Theoretical explication of a growing body of empirical data on consciousness-related anomalous phenomena is unlikely to be achieved in terms of known physical processes. Rather, it will first be necessary to formulate the basic role of consciousness in the definition of reality before such anomalous experience can adequately be represented. This paper takes the position that reality is constituted only in the interaction of consciousness with its environment, and therefore that any scheme of conceptual organization developed to represent that reality (...) must reflect the processes of consciousness as well as those of its environment. In this spirit, the concepts and formalisms of elementary quantum mechanics, as originally proposed to explain anomalous atomic-scale physical phenomena, are appropriated via metaphor to represent the general characteristics of consciousness interacting with any environment. More specifically, if consciousness is represented by a quantum mechanical wave function, and its environment by an appropriate potential profile, Schrödinger wave mechanics defines eigenfunctions and eigenvalues that can be associated with the cognitive and emotional experiences of that consciousness in that environment. To articulate this metaphor it is necessary to associate certain aspects of the formalism, such as the coordinate system, the quantum numbers, and even the metric itself, with various impressionistic descriptors of consciousness, such as its intensity, perspective, approach/avoidance attitude, balance between cognitive and emotional activity, and receptive/assertive disposition. With these established, a number of the generic features of quantum mechanics, such as the wave/particle duality, and the uncertainty, indistinguishability, and exclusion principles, display metaphoric relevance to familiar individual and collective experiences. Similarly, such traditional quantum theoretic exercises as the central force field and atomic structure, covalent molecular bonds, barrier penetration, and quantum statistical collective behavior become useful analogies for representation of a variety of consciousness experiences, both normal and anomalous, and for the design of experiments to study these systematically. (shrink)

The scientific, personal, and social implications of this revolutionary work are staggering. MARGINS OF REALITY is nothing less than a fundamental reevaluation of how the world really works.

(1996). Medieval hagiography and post‐tridentine hagiology shaping Robertson Davies's own sense of the marvelous in fifth business (1970) The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 1153-1163.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning in Dramatic and Virtual Worlds:What Do Students Say About Complementarity and Future Directions?John O'Toole (bio) and Julie Dunn (bio)A top financial backer has arrived to determine which team of computer interaction designers has developed the most exciting and innovative proposal for the Everest component of the Virtually Impossible Computer Company's Conquerors of the World Series. Tension is high as the presentations begin, but this tension soon turns to (...) outright conflict as some proposals suggest George Mallory as the conqueror, and the financial backer will have none of him. The backer, it seems, has her own agenda and is determined to allow for only one view of history—the one that records Sir Edmund Hillary as a New Zealand hero and the only real conqueror of the tallest mountain on earth. The designers become more and more agitated until suddenly someone bangs their hand on the table and calls out, "Hang on... just because you've got the money doesn't mean... kids need to learn about both these men... they need to learn about history." With that the drama is cut by the teacher. The deep understandings about "history's purchased page" that can be generated when drama and computers are brought together for learning have been made explicit... but could these same outcomes have been achieved using just one of these approaches?IntroductionThe research explored within this article was generated as part of the Media Station, a project funded by the Australasian Collaborative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID), with an overall mission to investigate the potential of massively multiplayer online games for learning. This particular subproject, History's Purchased Page, saw researchers from interaction design [End Page 89] and drama education come together with a group of young learners to investigate their perceptions of the complementarity of computers and live classroom drama and to brainstorm future possibilities for applying computer-based technologies to drama-based learning. We sought to discover the following:• What do young learners say about how they experience and value learning in a context involving a combination of drama and computers?• What ideas do these young learners have about how future technologies might enrich the complementarity of this combination?As the drama researchers involved in this project, we had been experimenting with this perhaps slightly unusual combination for over a decade by incorporating computers into a number of our drama units within our primary textbook Pretending to Learn.1 Our goal in these experimentations had always been to enrich the classroom drama experience by taking advantage of the information capacity of the Internet and other computer-based resources, including databases. For example, we had used The First Fleet Database2 to support a drama unit where the learners take on the role of convicts arriving in Australia in 1788. We discovered that this material, combined with other documentation and historical materials available via the Internet, greatly enhanced not only the historical accuracy of the work but also the level of engagement experienced by the learners when in role. Therefore, we were very keen to extend this work by exploring new possibilities and were especially keen to develop a better understanding of what the learners made of this interactivity.In recent years the partnering of these two quite different approaches to learning has developed quite a research following, and a number of drama teachers and researchers have become interested in the complementarity of these ways of learning.3 At the same time, researchers and designers from the field of computer-assisted learning have also noted these connections. This goes back to the work of Brenda Laurel, who first drew attention to the intriguing links between computers and theatre in her now famous text Computers as Theatre.4 With the rapid growth of interactive learning tools such as 3-D immersive worlds, blogs, and online voice and text chat spaces, the opportunities for exploration of these connections have also grown, with each of these offering exciting new possibilities when used in conjunction with the highly interactive and engaging strategies of process drama.Process drama is a way of group learning, through whole-class improvised drama, with students (and sometimes the... (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to look at some of the apparent characteristics of consciousness in theories in which consciousness is said to play a role in the collapse of the state vector. In particular, these reflections are based primarily on the work of three theorists: Amit Goswami, Henry Stapp, and Evan Harris Walker. Upon looking at such theories, three characteristics of consciousness become apparent. The first is a volitional aspect of the mind that needs to be distinguished from (...) awareness or observation. The second is the stratification of consciousness such that the experiential stream that goes on privately for a given person can be distinguished from a universal deep consciousness, akin to David Bohm’s implicate order, that might underlie ordinary consciousness. Having done so, a question arises regarding the manner in which deliberately intentional acts that occur within one’s experiential stream can apparently have their intended effects. An indirect mechanism consistent with the M5 model of Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne is proposed. Third, in transferring the notion of the collapse of the state vector from the context of observation in experimental physics to manifestation of everyday life, the temporal discontinuity of collapses implies that the experiential stream of ordinary waking consciousness is also discontinuous. Furthermore, in some collapse-type quantum mind theories, the subject–object distinction is thought to emerge with the collapse, so that the physical universe itself, including its spatial features, could be arising from a pre-physical substrate at the rate of once per Planck time. This idea can be modelled using Jack Ng’s notion of a spacetime lattice with Planck time timelike separations and Planck length spacelike separations. Furthermore, such modelling can be partially cast in category-theoretic form by adapting a previous application of Grothendieck topoi to Edmund Husserl’s conceptualization of conscious mental acts. Thus, a volitional aspect of mind, the stratification of consciousness, and discontinuity of the ordinary waking state are some of the characteristics of consciousness implicit in some collapse-type quantum mind theories. (shrink)

The 2014 SSE Conference near San Francisco is now behind us, and I’d rate it as quite successful. Apart from the predictable good times shared with friends whom we see only at these get-togethers, several things in particular stood out for me. First, Gerald Pollack’s Dinsdale lecture on the fourth phase of water was unusually interesting, and in fact all the invited talks were both stimulating and entertainingly presented. (Kudos again to Adam Curry for putting together a really first-rate program, (...) and to Jerry Gin for doing such a wonderful job as local host.) Although I wasn’t monitoring the behavior of attendees generally or invited speakers in particular, I happened to sit near or next to Gerald Pollack for much of the meeting. And I have to say that I was also struck and impressed by his attentiveness and openness to the rest of the program. If he missed a presentation, I didn’t see it, and I believe he took careful notes of most (if not all) of the talks as well. I doubt this was a mere courtesy. I believe Pollack exemplifies the kind of inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, and intellectual courage I at least take to be a prerequisite for membership in the SSE, but which one sees all too infrequently in the Academy, or in the real world generally. Moreover, the conference was quite well-attended, and I was pleased (and somewhat surprised) that many of those present don’t yet qualify for membership in the AARP.1 The shortage of “young blood” has been a concern, not just for the SSE, but also for other similarly minded organizations to which I belong (e.g., the Parapsychological Association and the Society for Psychical Research)2. Indeed, the SSE Council routinely considers ways to encourage the recruitment and participation of new and young members. Brenda Dunne has certainly helped with this by organizing and hosting the New Members and Young Investigators meetings at the annual conferences, and my spies informed me that this year’s meeting was again a success (and not just because the pizza was very good). (shrink)

When confronting the unexplained, it is helpful to consider it from many different points of view. In an essay published in 2004, entitled "Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality," Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of Princeton University's PEAR laboratory proposed that consciousness constructs its reality by ordering the information it derives from the external world through an array of physiological, psychological, and cultural filters. This thesis has now been considered by nineteen distinguished scholars who here present their (...) commentaries from a broad spectrum of professional and personal perspectives. Drawn from such diverse backgrounds as art, Buddhism, evolutionary biology, fantasy, out-of-body experiences, philosophy, physics, psychology, semiotics, and systems engineering, among others, these contributions offer an assortment of unique and fascinating glimpses of how our experiences and their styles of representation are reflected through these filters of consciousness. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore an approach to ‘mindfulness’ that lies outside of the usual Buddhist mainstream. This approach adopts a ‘non-dual’ stance to meditation practice, and based on my limited experience and training in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, this non-dual notion of ‘mindfulness’ seems an especially appropriate point of comparison between Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Buddhism. That comparison itself will not be the focus here—given my own inexpertise and lack of clinical experience, it would be (...) best to leave the comparison to others! Instead, the aim here will be to explore some features of ‘mindfulness’ in the context of non-dual styles of Buddhist practice. To begin, we will assess some difficulties that emerge when one attempts to speak of ‘mindfulness’ in Buddhism. Next, we will turn to the somewhat radical notion of ‘non-dual’ practice in relation to the more mainstream descriptions found in the Buddhist Abhidharma literature. We will then examine some crucial features of Buddhist non-dualism, including attitudes and theories about thoughts and judgments. A brief foray into specific practice instructions will help us to understand the role of ‘mindfulness’ in a specific non-dual tradition called, ‘Mahāmudrā’ (the ‘Great Seal’). Finally, after some reflection on ‘mindfulness’ in the non-dual practice of Mahāmudrā, I will conclude by considering a crucial issue: the context of practice. (shrink)

The essays that follow grew out of a workshop held at the Center for Buddhist Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in March 2018, on the topic of conceptuality and non-conceptuality in Buddhist philosophy. Discussions at the workshop focused specifically on the tenability of the claim made by the two Buddhist epistemologists Dignāga and Dharmakīrti that perceptual cognitions are non-conceptual and yet also contribute to the contents of conceptual thought. The four contributions collected here present just a few of the resulting (...) reflections.This essay explores the Dharmakīrtian1 notion of a "concept" in the specific context of a "pseudo-perception", that is, cognitive events that... (shrink)

This volume explores the distinctiveness of teaching and learning as a human undertaking and the nature and scope of the philosophy of education. An investigation of the distinctiveness of teaching and learning as a human undertaking. Provides fresh thinking on the nature and scope of the philosophy of education. Draws on the original insights of an international group of experts in philosophy and education. Includes an interview on education with Alasdair MacIntyre, together with searching investigations of his views by other (...) contributors. (shrink)

Religion is often singled out for special legal treatment in Western societies - which raises an important question: what, if anything, is special about religious conscience beliefs that warrants such special legal treatment? In this paper, I will offer an answer to this specialness question by investigating the relationship between religious conscientious objections and their insulation from relevant evidence. I will begin my analysis by looking at Brian Leiter’s arguments that religious beliefs are insulated from evidence and not worthy of (...) special legal treatment as a result. I will argue that he fails to show that religious conscience beliefs are both in principle responsive to empirical evidence and in practice typically more insulated from this evidence than secular conscience beliefs. If I am right about this, then Leiter fails to answer the “central puzzle” of his recent book and fails to sufficiently distinguish the religious conscience from the secular conscience. Second, I will look at whether or not it is plausible to understand the religious conscience as insulated from other forms of evidence. Following the research of social-psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I will argue that, typically, both forms of conscience seem to be similarly insulated from moral argumentation. I will also show that, while it seems as though the religious conscience usually draws from a larger set of moral values when compared to the secular conscience, this should make no legal difference overall. To conclude, I will explain that the arguments in this paper can be understood as evidence in support of an egalitarian response to religion’s specialness. (shrink)

This paper examines a recent trilogy of books by Richard Kearney collectively entitled 'Philosophy at the Limit'. Kearney is perhaps best known to the wider academic world because of his publications on, and dialogues with, Contemporary European Philosophy. In the first of these books, On Stories, Kearney, in common with many contemporary thinkers seeks to push back the frontiers of philosophy to include all forms of narrative such as literature, film, theatre as well as other disciplines such as biblical studies (...) and psychoanalysis. What distinguishes Kearney's approach from others is that his writings embody a concern for the ethical. The second work, The God Who May Be is perhaps the more interesting of these books, philosophically speaking. Here Kearney sheds new light on an old question and challenges many of the traditional theistic conceptions. Finally, in Strangers, Gods and Monsters we have a contemporary reflection on the notion of ‘otherness’. In all, these three books contain an interesting and engaging presentation of some of the central themes under discussion in the continental tradition. (shrink)

In a fable by Lincoln Steffens, he recounts the fate of a man, who, climbing to the top of a mountain, seizes hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, duly directs his underlings to tail him. When the demon reports with alarm the man's success Satan remains unperturbed., he yawned. ll tempt him to institutionalize it.’1.

Dying patients have more than medical needs. In fact, what they feel most sharply, whether or not they are religious, are spiritual concerns. The Christian theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, properly interpreted and translated to reflect the universal concerns with which they are connected, provide a starting point.

The article seeks to summarise recent research carried out by the author into thirteenth and fourteenth-century commentaries on the De longitudine et brevitate vitae. The texts of some representative commentaries are examined as a means of assessing the reception of Aristotle's natural philosophy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As this is an area which has received comparatively little attention from researchers up to now, it is hoped that in examining commentaries on this one text of the Parva naturalia what (...) emerges might serve to give a clearer picture of the reception and understanding of Aristotle's natural philosophy. The article also contains some brief comments on the two medieval translations of the De longitudine, by James of Venice and William of Moerbeke. In an appendix, a transcription of the prologue to Walter Burley's commentary is also included. (shrink)

Cet article présente la première édition critique du commentaire sur le De longitudine et brevitate vitae Aristotelis de Pierre d’Auvergne, ainsi qu’une édition de la traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke. Le texte est particulièrement intéressant, parce qu’il fait partie, semble-t-il, du projet de Pierre d’Auvergne de compléter les commentaires sur les Parva naturalia de Thomas d’Aquin. L’introduction étudie aussi le concept philosophique de ‘vie’ chez Aristote.