User blogs

The Co-Evolution of Consciousness and Language and the Development of Memetic Equilibrium (by Christopher W. diCarlo)

Abstract: We now have significant evidence indicating many of the evolutionary constraints that contributed to the transitional phases through which hominins evolved cognitively from pre-conscious to gradually increasingly conscious states. With the co-evolution of language and consciousness, our ancestors were able to better understand relationships in terms of causality, morality, and mortality. And this is where we begin to see the incorporation of more and more memes into emerging and developing cultures. I will attempt to demonstrate that the acceptance of memes will deviate from individual, kin or group biological equilibrium if the perceived benefit of the meme(s) is intended to increase S-R value. With the emergence of sophisticated languages and consciousness, there arose an intimate and powerful connection between the memes of any particular individual, kin or group and their biological equilibrium. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/51

The Proclivities of Particularity and Generality (by Stephen P. Smith)

Abstract: The proclivities of particularity and generality describe a polarity, held together by a naked emotionality that signifies a felt middle-term. This polarity indicates a type of circular reasoning, and can endlessly oscillate due to an equivocation that confuses particularity with generality that may block emotional energies and prevent resolution. Deduction and induction represent the same polarity, as does the frequentist and Bayesian interpretations of statistics. Reintroducing emotion back into logic returns an intuitionist logic and grammar, and this permits the resolution of felt tension. This intuitionism is tied to a time-sense that oscillates between foresight (to particularity) and hindsight (to generality). Emotionality is found relating to causation, agreeing with A.N. Whitehead. It is hypothesized that the intuitionist logic provides a universal grammar, or a vitalistic organizing principle, that has impacted on biological evolution. This agrees with panpsychism and panentheism. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/55

From Dust to Descartes: My Thoughts on Various Aspects of Consciousness (by Micul E. Thompson)

Abstract: This short essay attempts to demonstrate how subjective experience, language, and consciousness can be explained in terms of abilities we share with the simplest of creatures, specifically the ability to detect, react to, and associate various aspects of the world. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/9

From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience: The Continuum of Experience (by Gregory M. Nixon)

Abstract: When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim here to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/21

Hollows of Experience (by Gregory M. Nixon)

Abstract: This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I chapter is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural protolanguage learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object – of self and world – the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/22

Myth and Mind: The Origin of Human Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred ( by Gregory M. Nixon)

Abstract: By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realization of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as the world – as opposed to the immediate natural environment of ourselves and other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/23