"Everything remembered is dear, touching, precious....at least the past is safe, though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now, because we have survived." --Susan Sontag, Partisan Review Winter 1967 "Daydreaming is good for you. It fosters creativity, happiness and mental health...Daydreaming, letting your wishes and instincts play out, is so important … Continue reading Daydreams and Intuition
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
In the Review section of the WSJ this weekend in an article by Frank Wilczek, he casually suggested that it shouldn't be so difficult to accept, intuitively, that life and mind emerge from matter, as if we were all just somehow mistaken or deluded about the source of life and mind. Wilczek shared the Nobel … Continue reading Emergent Realities
...the very observation is an act of creation, and that consciousness is doing the creating. ~ Gregg Braden Opening up the front door this morning brought the image above into consciousness for me, and now for all of my visitors and readers here at John's Consciousness. The first snow of 2016 may seem like an … Continue reading Winter’s Promise of Spring
According to Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, intelligence is defined as: noun 1. capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 2. manifestation of a high mental capacity: "He writes with intelligence and wit." In a recent study conducted at the University of Western Ontario, researchers … Continue reading An Artificial Version of Human Intelligence?
"My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, … Continue reading Oliver Sacks – 1933-2015
"The working hypothesis of this book is that consciousness emerges from neuronal features of the brain. Understanding the material basis of consciousness is unlikely to require any exotic new physics, but rather a much deeper appreciation of how highly interconnected networks of a large number of heterogeneous neurons work. The abilities of coalitions of neurons … Continue reading Quest for Consciousness
The evolution of life on our planet has produced an extraordinary variety and diversity of species, and the paths followed by many of the branches on the tree of life have held sway for millions of years before ending completely or splitting off into whole new species. The ability of each branch to continue into … Continue reading Evolution of Cognition
"Many theories of the origin of life have been proposed, but since it's hard to prove or disprove them, no fully accepted theory exists," --Diana Northup, a cave biologist at the University of New Mexico. Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University thinks "...life started with molecules that were smaller and less complex than … Continue reading In The Beginning
"Finally we must make use of all the aids which intellect, imagination, sense-perception, and memory afford in order, firstly, to intuit simple propositions distinctly; secondly, to combine correctly (compare) the matters under investigation with what we already know, so that they too may be known; and thirdly, to find out what things should be compared … Continue reading Our Human Powers
John's Consciousness 