"Brightly colored brain scans are a media favorite as they are both attractive to the eye and apparently easy to understand, but in reality they represent some of the most complex scientific information we have. They are not maps of activity, but maps of the outcome of complex statistical comparisons of blood flow that unevenly … Continue reading Coming To Grips With Consciousness
Ever since I first started to understand what it meant to BE a father, I have wanted to be one. My own father was a particularly good role model in most aspects of parenting, and while he ruled over our ultimate accumulation of eight children in our family with a fairly strict hand by today's … Continue reading Consciousness in the World: Being a Dad
"If we turn our contemplation away from our outer world and to the inner one, as the sages advise, a different reality becomes evident. Like light, consciousness has no place, and no shape. It is invisible, yet illuminates everything. It is unimpeded by time and space...While the physiological basis of consciousness is not yet understood, … Continue reading Philosophy of Consciousness
"If we seek genuine psychological understanding of the human being of our own time, we must know his spiritual history absolutely. We cannot reduce him to mere biological data, since he is not by nature merely biological, but is a product also of spiritual presuppositions." - -Carl Jung from a presentation at the C. G. … Continue reading Body, Mind, Spirit
The extraordinary complexity of the human brain, which developed over millions of years of evolution, has finally produced creatures who can acknowledge their existence in a way that complex artificial physical systems may never do. The correlation between the processing of information in the brain, and that which takes place in our most sophisticated computers, … Continue reading A Summary of Quotes from My Blog on Consciousness
As human beings, we are, in large part, unremarkably different from many other species on our planet in our physical core components and basic constituent parts and systems. In our most fundamental nature, we exist physically as they do, we are made up of the same essential molecular structures, we rely on very similar biological … Continue reading A Fundamental Theory of Consciousness
If you've been working with a personal computer for any length of time in your home or office, (and I think it's safe to say most everyone has at least some experience in this regard) or even if you've just heard other people talking about them, you may have heard them use the term "meltdown" … Continue reading Computer Meltdown
The title of this posting is a bit overreaching, I admit, but if you will be patient and have been following along here, I think I can point the conversation in that direction, even if it takes a few additional postings to get through it. My friend and fellow blogger, Marc Schuster, passed along a … Continue reading Existence is Consciousness
Relief sculpture of battle scene in the Vatican Museum, Rome, Italy. “In these confused and restless zones, in which present blends with future in a world of upheaval, we stand face-to-face with all the grandeur—the unprecedented grandeur—of the phenomenon of man. What has made us so different from our forbearers, so ambitious too, and so … Continue reading The Phenomenon of Consciousness
What is it about being human that separates us from all the other species on the planet? Why is it that our fellow creatures on Earth don’t enjoy the same level of cognitive talent as we do? What separates us from even those creatures with virtually the same parts and similar brain structures as ours? … Continue reading On Being A Conscious Human
John's Consciousness 