Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to one's environment; this contrasts with being asleep or being in a coma.
Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define or locate. Many cultures and religious traditions place the seat of consciousness in a soul separate from the body. Conversely, many scientists and philosophers consider consciousness to be intimately linked to the neural functioning of the brain.
An understanding of necessary preconditions for consciousness in the human brain may allow us to address important ethical questions. For instance, to what extent are non-human animals conscious? At what point in fetal development does consciousness begin? Can machines ever achieve conscious states? These issues are of great interest to those concerned with the ethical treatment of other beings, be they animals, fetuses, or in the future, machines.
| Contents [hide] |
Because humans express their conscious states using language, it is tempting to equate language abilities and consciousness. There are, however, speechless humans (infants, feral children, aphasics), to whom consciousness is attributed despite language lost or not yet acquired. Moreover, the study of brain states of non-linguistic primates, in particular the macaques, has been used extensively by scientists and philosophers in their quest for the neural correlates of the contents of consciousness.
Several studies point to common mechanisms in different clinical conditions that lead to loss of consciousness. Persistent vegetative state (PVS) is a condition in which an individual loses the higher cerebral powers of the brain, but maintains sleep-wake cycles with full or partial autonomic functions. Studies comparing PVS with healthy, awake subjects consistently demonstrate an impaired connectivity between the deeper (brainstem and thalamic) and the upper (cortical) areas of the brain. In addition, it is agreed that the general brain activity in the cortex is lower in the PVS state. Some non-Angloamerican traditions in electroneurobiology view this loss of consciousness as a loss of the ability to resolve time (similar to playing an old phonographic record at very slow or very rapid speed), along a continuum that starts with inattention, continues on sleep and arrives to coma and death.
Loss of consciousness also occurs in other conditions, such as general (tonic-clonic) epileptic seizures, in general anaesthesia, maybe even in deep (slow wave) sleep. The currently best suhe need for 1) a widespread cortical network, including particularly the frontal, parietal and temporal cortices, and 2) cooperation between the deep layers of the brain, especially the thalamus, and the upper layers; the cortex. Such hypotheses go under the common term "globalist theories" of consciousness, due to the claim for a widespread, global network necessary for consciousness to interact with non-mental reality in the first place.
Brain chemistry affects human consciousness. Sleeping drugs (such as Midazolam = Dormicum) can bring the brain from the awake condition (conscious) to the sleep (unconscious). Wake-up drugs such as Anexate reverse this process. Many other drugs (such as heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDMA) have a consciousness-changing effect.
The bilateral removal of the Centromedian nucleus (part of the Intra-laminar nucleus of the Thalamus) appears to abolish consciousness, causing coma, PVS, severe mutism and other features that mimic brain death. The centromedian nucleus is also one of the principal sites of action of general anaesthetics and anti-psychotic drugs.
Philosophers distinguish between phenomenal consciousness and psychological consciousness. Some suggest that consciousness resists or even defies definition. There are many philosophical stances on consciousness, sometimes known as 'isms', including: behaviorism, cognitivism, dualism, idealism, functionalism, phenomenalism, physicalism, pseudonomenalism, emergentism, and mysticism.
There is, in the view of very many philosophers, one mental function that accompanies some, or perhaps all, mental events, namely, consciousness. In a philosophical context, the word "consciousness" means something like awareness, or that a mind is directed at something. (That sounds more like a definition of that philosophical term "intentionality" often referred to with the layman's term "aboutness".) So when we perceive, we are conscious of what we perceive; when we introspect, we are conscious of our thoughts; when we remember, we are conscious of something that happened in the past, or of some piece of information that we learned; and so on.
In this philosophical sense of the word "conscious", we are conscious even when we are dreaming; we are conscious of what's happening in the dream. But, although currently it is doubtful that any sleep state without mentation exists, some sleep researchers believe there is a sleep stage that happens, called "deep sleep", in which apparently we are not conscious of anything in any sense. No mental processes that involve consciousness in an ordinary or in a philosophical sense seem to be going on. So dreamless deep sleep is often pointed out as an instance in which one is alive and one's brain is functioning, but there are no mental events occurring in which there is any element of consciousness. This is a typical situation in which some electroneurobiological researchers see a change in time acuity or the ability to distinguish moments, assumed to arise from relativistic interval-dilation effects at work in brain biophysics.
Modern investigations into and discoveries about consciousness are based on psychological statistical studies and case studies of consciousness states and the deficits caused by lesions, stroke, injury, or surgery that disrupt the normal functioning of human senses and cognition. These discoveries suggest that the mind is a complex structure of various localized functions held together by a unitary awareness.
There has been some debate about the following question: Must one be conscious, in the philosophical sense, whenever a mental event occurs? For example, is it possible to have a pain that one does not feel? Some people think not; they think that in order for something to be a pain, one has to feel it and hence be aware of it. Philosophers call this the "incorrigibility" of certain mental states. Similarly, if anything is a thought, then one has to be aware of that of which one is thinking (indeed, that seems nearly a tautology); if there is no consciousness, then one is not thinking. This raises these questions: do mental events necessarily involve consciousness? What about functioning of the brain of which we are unaware?
Suppose we answer "No." Then, of course, what we'd be saying is that there are some mental events that do not include an element of consciousness. These events are going on even though we aren't aware of them. In other words, part of the mind is unconscious. Cognitive scientists believe that many cognitive processes are unconscious in this manner; we are aware of only some of the events that are occurring in our brains.
Some view consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, somehow arising from a hierarchy of unconscious processes (see below). These are fairly recent views, made popular only after Freud.
Although it is the conventional wisdom that consciousness cannot be defined, philosophers have been describing it for centuries. Rene Descartes wrote 'Meditations' in the seventeenth century, and this contains extensive descriptions of what it is to be conscious. Descartes described consciousness as things laid out in space and time that are viewed from a point. Each thing appears as a result of some quality such as colour, smell etc. (philosophers call these qualities 'qualia'). Other philosophers such as Nicholas Malebranche, John Locke, David Hume and Immanuel Kant also agreed with much of this description although some avoid mentioning the viewing point. The extension of things in time was considered in more detail by Kant and James. Kant wrote that "only on the presupposition of time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time (simultaneously) or at different times (successively)". William James stressed the extension of experience in time and said that time is "the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible". These philosophers also go on to describe dreams, thoughts, emotions etc.
Philosophers have provided a description of consciousness that is like our own experience. When we look around a room or have a dream, things are laid out in space and time and viewed as if from a point. However, when philosophers and scientists consider the location of the contents of consciousness there are fierce disagreements. Some philosophers and scientists do not hold that every mental event has a direct physical event (weak or no 'Supervenience'). As an example, Descartes proposed that the contents of consciousness are images in the brain and the viewing point is some special, non-physical place without extension (the Res Cogitans). This idea is known as 'Cartesian Dualism'. Another example is found in the work of Thomas Reid who thought the contents of consciousness are the world itself which becomes conscious experience in some way through a chain of cause and effect. The precise physical substrate of conscious experience in the world, such as photons, photochemicals, quantum fields etc. is not specified. This idea of a chain of cause and effect or chain of relations causing conscious experience to supervene on the world is found in post-modernism and some forms of behaviourism. There are few examples of scientists and philosophers who adhere to the idea that mental events are directly physical events in the brain. Those who do propose this usually argue that we only think that the descriptions of consciousness occur (eg: Daniel Dennett) although some proponents of Quantum mind, space-time theories of consciousness and Electromagnetic theories of consciousness suggest a direct correspondence between brain activity and experience.
The concept of supervenience is closely related to the idea of emergentism. It is sometimes held that consciousness will emerge from the complexity of brain processing (see for instance the Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness). The general label 'emergence' allows a new physical phenomenon to be implied by physicalist theorists without specifying the exact nature of the phenomenon. This leaves an explanatory gap.
The physicist Roger Penrose, in his book Shadows of the Mind, argued for a quantum mind approach, suggesting that non-local quantum mechanical effects within sub-neural structures give rise to conscious states. He has argued for the need for a fundamentally new physics in order to explain consciousness, which he conceives as a fungible material: one of which any portion can substitute another. ('Shadows' is effectively a second edition of The Emperor's New Mind. Penrose is keen to stress that it replaces that older work).
This central feature of the quantum approach is of much importance: quantum mechanical theories of consciousness investigate such an entity, namely an experience having the property of being fungible, and their work has not hitherto faced the problems set by experience as it is found, namely as distinctively exclusive and "unbarterable". This for other researchers makes a main controversial point.
Penrose was not the first to suggest a link between consciousness and QM; Michael Lockwood and Henry Stapp got there first, and so did Brian Flanagan. Before them there was Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics (QM), who, as David Bohm tells us, "suggests that thought involves such small amounts of energy that quantum-theoretical limitations play an essential role in determining its character." Also of interest are the ideas of Weyl, Wigner, and Schrodinger. All of them shared in the view of consciousness as a fungible reality; adversaries of this stance call it "antipersonalism" and argue that such a construct has never been factually found.
The Uncollapsing theorem is an unproven conjecture that if an observer is in a deep altered state of consciousness they will not collapse the wavefunction of a system when they observe it but rather uncollapse it, meaning they can move the wavefunction into a wider possibility states. This would explain certain experiences of meditators who feel they move into a larger space of possibilities when they go into deep meditation.
In sum, no real evidence has been found to support any specific relationship between quantum mechanics and the occurrence of consciousness.
In Buddhism, consciousness-only (Sanskrit vijñapti-mātratā, vijñapti-mātra, citta-mātra; Chinese 唯心 pinyin wei xin) is a theory according to which all existence is nothing but consciousness, and therefore there is nothing that lies outside of the mind. This means that conscious-experience is nothing but false discriminations, imaginations; a provisional antidote; thus, the notion of consciousness-only is an indictment of the problems the activities of consciousness engender.
Especially in his book Integral Psychology, Ken Wilber has attempted to develop an integral approach to consciousness.
We generally agree that our fellow human beings are conscious and that lower life forms such as bacteria are not. Many of us attribute consciousness to higher-order animals such as dolphins and primates; academic research is investigating which rather than whether animals are conscious. This suggests the hypothesis that consciousness has co-evolved with life, which would require it to have some sort of added value. People have therefore looked for specific functions of consiousness. Bernard Baars (1997) for instance states that “consciousness is a supremely functional adaptation” and suggests a variety of functions in which consciousness plays a role: prioritization of alternatives, problem solving, decision making, brain processes recruiting, action control, error detection, planning, learning, adaptation, context creation, and access to information. Antonio Damasio (1999) regards consciousness as part of an organism’s survival kit, allowing planned rather than instinctual responses. He also points out that awareness of self allows a concern for one’s own survival, which increases the drive to survive. Although how far consciousness is involved in behaviour is an actively debated issue. Many psychologists, such as radical behaviourists, and many philosophers, such as those who support Ryle's approach, would maintain that behaviour can be explained by non-conscious processes akin to artificial intelligence and might consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal or only weakly related to function.
As there is still not a clear definition of consciousness, no empirical tests currently exist to test consciousness as a whole. Some have even argued that empirical tests of consciousness are intrinsically impossible. However, some researchers have devised tests to detect what they feel are certain aspects of consciousness. A test similar to this was used in the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick to see if a person was a robot or an actual human. In the Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner which was inspired by that book, the test is known as the "Voigt-Kampf" test and tests the subject for empathy.
Alan Turing proposed what is now known as the Turing test to determine if a computer could simulate human conversation undetectably. This test is commonly cited in discussion of artificial intelligence. The application to consciousness is highly suggestive, but not clear. One is reminded of Edsger Dijkstra's comment "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".
With the mirror test, devised by Gordon Gallup in the 1970s, one is interested in whether or not animals are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Such self-recognition is said to be an indicator of consciousness. Humans (older than 18 months), great apes (except for gorillas), and bottlenose dolphins have all been observed to pass this test.
(General)
(Consciousness and quantum mechanics)
Philosophical realism refers to various philosophically unrelated positions, in some cases diametrically opposed ones, which are termed "realism." In large measure this depends on which debates are active at the time, and may be encouraged by the fact that a philosophical position often looks stronger if one attaches the word "real" to it.
The oldest use of the term comes from Medieval interpretations of Greek philosophy. Here "realism" is contrasted with "conceptualism" and "nominalism". This can be called "realism about universals." Universals are terms or properties that can be applied to many things, rather than denoting a single specific individual--for example, red, beauty, five, or dog, as opposed to Socrates or Athens. Realism holds that these universals really exist, independently and somehow prior to the world; it is associated with Plato. Conceptualism holds that they exist, but only insofar as they are instantiated in specific things; they do not exist separately. Nominalism holds that universals do not "exist" at all; they are no more than words we use to describe specific objects, they do not name anything. This particular dispute over realism is largely moot in contemporary philosophy, and has been for centuries.
In another sense realism is contrasted with both idealism and materialism and considered synonymous with weak dualism. In still a third, and very contemporary sense realism is contrasted with anti-realism.
Both these disputes are often carried out relative to some specific area: one might, for example, be a realist about physical matter but an anti-realist about ethics.
Increasingly these last disputes, too, are rejected as misleading, and some philosophers prefer to call the kind of realism espoused there "metaphyiscal realism," and eschew the whole debate in favour of simple "naturalism" or "natural realism", which is not so much a theory as the position that these debates are ill-conceived if not incoherent, and that there is no more to deciding what is really real than simply taking our words at face value.
See also: legal
realism, scientific realism, critical realism, naïve realism, socialist realism, philosophical skepticism, technorealism
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of beliefs which begin with the claim that the mental and the physical have a fundamentally different nature. It is constrasted with varying kinds of monism, including materialism and phenomenalism. Dualism is one answer to the mind-body problem. Pluralism holds that there are even more kinds of events or things in the world.
Note that other fields have their own meanings for "dualism". See dualism.
| Contents [hide] |
Ontological dualism makes dual commitments about the nature of existence as it relates to mind and matter. Substance dualism asserts that the mind and matter are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances, while property dualism suggests that the ontological distinction lies in what properties mind and matter differ as in emergentism. Yet a weaker type of ontological dualism is predicate dualism which claims the irreducibility of mental predicates to physical predicates.
Cartesian dualism is a kind of substance dualism, a great difficulty with which is the explanation of the interaction between mind and matter, if mind is to be immaterial.
Regardless of whether ontological dualism is correct, one may wish to inquire how the mental interacts with the material.
Interaction dualism can be distinguished based on if and how mind and matter are thought to causally interact. In dualistic interactionism (also Cartesian dualism, as it was Descartes' position), arguably the most popular and widespread version, mind events can cause physical events and vice versa. Thus when Johnny touches a hot stove and burns his skin (physical events), he experiences pain (a mental event). Conversely, when Jessica decides her dog needs exercise (a mental event), she takes it for a walk (a physical event). This is arguably most people's common sense view of the relationship between mind and matter.
Epiphenomenalism allows causality to flow only in one direction, claiming that physical events have mental effects, but not vice versa. So although the mental cannot be reduced to the physical, mental events are side-effects, or by-products, of physical processes. Usually, the mind is seen as being a by-product of the brain and its neurons. The contrary position, that physical events are somehow by-products of mental events, is relatively unpopular and does not have a standard name.
According to a rather different theory called parallelism, mental events and physical events are perfectly coordinated by God; so that when a mental event such as Sally's decision to walk across the room occurs, then it just so happens that Sally's body heads across the room. But there is no cause-effect relation between mind and body; mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated by God, either in advance (as per Gottfried Leibniz's idea of pre-established harmony) or at the time (as in the Occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche).
One argument for dualism, especially dualistic interactionism, is that it is a very common sense view. Some developmental psychologists claim to have shown that dualism is commonsensical for very young children as well. This is obviously not "proof", but it suggests we should at least demand a reason for abandoning dualism.
A second argument is that the mind is (or resides in) the immortal soul. Traditional Christianity actually believed in the binding of the soul and body in one's redemption. Only in more recent branches off of Christanity was the idea that your body will die and then your soul will go to heaven, or hell. If you believe in this idea then you believe in dualism. Another idea in contrast to dualism is if you accept phenomenalism, which holds that everything is, ultimately, mental. But in any event you absolutely cannot hold that the soul is reducible to anything physical. If events in your soul were reducible to events in your brain, then when your brain stopped functioning, your soul would cease to exist. This is not necessarily the case, as some views of the universe admit the possibility that the laws of physics are not static. See the book The Physics of Immortality (ISBN 0385467990).
Note that although this religious account may motivate or reinforce a religious person's belief in dualism, it may well seem altogether unconvincing to dualism's skeptics. To use this argument to convert, say, a card-carrying materialist to dualism, it seems necessary to first establish that people do, in fact, have immortal souls. And yet the card-carrying materialist is one of the last kinds of people who are going to admit to this.
A third argument for dualism goes like this: if dualism is false, we should be able to reduce mind to matter, or vice versa, or to reduce both to a neutral third substance. Notably Buddhist philosophy argues this point, but says everything reduces to "emptyness" or Shunyata rather than a "substance".
A final argument, to be explored in depth, is that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different and perhaps irreconcilable properties.
First, mental events are not publicly observable. When I touch the hot stove, you may see me whip back my hand and say "Ouch!" but you are not feeling my pain. Unless you're Mr. Spock, or God, you can't as it were get inside my mind and take a look at what's going on in there. And of course it's not just because my mind is hidden beneath my skull. If you knew just where to look in my brain, you wouldn't be able to see thoughts and feelings jiggling around in there. That's just not how it works. So unlike physical events, like fireworks displays, mental events are private, not publicly observable.
Second, mental events are often said not to be spatially located. Where is my pain supposed to be? Maybe you could say in my fingertips, because they hurt. But is that where the feeling is? Does it really make sense to say that the feeling is in my aching fingertips? That sounds a little funny, anyway. A better example would be an emotion like happiness. When I say I'm happy, can I locate my happiness in my head, or does it exist all my body, or something? Doesn't that sound odd? It would seem better to say that my happiness isn't the sort of thing that can be located in a particular place.
Third, more generally, mental events do not seem to have various physical properties which physical events have. For one thing, mental events do not involve anything having mass, or physical motion. We can't weigh a thought. We can't say that a feeling has a velocity of 10 miles an hour. To say such things is to talk nonsense. Now you might say: that's only because mental events are events. You can't say that physical events have mass or velocity either. Point well enough taken; that's true, no event, per se, has mass or velocity. But physical events do involve objects which have mass and velocity. Mental events do not have any components which have mass and velocity. For example, when I think, "I like ice cream," I have a concept of ice cream; and my concept of ice cream has no mass and velocity. Nothing involved in my appreciation for ice cream would appear to have any such physical properties. This is a point to which we will have to return. But on the face of it, this seems pretty obvious.
Fourth, mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, which physical events obviously do not. I mean, for example, what a burned finger feels like, what sky blue looks like, what nice music sounds like, and so on. I'm going to expand on this fourth point at some length. Recently, philosophers have been calling the subjective aspects of mental events qualia, and they also call them raw feels. There is something that it's like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on; there are qualia involved in these mental events. And the claim is that qualia seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. Just think of what that would involve. You'd be saying: feeling the top of my hand right now, this "raw feel" I'm experiencing right now, is itself nothing more than a physical event.
In fact, there is an article by an American, Thomas Nagel, that came out in the late 1970s called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" In this article Nagel argued roughly as follows. You are familiar with the fact that bats use a certain kind of sonar, right? They emit high-pitched shrieks which allow them to fly around in dark caves; they can tell how far away the walls are based on how their shrieks echo around in the cave. Bat sonar allows bats to perceive distance, shape, size, and so on, in a way similar to, but obviously different from the way vision works for us. Now Nagel invited us to ask, "So what is it like to be a bat, flying around in the dark using bat sonar?" Surely bats do have experiences; we just don't know what they are. Suppose we were to take apart a bat brain and figure out how the neural apparatus for bat sonar works. No doubt biologists have actually done so, dissected bat brains and so forth. But in understanding how the bat brain works, do those biologists learn what it is like to be a bat? Well of course not. They're mucking around in the grey matter of bats. In order to know what it's like to be a bat, and to have bat sonar, why, you'd have to be a bat. So argued Nagel.
So what's the point of all this? The point is that if indeed there are "bat qualia," then there are peculiar mental events of a sort that only bats have, and we cannot learn what they are like even if we have a detailed understanding of physical events going on in the bat brain. Or to put it even more simply: there is a strange "bat sonar experience" we'll never have. We won't have it even if we learn what physical events in bat brains are associated with bat sonar. So that's excellent evidence that mental events cannot be reduced to physical events; mental events must be regarded as quite a different sort of thing from physical events. Really, you can make the same point without even bringing up weird cases like bat sonar. Just think of your own unique feelings. Do you think that a psychologist could, simply by digging around in your brain and doing tests on your grey matter, ever learn what that feeling was like?
So there are at least four major differences between the mental and the physical, which make it difficult, to say the least, to understand how one might reduce the mental to the physical. Mental events are not publicly observable; they are not spatially located; they do not involve physical properties such as mass and velocity; and there seems to be an irreducibly subjective aspect to them. That seems to give us considerable reason to think that the mind and the body are two totally different categories of being. So there you have one basic, powerful argument for dualism.
Varieties of dualism in which mind can causually affect matter have come under strenuous attack from different quarters, especially starting in the 20th century. How can something totally immaterial, people ask, affect something totally material? That's the basic problem. We can analyze the problem here into three parts.
First, it is not clear where the interaction would take place. Burning my fingers causes pain, right? Well, apparently there is some chain of events, leading from the burning of skin, to the stimulation of nerve endings, to something happening in the nerves of my body that lead to my brain, to something happening in a particular part of my brain; and then, I feel pain. But the pain is not supposed to be spatially located. So what I want to know is, where does the interaction take place? If you say, "It takes place in the brain," then I will say, "But I thought pains weren't located anywhere." And you, as a dualist, might stick to your guns and say, "That's right, pains aren't located anywhere; but the brain event that immediately leads to the pain is located in the brain." But then we have a very strange causal relation on our hands. The cause is located in a particular place but the effect is not located anywhere. Well, you might say, that might be puzzling but it's not a devastating criticism.
(Problems with the above paragraph: 1) some dualisms maintain that the mind resides in a particular place, say, in the pineal(?) gland. In this case the arguments about the mental being "nowhere" look less strange. 2) it seems a little blurred -- is the problem locating the mind or the mental events or both? 3) it should at least be emphasized that things don't necessarily have to be in the same place to interact, as we see with the "attraction at a distance" in gravity.)
So look at a second problem about the interaction. Namely, how does the interaction take place? Maybe you think, "Well, that's a matter for science -- scientists will eventually discover the connection between mental and physical events." But philosophers have something to say about the matter, because the very idea of a mechanism, which explains the connection between the mental and the physical, would be very strange, at best. Why do I say it would be strange? Compare it to a mechanism that we do understand. Take a very simple causal relation, such as when the cue ball strikes the eight ball and causes it to go into the pocket. Here we can say that the cue ball has a certain amount of momentum as its mass moves across the pool table with some velocity, and then that momentum is transferred to the eight ball, which then heads toward the pocket. Now compare that to the situation in the brain, where we want to say a decision causes some neurons to fire and thus cause my body to move across the room. The decision, "I will cross the room now," is a mental event; and as such it does not have physical properties such as force. If it has no force, then how on earth could it cause any neuron to fire? Is it magic? Honestly, how could something without any physical properties have any physical effects at all?
Here you might reply, as some philosophers have indeed replied, as follows. You might say: "Well sure, there is a mystery about how the interaction between mental and physical events can occur; but the fact that there is a mystery doesn't mean that there is no interaction. Because plainly there is an interaction and plainly the interaction is between two totally different sorts of events." Now I expect that some of you may want to say this. But the problem with it is that it does not seem to answer the full power of the objection.
So let me explain the objection more precisely. Let's take as our example my decision to walk across the room. We say: my decision, a mental event, immediately causes a group of neurons in my brain to fire, a physical event, which ultimately results in my walking across the room. The problem is that if we have something totally nonphysical causing a bunch of neurons to fire, then there is no physical event which causes the firing. That means that some physical energy seems to have appeared out of thin air. Even if we say that my decision has some sort of mental energy, and that the decision causes the firing, we still haven't explained where the physical energy, for the firing, came from. It just seems to have popped into existence from nowhere.
A fundamental principle of physics is involved, the conservation of energy. According to this principle, "In all physical processes, the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant." Or in a form you may have heard before: in any change anything undergoes, energy is neither created nor destroyed. This is a basic principle you probably learned about in high school physics. So the point is that nerve firings, which are allegedly caused by a totally nonphysical decision, would appear to violate the Principle of the Conservation of Energy.
Now, dualistic interactionists have tried to answer these objections, and other such objections, but most philosophers these days are not impressed by their answers. It has come to the point where, in fact, there aren't very many interactionists around, and there haven't been many for decades. When I say this, I don't mean to imply that dualistic interactionism is false. All I mean to imply is that many philosophers today think it is false, and perhaps also that, if you want to hold onto interactionism yourself, you should try to come up with some effective replies to these objections.
(Another very interesting route to take for the aspiring substance dualist might be to question the causal closure of the physical domain. Briefly: there seem to be events on the quantum level which lack a physical cause; if they lack a physical cause, then either they have a nonphysical cause or they are uncaused; in either of these cases, the physical domain is not causally closed. But it remains true that there are very serious objections to substance dualism which must be met.)
John R. Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has pioneered an approach to mind-body issues that is dualistic in some respects, monist in others. He calls it "biological naturalism."
Searle's views sound like dualistic interactionism. He believes that consciousness "is a real part of the real world and it cannot be eliminated in favor of, or reduced to, something else" whether that something-else is a neurological state of the brain or a software program. He contends, for example, that the software known as Deep Blue knows nothing about chess. He also believes that consciousness is both a cause of events in the body and a response to events in the body.
On the other hand, Searle doesn't treat consciousness as a ghost in the machine. He treats it, rather, as an emergent property of the brain as a whole. (See holism). The causal interaction of mind and brain can be described in naturalistic terms, thus: events at the micro-level (perhaps at that of individual neurons) cause consciousness. Changes at the macro-level (the whole brain) constitute consciousness. Micro-changes cause and then are impacted by holistic changes, in much the same way that individual football players cause a team (as a whole) to win games, then the individuals gain confidence from the knowledge that they are part of a winning team.
Mysticism (ancient Greek mysticon = secret) is meditation, prayer, or theology focused on the direct experience of union with divinity, God, or Ultimate Reality; or the belief that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge. In the context of epistemology, it can refer to using any kind of non-rational means — such as feeling or faith — in attempt to arrive at any kind of knowledge or belief.
| Contents [hide] |
A wide range of perspectives occur among spiritual traditions and beliefs which embrace direct experiential knowledge of God, Divinity, or Ultimate Reality. Different traditions adopt a range of intellectual or rational assessments of what is likely, possible, provable, approvable, or factual. Among these the idea of union or interrelationship of oneself and of all mortal beings with the ultimate imperishable being is often declared to be something that can be experienced in profound, definite, and personally undeniable ways, rather than something that is merely conjectured. Many assert that the triggering of such experience can involve ritual prayer and contemplations focused on such union, or may sometimes occur spontaneously with some individuals.
Theistic, pantheistic, and panentheistic classical pantheist/cosmotheist metaphysical systems most often understand mystical experience as individual communion with a god or goddess. One can receive these very subjective experiences as visions, dreams, revelations, prophecies, and so forth. St. Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic mystic of the 13th century, defined it as cognitio dei experimentalis (experiential knowledge of God). In Catholicism the mystical experience is not sought for its own sake, and is always informed by revelation and ascetical theology. This causes the subjectivist tendency of mysticism to be curtailed, as experiences not aligned with truths otherwise known are discarded.
In philosophy, the term Perennial Philosophy is used, and relates to a primary concern:
Some mystics use the term to refer to a manner wherein the mystic plumbs the depths of the self and reality in a radical process of meditative self-discovery to discover the true nature of reality experientially. Historically in some cultures and traditions, mind-altering substances -- often referred to as entheogens -- have had a place as a 'guide'; others use rituals and methods such as meditation, self-reflection or self-enquiry.
Mystics of different traditions report similar experiences of a world usually outside conventional perception, although not all forms of mysticism abandon knowledge perceived through normal means. Based on extraordinary perception, mystics may believe that one can find true unity of religion and philosophy in mystical experience.
Elements of mysticism exist in most religions and in many philosophies. Some mystics perceive a common thread of influence in all mystic philosophies that they see as traceable back to a shared source. The Vedic tradition is inherently mystic; the Christian apocalyptic Book of Revelation is clearly mystical, as with Ezekiel's or Daniel's visions of Judaism, and Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel inspired the Qur'an in a mystical manner. Indigenous cultures also have cryptic revelations pointing toward a universal flow of love or unity, usually following a vision quest or similar ritual. Mystical philosophies thus can exhibit a strong tendency towards syncretism.
Some systems of mysticism are found within specific religious traditions and do not relinquish doctrinal principles as a part of mystical experience. For example, Christian mystics, through the centuries, have not decided that Jesus is not God after all: in other words, not all mysticism results in syncretism. In some definite cases, theology remains a distinct source of insight that guides and informs the mystical experience. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas' mystical experiences all occurred squarely within the love of the Catholic Eucharist.
Readers frequently encounter seemingly open-ended statements among studies of mysticism, throughout its history, for example in Taoist thought and in studies of Kabbalah. In his work, Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, a prominent 20th century scholar of that field, stated: The Kabbalah is not a single system with basic principles which can be explained in a simple and straightforward fashion, but consists rather of a multiplicity of different approaches, widely separated from one another and sometimes completely contradictory.
In Catholic traditions, mystical theology is informed by revelation, which averts an apparent tendency to become lost in formless thought. Christian mystics, too, are obligated to obey the forms of ascetical and moral theology, as following Christ is their primary objective, rather than seeking mystical experiences for their own sake. [1] (http://chastitysf.guidetopsychology.com/guide.htm)
The late 19th century saw an significant increase of interest in mysticism in the West that combined with increased interest in Occultism and Eastern Philosophy. Theosophy became a major movement in the popularization of these interests. Madame Blavatsky and G. I. Gurdjieff functioned as central figures of the theosophy movement. This trend later became absorbed in the rise of the New Age movement which included a major surge in the popularity of astrology. At the end of the 20th Century books like Conversations With God (a series of books which describes what the author claimed to be his experience of direct communication with God) hit the bestseller lists.
Examples of major traditions and philosophies with strong elements of mysticism are:
Some examples of Hindu mystics:
Some examples of Christian mystics:
Some examples of Muslim mystics (also called sufi):
Some examples of Jewish mystics:
Some examples of other mystics:
In philosophy, idealism is any theory positing the primacy of spirit, mind, or language over matter. It includes claiming that thought has some crucial role in making the world the way it is--that thought and the world are made for one another, or that they make one another.
As such, the name of idealism is given to a number of philosophical positions with quite different tendencies and implications. The earliest sort of idealism, identified with Plato, involved the belief that abstract or mental entities have some sort of reality "independent" of the world. (Some philosophers think of numbers this way; Plato thought that all properties and objects we could think of must have some such independent existence. Thus, this sort of idealism affirms the worth of metaphysics and logic to explore the qualities of these abstract mental entities. Because this sort of idealism affirms the reality of these mental entities, it is given the rather counterintuitive name of realism; in this sense realism contrasts with nominalism, the notion that mental abstractions are merely names without an independent existence. To distinguish it from other forms of realism it's often called Platonic realism.
On the other hand, the flavor of idealism associated with Immanuel Kant held that the mind forces the world we perceive to take the shape of space-and-time. Kant focused on the idea drawn from British empiricism, and its philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, that all we can know is the mental impressions, or phenomena, an outside world that may or may not exist independently creates in our minds; we can never know that outside world directly. Kant's postscript to this added that the mind is not a "blank slate", but comes equipped with categories for organizing our sense impressions. Still, this Kantian sort of idealism, in sharp contrast to Plato's, instead of opening up a world of abstractions to be explored by reason, seeks instead to undermine our certainties about a knowable world outside our own minds. We cannot approach the noumenon, the "Thing in Itself" (German: Ding an Sich) outside our own mental world. This sort of idealism goes by the equally counterintuitive name of transcendental idealism.
Georg Hegel, another philosopher whose system has been called idealism, thought that history must be rational in something significantly like the way science is. His famous dictum is that "the Real is Rational"; reason is the arbiter that shapes the world as it is, and gives us access to what is real. Hegel's idealism posits that since ideas about reality are products of the mind, there must be a mind at work in the universe that establishes reality and gives it structure. Hegelian idealism goes by the name of absolute idealism.
Surrealism began as vaguely idealist before tending more towards materialism.
Not all religion and belief in the supernatural is, strictly speaking, anti-materialist in nature. While many types of religious belief are indeed specifically idealist, for example, Hindu beliefs about the nature of the Brahman, Zen Buddhism stands in the middle way of dialectics between idealism and materialism, and mainstream Christian doctrine affirms the importance of the materiality of Christ's human body and the necessity of self-restraint when dealing with the material world.
Several modern religious movements and texts, for example the organizations within the New Thought Movement and the book, A Course in Miracles, may be said to have a particularly idealist orientation. The theology of Christian Science is explicitly idealist.
More accurately Idealism is based on the root word Ideal meaning a perfect form of and is most accurately described as a belief in perfect forms of virtue, truth, and the absolute. Idea-ism would be a more appropriate term for the definitions listed above. There is a clear distinction between an idea and an ideal. i.e. Websters Dictionary says "conforming exactly to an ideal, law, or standard: perfect.
In general parlance, "idealism" or "idealist" is also used to describe a person having high ideals, sometimes with the connotation that those ideals are unrealizable or at odds with "practical" life.
Idealism comes in various shapes and sizes. There are, in essence, three basic forms of idealism: transcendental idealism (Kant), subjective idealism (Berkeley), and absolute idealism (Hegel). Briefly, the distinctions can be summarized this way: transcendental idealism holds that there is a fundamental distinction between matter and ideas, with ideas holding supremacy. In this view, matter is the world of appearances and mind is the world of truth. Subjective idealism is often confused with a form of relativism because it argues that which is most real is that which is most immediate to experience, and the internal ideas which we use as a lens to see the world are the primary reality. In this view, objects of sense are indistinguishable from our ideas about them. Absolute idealism is fundamentally holistic, arguing that only ideas exist - matter is just another idea. It is distinguished from Berkeley's subjectivity because it includes an element in which there is in effect only one Perceiver of all that exists, and fundamentally speaking, all things in the universe are one with it. This standpoint is comparable to Advaita Hinduism, Zen, American Transcendentalism, and certain strains of western heterodox thinking such as the theology of Meister Eckhart and transpersonal psychology.
'Spirit' or 'Mind' can also be substituted for the word 'idea' in the view of many philosophers.
