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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 15, 2017 - 02:03pm PT
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Different schools of spiritual practice have their own ideas about these things. Within their particular universes, the terms probably fit together, but making one-to-one comparisons among the terms across different disciplines will expose contradictions and give rise to confusion, just as it does among different scientific disciplines.
This is a crucial point Mike made here, IMO. Meditation, per se, is a little like saying, "working out." There are a gazillion ways to go about it and depending on orientation, aim, instruction, training and tradition - to say nothing of all the doctrine and dogma attending much of it - a person can end up in wildly divergent terrain.
Many disciplines, especially coming out of India, are seeking spiritual experiences, or as I like to say, spiritual content, and they're certainly there to be had if you follow that route. I was lucky in one sense because my discipline, Zazen, is not chasing any content, any thing one can catch hold of and this inevitably leads to the abyss Mike mentioned, which is nothing or nothingness or emptiness or whatever label you choose to place on preverbal, inchoate, non-ceptualized being - for the lack of a better word. This is questionably a better vantage to survey the mind question because you are not fixated on the stuff of mind, but stripped-down mind itself.
The drawback with Zazen and other practices like it is that they all are so spare, unpackaged, unvarnished and unpopular that it's something of a miracle they even survive. But IMO, practices that promote simply being present with whatever content comes up inevitably involve a switch in focus from content to what one eventually recognizes as simple unmediated awareness.
Can you have an experience of this? John asks. That's almost a koan.
At this level, there is no experiencer, IME. No discriminating subject. There is just awareness, which sans content, and as mentioned, morphs into presence. This presence is, so far as I can tell, the ground on which all experience unfolds. All experience is postulated by this awareness and presence. The abyss is encountered when you head on or T-bone into pure nothingness, where even content, especially personal existence, is entirely absent. It's like extinction and forever rolled into one. The "face yuo have before you were ever born."
The first time I slammed into this I was freaked out for going on six months.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 15, 2017 - 03:07pm PT
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Can you have an experience of this? John asks. That's almost a koan
Yes, "experience devoid of content" is a tough nut to crack. More a curiosity of linguistics. I don't see it as synonymous with empty awareness, although I don't have first hand knowledge of the latter.
It seems like the path you have chosen leads only back to meditation, John. And the many varieties of meditation might provide insight. For example, I mentioned the mysterious Tulpa some time ago.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 15, 2017 - 06:47pm PT
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MH2:
I like everything that he said (and I like him), except the few times when he exposed an intention.
Thx.
It seems to me that he’s talking about being engaged with beauty, and how magical and mysterious those workings are.
Largo?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 15, 2017 - 07:10pm PT
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I don't know much about Richard Wagamese. It was CBC's Shelagh Rogers calling him, "love on two legs," that caught my attention. According to her, at least, Richard Wagamese radiated love to all he met. Of course, some of that assessment may be attributed to how Shelagh Rogers tends to see things. But it also seems that Richard Wagamese may have had a good sense of how other people suffer, as a result of his own experiences, and had a high level of empathy in addition to his drive to learn how to write.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 16, 2017 - 09:40am PT
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John said:
It seems like the path you have chosen leads only back to meditation, John. And the many varieties of meditation might provide insight. For example, I mentioned the mysterious Tulpa some time ago.
Key point here. About six months ago I got a missing piece to the whole Mind investigation from Israeli Tsur Taub (like many, a science-based scholastic who traversed into consciousness studies) which gave me a whole new appreciation of all aspects of consciousness, and more importantly, a basic model in which to make some little sense of it all.
The theoretical key to the model was accepting that awareness was a fundamental (just as fundamental as the Four Forces) quality involved in consciousness. This takes a lot of explaining why it's NOT some stand-alone, magical stuff or ether or (fill in the woo woo blank), and I'll try and get to that later (I have to go to an office and work now).
The short of it is that awareness is inherently nothing at all, but it can BECOME anything because it figuratively speaking casts a light on whatever content that our mechanical minds (governed by physical laws) present to awareness. Imagined as a movie screen or a borderless canvass, our minds project content (memories, thoughts, feelings and sensations) onto the screen/canvass and in various feedback loops, we start evaluating same. Consciousness doesn't "go" anywhere during deep sleep. It's just that for a while, our minds stop presenting content to awareness. Awareness is something we share with all living things. It's just that our brains (minds) are much more developed than a dogs, for example, so we enjoy a much more subtle degree of understanding.
Per John's "mysterious Tulpa," and all the rest of the mysterious content reported throughout history, it's interesting to consider that the movie screen of awareness (speaking metaphorically of course) can possibly work two ways. Determined content coming from our minds/brains is front projected onto the screen, so to speak. Largely if not entirely, this content is subject to standard cause and effect and is conditioned and determined by our personal history, genetics, and evolutionary endowments. But it may be the case that other "mysterious" content is rear-projected onto the same screen of awareness, tapping into some archtypal archive bank that has been insinuated by everyone from Jung to Plato (Platonic forms).
Interesting to ponder...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 16, 2017 - 01:47pm PT
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Someone I took a course from, as an undergraduate, in Political Sociology. I wrote a paper or essay on leadership. He said I had a propensity to find the interstices.
In other words, I fell into the cracks.
He also said he found the Playboy centerfolds dull, a comment I could not grok.
But then, he had been to India.
I met him again when I was a grad student at Chicago and congratulated him on getting the award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He called it, "the kiss of death."
Not the same Taub, but a Taub.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Taub
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 16, 2017 - 06:19pm PT
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About six months ago I got a missing piece to the whole Mind investigation from Israeli Tsur Taub (like many, a science-based scholastic who traversed into consciousness studies) (JL)
From LinkedIn:
Education [Tsur Taub]:
collage of management
B.A., Business, Management, Marketing
2005 – 2008
Yes, that's "collage", occurring twice. And you are influenced by this guy? He's the one suggesting a "fundamental force"? Well, to each his own.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 16, 2017 - 06:54pm PT
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John, are you suggesting that the only viable knowledge comes from people like us who plowed through graduate school? John Searle made an interesting point when he said that when he was studying philosophy at Oxford the most brilliant people he had as profs never had more than a BA. My mom was an excellent scholar and only had a masters. Hell, Thomas Edison was basically home schooled and "much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art."
I think you are still looking at the challenge of understanding consciousness as a matter of understanding data processing, and so someones pedigree per quantifying whatever is crucial to real knowledge, all else being "poetry."
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 16, 2017 - 07:18pm PT
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You said "science-based scholastic" so I made an assumption that he was. Maybe there is something to his fundamental force idea. Guess we'll see. Are there others who have advanced this idea? It's certainly intriguing. Sort of like a field of consciousness.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mar 16, 2017 - 08:12pm PT
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The Indo-Tibetan schools of meditation that emphasize spiritual experiences all teach that part of the reason for their methods is to distinguish between internally created experiences and the archetypal archive bank of philosophers and mystics.
They also work very well, as do psychedelics, in convincing the ultra rational that there is more to the mind than intellect and reason. It is one thing to read about the unconscious mind, it is quite another to encounter it directly, and still quite another to encounter that which seems to come from outside the mind yet interpenetrate it in some mysterious fashion.
In time, a wider non verbal consciousness appears. It's a question of personality which method one is best suited for - the gradual approach of the Indo-Tibetan systems or the all or nothing approach of Zen.
I do believe that the Indo-Tibetan approach stresses heart and turning back to the world more than Zen but that could be my own bias.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 16, 2017 - 08:23pm PT
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They also work very well, as do psychedelics, in convincing the ultra rational that there is more to the mind than intellect and reason. It is one thing to read about the unconscious mind, it is quite another to encounter it directly, and still quite another to encounter that which seems to come from outside the mind yet interpenetrate it in some mysterious fashion.
This is not my experience, and while there is more to mind, as experienced, than intellect and reason, it doesn't exclude the possibility that intellect and reason can explain the mind.
I find the ancient ideas regarding mind to be just that, ancient, and from a very limited view point, essentially without any scientific basis. They provide a set of foundational descriptions of the phenomenology of our experience, but the "theoretical" understanding misses a great many things we now know, biology being one of those things.
The state of ancient understanding that has passed to us had reached its limits to explain, and consequently, and with a lot of honesty, concluded that no more progress could be made along those lines of study; putting many them outside the realm of what was then considered in the realm of "intellect" and "reason." So presented, we have a mystery.
But those limits are not the limits of the ability to understand "mind," rather, they are the limits imposed by those ancient practices.
Even the idea of "psychedelics" is distinctly modern in this context strongly connected to the physical functioning of the brain, and as such, presents a challenge to the idea of some non-physical dimension.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 16, 2017 - 10:07pm PT
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What shall we make of expertise? Nobel laureate Herbert Simon said that it took 50,000 chunks of information to achieve expertise in domains. He said it would take at least 10 years of highly devoted study. (A “chunk,” said Simon, could be about 150 inter-connected data points.)
Well, that’s just one guy who said one thing. However, . . . I should note that Simon got his Nobel in economics, from which he later left for cognitive science and made a name for himself there. Simon said he realized that economics could not truly explain behavior. Behavior really happens on an individual level. (A focus on subjectivity is not too far around the corner.)
Who has ten years of intensive experience looking at the mind? Maybe it’s the case that the field is just moving slowly, or perhaps we’re all not reading the right journals. (That’s a joke.)
I would say there are no limits that stand in the way of anyone who wants to study the mind—other than their own views.
More and more, Ed, people are looking for themselves beyond what a teacher says or provides. (Horrors!) Consciousness has freed itself, as it were. (Oh-oh.)
Psychedelics were merely a spur on the growth curve. I’m afraid I have many colleagues in these practices who are still looking to return to those experiences. Alas, that is not what this is about. Darn it.
Jgill had earlier referenced tulpas, and I wanted to say something but didn’t. It looks like this is a concern however, and I can understand why. What kind of craziness suggests creating apparently conscious animations with the mind?
Let’s forget about AI for the moment.
Shamanism has long been a basis for study among primitive peoples, and Jung made a modern connection to it. Some have said that Jung himself was a classic shaman—a psychic self-healer, who in turn used the healing experience to heal others.
Most of us admit to the existence of some pretty weird psychological ailments, We even talk about them as if they were materially concrete. Things like personality disorders, (e.g., multiple personalities). Shamans, like Jung (ala “depth psychologists”), have helped others to find their way back to a sense of wellness by negotiating an alternate reality to retrieve a soul that has gotten lost. (Who here hasn’t gotten lost existentially? No? You’ve led a blessed life.)
I get that the idea of tulpas is rationally and empirically untenable. (Must everything be rational and empirical??)
If there is one strange thing in your life, then it could well be that there are others. Pushing what’s weird away is a kind of denial in my book. S’Ok, though.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 16, 2017 - 11:46pm PT
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Pushing what’s weird away is a kind of denial in my book.
you think that is what I do?
or do you just need to explain "what's weird" rather than living with for the moment?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mar 17, 2017 - 07:38am PT
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I have never excluded the possibility that intellect and reason could explain the mind. I just don’t observe that it has done so at present. I also don’t believe after reading these thousands of posts that it will solve the issue of whether or not there is an archetypal archive or universal consciousness in the universe. Even if every molecule in the brain is discovered and described, I doubt that will solve the issue of whether the brain is an evolved receiving station for a greater consciousness or just an evolved piece of meat. Certainly the idea that our species is part of a greater whole with a purpose will serve our survival better, whether true or not.
Instead of drawing up defensive lines I think it would be much more interesting to speculate and then possibly design experiments to test for example, whether there is a portion of the mind that stores information from our ancestors and their traumatic experiences? Could the many cases of people who remember past lives be a genetic memory of their own ancestors for example? If we have just recently discovered the claustrum, how many more parts and functions of the brain are waiting to be discovered?
Then there are the many issues involving memory that MH2 brought up a few pages back. I would love to see a detailed study of the order in which our senses evolved and how that relates to the brain and memory. Psychology has established that the sense of smell is associated with our earliest and deepest memories, yet our noses diminished to make way for our finely tuned primate eyes long ago. If smell is still so important, the importance of the sense of smell must have somehow shifted from the nose to the brain and from social signaling to memory.
As for psychedelics, of course they involve the biology and chemistry of the brain but so do certain meditational techniques. When one can produce psychedelic effects without outside chemicals, by following the techniques of the ancients, that tells us something interesting about human physiology, though what exactly, is open to interpretation. To write off ancient and non western knowledge as no longer relevant is typical modern western hubris in my view. One may disagree with the interpretations and vocabulary of the ancients, but they have so far put much more time into experiential effort than any modern scientist.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 17, 2017 - 08:01am PT
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Modern science is stuck in a rigid dichotomy clasp of mechanistic only consciousness.
They are clueless to the powers of consciousness itself.
These fools are even advocating robots to take over them. (devolve themselves even more).
They are insane .....
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 17, 2017 - 08:23am PT
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Ed: you think that ["Pushing what’s weird away"] is what I do?
or do you just need to explain "what's weird" rather than living with for the moment?
Well gosh, Ed. I think the term “weird” is synonymous with “woo,” wouldn’t you say? It’s a term that’s gotten plenty of air time around here. To those who have used it, I wrote that to them.
To you I was partially responding to an apparent lack of confidence in “ancient ideas” that you say has no scientific basis. I’ve tried to summarize what research has had to say about expertise. If we are concerned about any “limits” precluding the ability to understand mind, then a lack of expertise might be one limit.
I do not favor one set of practices over another. I don’t see reality privileging one view or approach of investigation over any other. I don’t see how it could. I’m for all views.
I’d be more enthusiastic about any study of mind if one could just come down on a single point with definiteness. But, that seems to unattainable no matter what approach one uses. I would say that over the few thousand years of investigation by humans, no single point of definitiveness ends up to be particularly definitive in itself. (Voila.)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 17, 2017 - 08:30am PT
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Ed said: "that intellect and reason can explain the mind."
I think what Ed means here is that intellect and reason can discover the so-called neural correlates to mind, and in that sense can "explain" the objective functioning. note that in virtually every other instance we can mention, there is never anything else BUT objective aspects to "explain" in the investigation of reality. When it comes to rocks or solar systems or quarks etc., physical causation says it all.
Not so with consciousness. I agree with Ed that reason is the principal tool to understanding the physical aspects of the 3rd person piece of consciousness. And I understand the knee-jerk reaction of staunch quantifiers to try and shoehorn the 1st person into the 3rd person in a deterministic way. The problem is awareness, sentience, or whatever term you wish to choose that underscores the fact that we are aware of the stuff of consciousness. Every effort to try and explain this as information, as mirror neurons, as a state, a processing artifact, and all the rest, is just as absurd as vitalism and ether and the independent existence of consciousness from brain and brain from consciousness.
That's the fly in the ointment. The amazing thing to me is that some people expect a mechanism to actually "explain" experience, above and beyond causal factors. Or that all that can be known beyond causality is "poetry."
After all this time its pretty obvious that some people are simply fixed in a perspective. Poor Dingus is always going to see experiential talk as some specie of "religion," though there's never been any mention of a God, faith, belief in any thing, worship, sacred doctrine, and all the other stuff normally attached to religion.
Chalmers Hard Problem asks, in so many words: If a mechanism is supposed to explain consciousness, above and beyond neural correlates, in what sense does this MAKE sense?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 17, 2017 - 10:20am PT
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To write off ancient and non western knowledge as no longer relevant is typical modern western hubris in my view. One may disagree with the interpretations and vocabulary of the ancients, but they have so far put much more time into experiential effort than any modern scientist.
I don't see this at all, modern scientists have access to knowledge that would have greatly informed ancient thinking, and they, modern scientists, have access to that ancient knowledge.
You can set up a false tension between "non-western knowledge" and western science, but that would overlook the fact that scientists are generally open to any knowledge that can help them understand the subject of their research.
My point is that freezing the study of consciousness by prioritizing "ancient knowledge" over modern knowledge as represented by "science" stunts progress. The ancients came to the conclusion that they could not apply "intellect and reason" any further than they did, and so left many questions unanswered, and unanswerable given their state of knowledge.
If you see that statement as viewed pejoratively then we'll have difficulty (as we have) in this discussion. Further, it is long past the time when the claim that "western" science and culture was unfamiliar with "eastern" traditions and knowledge, many who post to this thread are long time students of the East, and other ancient systems of knowledge. For better or worse, our ubiquitous communications have greatly bound the world together so much so that there are few bits of esoteric knowledge remaining to be found out there.
Finally, the largest barrier to learning about other cultures, the "language barrier" is being addressed ever more competently by machines who, even though Largo can represent the many ways to confuse a machine (one can just as easily confuse a non-native speaker in some peculiarities of any language), we are on the cusp of a vast expansion of our access to ancient works. The means of our access, those very machines, are also much more powerful than any translation service we have had in the past by the very feature that they can explain their translation, and even adapt different translations.
Whether or not they "understand" (the machines) what they are translating. That too is changing.
Interestingly, these links now so extensive, open our thinking to many more and different perspectives, but they do this in "both" directions, muddling the "colonial" distinctions of who is observer and who observed.
It does us well to contemplate this two way effect when trying to understand new-to-us ideas.
But to expand the causal consequences to a different level, when trying to find "tests" of the hypotheses related to:
"Even if every molecule in the brain is discovered and described, I doubt that will solve the issue of whether the brain is an evolved receiving station for a greater consciousness or just an evolved piece of meat."
"Receiving" and "sending" are complementary, one wonders of many possible experiments, even rejecting the misguided view that "a piece of meat" is inferior to "greater consciousness," especially given we know a lot about that particular piece of meat, and have almost no empirical evidence regarding a "greater consciousness."
In fact, the "greater consciousness" is part of the end of the ancient program to understand consciousness, etc, that is, nothing that the ancients knew allowed them to exclude that possibility.
The fact that our modern thinking on this has failed to come up with an answer doesn't prove the possibility.
What experiments could we do?
Well, given what we understand we could propose a number of them, and they have been proposed and the results are generally inconclusive, albeit open to the criticism that experimental design bias could be the cause.
But evolution provides a rather stringent limit, that is, if one could obtain a survival advantage by tapping into the "greater consciousness" then that attribute would be more widely shared. For instance, if such ability allowed one to "see the future" we would agree that this would be a tremendous advantage for survival.
It doesn't do much good to claim that such "abilities" are somehow downloaded off the "greater consciousness net" as there has to be some physical aspect related to the download (Werner's viewpoints not withstanding here). So that one might evolve those physical attributes.
If instead you'd hypothesize that this is not at all physical, then there is no experiment you can do, so it is disingenuous to propose experiments at all, there are no experiments (in the formal sense) to be done.
Finally, you would have to propose how this is a "one way" connection, that we are receivers. If we are also senders, then there are simple experiments to do, the obvious one being to send a message with the instructions to repeat back certain information confirming the reception.
As far as I know, no such communication exists.
Finally, and this is a frustrating point, science doesn't claim to know everything, so being accused of closed mindedness is disheartening. If one takes the view that science is a methodology for learning about the physical world it is a more productive (in my opinion) way to proceed and one that most philosophical discussions have been most productive.
But empirically based learning is limited by the domain of experience, and so there may be major physical phenomena that have no contemporary scientific explanation.
My favorite example of this is the Sun, perhaps the most common physical experience, and long recognized as the provider of our existence on the planet. One can estimate the total amount of energy coming from the Sun, there are simple experiments that you can do around a campfire, to extrapolate to the estimated distance to the Sun, for instance.
It is ancient knowledge that there are no known sources of chemical energy that can account for the Sun's energy. And there were no known sources of energy beyond chemical into the first couple of decades of the 20th century.
[I will take the criticism that this is a particularly western point of view, but the puzzle of a possible physical source of the Sun's energy is not just a western phenomenon].
There were two empirical phenomenon that were required to explain the source of the Sun's energy. The first was understanding Special Relativity one the consequences being embodied in the most famous physics equation: E=mc² which is often referred to as the equivalence of mass and energy. I say this is empirical because the phenomenon that lead to the statement was the mechanics of electrons moving in electro-magnetic fields, which "demanded" that the notion of Galilean relativity incorrectly described this physical situation. This "discovery" was largely theoretical, where the physical phenomena were well studied, but the physics not entirely understood until 1905.
The second was largely an experimental discovery, but not so much a discovery as a careful measurement. That measurement was the precise measurement of atomic masses carried out in the summer of 1919. This study revealed that the sum of the masses of four Hydrogen atoms was less than the mass of a Helium atom, the implication being that there was a mass difference, and that mass difference could be appear as energy.
So the then largely unknown process of fusing atomic nuclei into larger nuclei could result in the release of energy. Estimates of that energy release provide an order of magnitude agreement with the Sun's energy production, and not only that, the lifetime of the Sun (you know the Sun's mass, and it's composition largely made out of Hydrogen, so you can calculate how long you can "drive" based on the size of your "tank").
Based on this new phenomenology it took about 20 years to fully flesh out the theory which is largely used today to explain this energy production of all luminous objects in the visible universe.
This knowledge is less than 100 years old. And prior to it, you could make the argument that the existence of the Sun was a demonstration that science could not explain the universe, that intellect and reason were insufficient. That the Sun was a god, divine and beyond the physical, beyond our abilities to comprehend, and that it was hubris to try to do so.
Philosophy could not predict the inevitability of the scientific explanation of the Sun, nor could it prove no such explanation existed. It should be noted that neither Special Relativity nor the atomic masses were studies that anticipated explaining the energy source of the Sun.
At the time, the Sun was a "hard problem" for physics, nothing proposed came close to explaining it... yet it was "everywhere," every star we peered at in the sky, through our telescopes into that vast universe, we saw examples of it, yet we had no good scientific idea what it was.
We didn't "solve" that hard problem by using rhetoric...
To the extent that consciousness is a physical phenomenon the understanding of that phenomenon rests on the accumulation of empirical knowledge. To the extent that consciousness is a "literary" phenomenon, it is possible that no scientific understanding will explain that literature. This should not be surprising.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 17, 2017 - 12:07pm PT
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My point is that freezing the study of consciousness by prioritizing "ancient knowledge" over modern knowledge as represented by "science" stunts progress.
--
Let's get a few things clear. "Ancient knowledge" is not "knowledge" in the way Ed is suggesting here. Ancient introspectors were NOT trying to do quantitative science sans instruments. They weren't even looking at external objects. "Ancient" in this sense only means that certain disciplines have been looking at the consciousness process from within consciousness for centuries, and that work continues to this day.
The task for the present day crowd is not to try and decipher some arcane view about objects and transmute it into contemporary quantifications. The task is to make relevant current AND old insights about phenomenal consciousness and bring it to the current conversation.
Much of the confusing here is in believing that the "ancients" were trying to do science and that present scientific investigations per objective functioning are trying to unpack phenomenal consciousness. Objective functioning holds out much promise per knowing WHAT we perceive, but the big fat lie coming from that camp is the belief that being aware is an emergent function of a data processing mechanism. Data processing, no matter the mechanism, will only render you a sentactic engine, a zombie that is totally void inside. No awareness.
Simply put, the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective. 1st person phenomenon - the very core of consciousness - is eschewed in this investigation so why does anyone expect them to 'find' what they are not even looking for? What you will find are various version of identity materialism, where brain states and consciousness states are misconstrued to be selfsame and/or causally determined.
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