Science, Consciousness & Human Values

Consciousness, Science & Values by James R. Arnold

Various features and expressions of consciousness are shown to be beyond scientific explanation, and yet essential to the appreciation of human values. Thus, the values realized by consciousness, including life, love, liberty, ethics, morality, art, friends, community, fun and laughter, are not going to be found on a chalkboard or under a microscope. See http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/453

How Vedanta Explains Conscious Subjective Experience by Syamala D. Hari

What is consciousness? Why does a purely physical lifeless system never seems to exhibit consciousness whereas human beings (and probably some other living beings) do? Can we explain subjective experience in objective (scientific) terms? These are some of the questions being debated by modern researchers of consciousness coming from both physical and social disciplines and philosophies. The modern philosopher Chalmers says that answering why some physical processes in the brain (body) are accompanied by experience, and why a given physical process generates a specific experience for example, experience of red or green is the “hard problem” of consciousness. Consciousness, the mind, the body, and their relations were thoroughly analyzed in the Indian philosophy (Vedanta) of ancient times. In this article, we describe how Vedanta explains occurrence of conscious subjective experience in living beings. See http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/454

On Life, Death, Good and Evil by Matti Pitkanen

Is there actual justification for moral laws? Are they only social conventions or is there some hard core involved? Is there some basic ethical principle, telling what deeds are good and what deeds are bad? Second group of questions relates to life and biological death. How should one define life? What happens in the biological death? Is something self-preserved in the biological death in some form? Is there something deserving to be called soul? Are reincarnations possible? Are we perhaps responsible for our deeds even after our biological death? Could the law of Karma be consistent with physics? Is liberation from the cycle of Karma possible? These questions are discussed from the point of view of TGD inspired theory of consciousness. The cosmology of consciousness, the concept of self-having space-time sheet and causal diamond as its geometric correlates, the vision about the fundamental role of negentropic entanglement and Negentropy Maximization Principle, and the hierarchy of Planck constants identified as hierarchy of dark matters and of quantum critical systems, provide the building blocks needed to make guesses about what biological death could mean from subjective point of view. See http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/455

On Intentionality, Cognition and Time by Matti Pitkanen

Intentions involve time in an essential manner and this led to the idea that p-adic-to-real quantum jumps could correspond to a realization of intentions as actions. However, it seems that this hypothesis which poses strong additional mathematical challenges is not needed, if one accepts adelic approach in which real space-time time and its p-adic variants are all present and quantum physics is adelic. I have already earlier developed the first formulation of p-adic space-time surfaces as cognitive charges of real space-time surfaces and also the ideas related to the adelic vision. The recent view involving strong form of holography would provide dramatically simplified view about how these representations are formed as continuations of representations of strings world sheets and partonic 2-surfaces in the intersection of real and p-adic variants of WCW ("World of Classical Worlds") in the sense that the parameters characterizing these representations are in the algebraic numbers in the algebraic extension of p-adic numbers involved. See http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/456

Some Thoughts on Samapatti by Alan J. Oliver

In the Yoga tradition, buddhi is consciousness in its own right and has been defined by some writers as acognitive knowing. My view is that acognitive knowing means knowing without the mind, and of course that is what Samapatti provides to the seer. And what this means in our seeking to understand consciousness is precisely what I referred to. There are possibly a number of models we could posit to accommodate this position, all of which would be counterintuitive for science. I will simply offer one which arises from the acognitive model. See http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/457

The Mirror & Its Reflections by Steven E. Kaufman

When the Mirror of what Is bends upon Itself a reflection arises in the Mirror that is either this or that. That reflection is never what Is, is never the formless Mirror Itself, but it does reflect, in its form, the way in which the Mirror is being in relation to Itself in order to create the reflection, in order to create the this or that, that arises within Itself, and which reflection, once created, the Mirror then knows as reality. Know yourself as form, as this or that reality, and you cannot know yourself as the formless Consciousness that you are. See http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/458

The Treasure by Steven E. Kaufman

Once it is realized that the ego, that some form, is not what we are, then we have found the Treasure within our Self, then we have found the Treasure that is our true formless Self, unobscured by the wanted forms that it only appeared to be. And then it can be realized that the Treasure that was found, that the Treasure we gave ourselves access to in all the wanted forms, in the pile of money, in the promotion, in falling in love, in a baby's eyes, in the sunset, in the sunrise, was all the same Treasure appearing in different forms. See http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/459