Are we closer to understanding the nature of consciousness than we were twenty years ago? Ever since Chalmers posed ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness, of why sentient organisms have subjective experiences, the debate has gone in circles. Papers on the subject variously conclude, There really is a hard problem, there […]
self awareness
8 posts
We take it for granted that we are self-aware. That we are conscious of ourselves. But how far back in human evolution can this self-awareness be traced? One way of finding out is to look for the earliest graves. Human beings are the only species that bury their dead. Not […]
Depth Psychology has never had it easy. Most articles in New Scientist and other scientific journals denounce psychoanalysis as pseudoscience, a collection of disproved and discredited techniques for curing mental illness. At worst, a scam. A long review article by Oliver Burkeman recently published in the Guardian takes a different view that […]
The debate on the nature and origin of consciousness has lately taken an unexpected turn. Rather than restricting consciousness to the human species, the new theories such as Integrated Information Consciousness (IIC) are expanding the notion of consciousness to many material entities, non-biological included. After a long detour into the […]
(The points are numbered to aid quick reference and refutation.) 1. The argument of this paper is that if we actually admit that we are self-conscious, and that when we are doing consciousness research we are actually thinking about thinking, then a great deal, if not the whole […]
It remains controversial to this day the precise point in the evolutionary chain leading from apes to modern man at which the first men, the primeval men, came into being on earth. The main reason for this controversy derives from the inability of the evolutionists to be able to formulate […]
Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle! Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Human beings can speak, and when a person refers to himself, he uses the first personal pronoun ‘I.’ But the faculty of human thought is extremely complex, and the “I” of […]