world from the control room behind your eyes. If we can identify that cognitive kernel, can we one day endow a machine with it? But by isolating such a thing, do we in some way annihilate it too (Kluger 2007 )?
Selected Webliography and Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. 1953 [1972]. Le Degré Zéro de l'écriture, Paris, Editions de Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1957 [1987]. Mythologies. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer214/214_silverstein.html
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Death of the Author. London: Fontana. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/whatis.htm
Burge, Tyler. 1992.
"Philosophy
of Language and Mind: 1950-1990." The Philosophical Review.
101:1.
Burge, Tyler. 1992.
"Philosophy
of Language and Mind: 1950-1990." Philosophy in Review: Essays
on Contemporary Philosophy (Jan., 1992), pp. 3-51.
Clark, Andy, Chalmers, David J. 1998. "The Extended Mind." Analysis. 58:10-23.
Clark, Andy, Chalmers, David J. 1998.
"The
Extended Mind." P. Grim, P. Ed. The Philosopher's Annual,
vol XXI.
Damasio, Antonio. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil. 1872. "About the limits of
natural knowledge."
Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. "Timeline of Consciousness." > Google Docs. Uploaded March 2, 2007. ©© Creative Commons Copyright License 2.5.
Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. "Timeline of Consciousness." > Speechless. Uploaded March 2, 2007. ©© Creative Commons Copyright License 2.5.
Goldman, Alvin I. 1993. "The Psychology of Folk Psychology." Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 16:15-28.Henry, Charles. 1992. "The Vertices of Consciousness and the Biology of a Machine."
James, Henry. 1898. The Turn of the Screw.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago.
Johnson, Mark, Lakoff, George. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.
Kluger, Jeffrey. 2007. "The New Map Of The Brain." Time. Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007.
Lemonick, Michael D. 2007. "The Flavor Of Memories." Time. Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007.McGaugh, J. L. 2000. "Memory: A Century of Consolidation." Science. 287:248-251.
McGinn, Colin. 1989. "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" Mind. 98:391: 349-366.
McGonigle, David J. 2005. "The Body in Question: Phantom Phenomena and the View from Within." The Phantom Limb: a Neurobiological Diagnosis with Aesthetic, Cultural and Philosophical Implications.
McGinn, Colin. 1993. Problem of Consciousness: essays towards a resolution. Blackwell Publishing.
Nadeau, Robert L. 1991. Mind, Machines, and Human Consciousness. Chicago: Contemporary Books.
Penrose, Roger. 1989. The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pinker, Steven. 2007. "The Mystery of Consciousness ." Time. Friday, Jan. 19, 2007.
Ramachandran, V. S.; D. C. Rogers-Ramachandran & M. Stewart. 1992. "Perceptual correlates of massive cortical reorganization." Science. No. 258/5085: 1159-1160.
Ramachandran, V. S., and Blakeslee. S. 1998. Phantoms in the Brain. London: Fourth Estate.
Smith, David Woodruff. 2003. "Phenomenology." > Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Van Gulick, Robert. 2004.
"Consciousness"
> Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
(Van
Gulick 2004)
Wade, Nicholas. 2005. "The legacy of phantom limbs." The Phantom Limb: a Neurobiological Diagnosis with Aesthetic, Cultural and Philosophical Implications.
Wilson, Edward O.
1971. Insect
Societies. Harvard University Press,
ISBN
0-674-45490-1.
Wilson, Edward O. 2006. The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Wilson, Edward O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Belknap Press, ISBN 0-674-81621-8
Wolfe, Tom. 1996.
"Sorry,
But Your Soul Just Died." Forbes. 158:13. pp.210.
Consciousness and the Novel http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=0674013778#synopses_and_reviews
Debord, Guy. 1961.
"Perspectives
for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life."
Lefebvre, Henri. 1961. “Perspectives de modifications conscientes
dans la vie quotidienne” Internationale Situationniste #6 (Paris,
August 1961). Translation by Ken Knabb from the
Situationist
International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition,
2006).
Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. "Timeline of Consciousness." > Speechless. Uploaded March 2, 2007. ©© Creative Commons Copyright License 2.5.
Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. "Timeline of Consciousness." > Speechless. Uploaded March 2, 2007. ©© Creative Commons Copyright License 2.5.