What Is Consciousness? Neuroscientist May Have Answer to the Big Question
The following is an excerpt from the new book Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael S. A. Graziano (Oxford University Press, 2015):
I was in the audience watching a magic show. Per protocol a lady was standing in a tall wooden box, her smiling head sticking out of the top, while the magician stabbed swords through the middle.
A man sitting next to me whispered to his son, “Jimmy, how do you think they do that?”
The boy must have been about six or seven. Refusing to be impressed, he hissed back, “It’s obvious, Dad.”
“Really?” his father said. “You figured it out? What’s the trick?”
“The magician makes it happen that way,” the boy said.
The magician makes it happen. That explanation, as charmingly vacuous as it sounds, could stand as a fair summary of almost every theory, religious or scientific, that has been put forward to explain human consciousness.
The human brain contains about one hundred billion interacting neurons. Neuroscientists know, at least in general, how that network of neurons can compute information. But how does a brain become aware of information? What is sentience itself?
The first known scientific account relating consciousness to the brain dates back to Hippocrates in the fifth century b.c. At that time, there was no formal science as it is recognized today. Hippocrates was nonetheless an acute medical observer and noticed that people with brain damage tended to lose their mental abilities. He realized that mind is something created by the brain and that it dies piece by piece as the brain dies. A passage attributed to him summarizes his view elegantly:
“Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant.”
The importance of Hippocrates’s insight that the brain is the source of the mind cannot be overstated. It launched two and a half thousand years of neuroscience. As a specific explanation of consciousness, however, one has to admit that the Hippocratic account is not very helpful. Rather than explain consciousness, the account merely points to a magician. The brain makes it happen everytime. How the brain does it, and what exactly consciousness may be, Hippocrates left unaddressed. Such questions went beyond the scope of his medical observations.
Two thousand years after Hippocrates, in 1641, Descartes proposed a second influential view of the brain basis of consciousness. In Descartes’s view, the mind was made out of an ethereal substance, a fluid, that was stored in a receptacle in the brain. He called the fluid rescogitans. Mental substance. When he dissected the brain looking for the receptacle of the soul, he noticed that almost every brain structure came in pairs, one on each side. In his view, the human soul was a single, unified entity, and therefore it could not possibly be divided up and stored in two places. In the end he found a small single lump at the center of the brain, the pineal body, and deduced that it must be the house of the soul. The pineal body is now known to be a gland that produces melatonin and has nothing whatsoever to do with a soul.
The boy must have been about six or seven. Refusing to be impressed, he hissed back, “It’s obvious, Dad.”
“Really?” his father said. “You figured it out? What’s the trick?”
“The magician makes it happen that way,” the boy said.
The magician makes it happen. That explanation, as charmingly vacuous as it sounds, could stand as a fair summary of almost every theory, religious or scientific, that has been put forward to explain human consciousness.
God is the center of my universe 
☮
Conscious Creation is about intentionally creating your own reality, but this unique interview goes a step farther, and tells us how the movies relate to this important process. Brent Marchant decided to take the concepts of the Conscious Creation movement to the movies, and see how its key principles and concepts are illustrated by specific films. In the final segment, Brent Marchant tells us how to use Conscious Creation in our relationships with the visitors.
We find out how to movies as a means of understanding and using the principles of Conscious Creation, an approach that is absolutely unique in the movement and in the world. He goes far beyond the ideas in What the Bleep Do We Know to talk about how specific films like Slumdog Millionaire illustrate ways of using Conscious Creation to draw things into our lives. Do we want to live in the slums, or draw a better experience into our lives?
Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.”
Philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally valid; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious.
At one time consciousness was viewed with skepticism by many scientists, but in recent years it has become a significant topic of research in psychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousness—that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness.
The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness by asking human subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., “tell me if you notice anything when I do this”). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by psychoactive drugs or spiritual or meditative techniques.
In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient’s arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.
@9:15 He’s talking about beliefs, not attitudes. Beliefs go far beyond religious beliefs. Belief that you don’t deserve; that you have to work really hard to have success; belief in your own failure, etc., etc. Now, in the New Earth many of us are working to recognize self inhibiting beliefs and to drop them. Beliefs can be so layered that the person’s outer attitude and even how he feels can mask over a deep belief, ex., that you are not a likeable person, there is something wrong about you, a belief that holds you back in many ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Our consciousness is a fundamental aspect of our existence, says philosopher David Chalmers: http://consc.net/consciousness
“There’s nothing we know about more directly…. but at the same time it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.” He shares some ways to think about the movie playing in our heads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
I am burning 
with the desire to inspire. I have the desire to change the world
☮️and to create a new worldly 
cancer awareness
️ By finding balance
☯️☮️
Rather it be by being vegan activist
organic gardener
or 🏻♂️FREE SPIRIT
!!!!
Consciousness and Healing: A Path to Whole Person Health.
BY Marilyn Schlitz 14 July 2016
If you’re like most people, your life is complex and sometimes challenging. It’s easy to feel the stresses that come with our busy days and diverse demands on our time and attention, mass distraction that pull us off our soul’s inner compass often bombard us.
Out of this complexity you may feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and distressed. These experiences can lead to dis-ease, moving you away from living into optimal health and well-being. Illness often represents a turning point for people, leading them to seek out new sources of comfort, strength, and purpose. Out of suffering can come profound transformation; It can deepen and strengthen our life purpose. But it is best to find a path to optimal health that can help us remain healthy and in right balance, even in the face of illness or disease.
The good news is that great strides have been made in whole person health care. The integration of body, mind, and spirit has become a key dimension of health education and disease prevention and treatment. Despite many advances in a wide range of holistic approaches, however, our health care system remains primarily disease-centered rather than addressing the well-being of our whole being.
To thrive as individuals and as members of healthy communities, we are called on to develop our inner wisdom, derived from direct personal experiences of illness and health, and transformative practices that promote our health and well-being—allowing us to move from surviving to thriving.
IONS has long been a leader in whole person health, researching the inner mechanisms of the healing response. In the landmark book, Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind Body Medicine, many factors are identified and dimensions that must be addressed to create optimal health. These include 7 key tenets.
Preview Embracing Your Spiritual Healing Journey
7 Key Tenets of Consciousness and Healing
- An integral approach to healing involves a whole-systems approach based in healing and the restoration of wholeness. We are part of an interconnected whole that includes biological, personal, cultural, and transpersonal dimensions.
- Understanding consciousness and awareness helps us understand and experience health and well-being, including our will to live, grow, and die with grace.
- Our interpersonal relationships are a vital part of our integral nature and they impact our health and well-being.
- It is hard to be healthy in a sick society and we have different levels at which we are part of the social fabric in conscious and unconscious ways. Social healing offers a path to mend present and historical wounds that have been created by conflict, collective trauma, and large scale oppression.
- Our connections to our and other’s culture and worldview opens us to our connection to tradition and diverse ways of knowing and being in the world and to a wide range of complementary healing systems.
- Much of standard medicine, with its high tech and low-touch approaches, removes healing from its ground in nature. Moving from a view of separation from nature to one of fundamental interconnectedness and our ability to perceive the beauty and sacred language of nature.
- Spiritual interconnectedness. Life is the great teacher. Our ability to see the way to a new approach to health and healing requires deep humility in the face of wonder and mystery. Gratitude, love, and compassion are essential tools to an inclusive and whole-hearted healing system.
By living into these tenets, we can move from surviving to thriving. Embracing healing becomes about the restoration of our wholeness, individually and collectively.
Preview Consciousness and Healing: Dr. Deborah Diamond D.C. at TEDxWaldenPond
Idiosyncratic Knowledge
Learn something new today!