Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Paragraph 229. Travel with me for a moment or two. Back...Back in time...even further back...to the dawn of the fullness of true self-awareness in our primitive ancestors. What a moment it must have been when humans were able to finally know with … Continue reading The Dawn of Awareness
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
In my previous post, I wrote about author Richard Brautigan, whose success in the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's brought him great notoriety and financial rewards for a time. His tendency to engage in a variety of self-destructive behaviors, and a degree of recklessness in attending to his own well-being, over time, ultimately led … Continue reading Crossroads
"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
Memory Is Feeling Some months ago, I wrote a few brief remarks to share for the memorial service marking one year since my Mom's passing, and while preparing to deliver the remarks, I recorded myself reciting them in order to review them before the service. The first attempts with just my voice were helpful in … Continue reading Memory is Feeling
http://www.layoutsparks.com/1/239152/summer-love-beach-waves "Understand that the body is merely the foam of a wave, the shadow of a shadow." -- Buddha Eric Kandel, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons in 2000, in his book, "In Search of Memory," emphasized the "biology of … Continue reading The Foam of a Wave
"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
Michelangelo Buonarroti - The Dream of Human Life Writing about "Life," or rendering artistically the everyday scenes of our temporal existence goes on all the time in every culture and it has become commonplace in our time to read about or to see the results of those efforts everywhere we go. Actually "living our lives" … Continue reading The Fulfillment of Life
"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 