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"Darin Drda, author of The Four Global Truths, writes:
Although they speak different languages, both tell the same story: the fate of life on Earth will be determined by forces beyond humanity’s control. This idea strikes me as a very dangerous one, certain to accelerate our collective journey down the road to ruin. What’s more, it doesn’t jive with the powerful and paradigm-shifting insight of 20th century physics that reality is participatory."
"The true definition of ‘apocalypse’ is more akin to ‘the lifting of the veil.’ What has long been hidden shall be revealed. Is it possible to understand this potential, and how to apply it, without falling victim to the aforementioned ‘isms of divine destruction, collapse, or extraterrestrial saviours?"
"The dark matter of our unconscious has created the human world we inhabit, including the crises that we appear unable to solve. Our old story of the Self, that we are “isolated beings in an indifferent universe” (and all it’s variations), is breaking down, because in fact, it was never objectively real in the first place. It was constructed by our level of consciousness.
The new consciousness struggles to be born."
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James Burns rescooped this on Human Condition. (January 23, 1:46 PM) |
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Anne Caspari thanks ddrrnt for this. (January 23, 1:49 AM) |
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ddrrnt shared this post on Tumblr. (January 23, 1:34 AM) |
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ddrrnt shared this post on Twitter. (January 23, 1:34 AM) |
Consciousness
Featureteaser: Could the datasphere be an extension of our collective consciousness? If so, could an intentional organization of this data have a profound effect via our unconscious agents of empathy and evolution, mirror neurons? 
At the end of last year, IBM predicted that by 2017 limited forms of mind reading would “no longer [be] science fiction.” Along similar lines, though, in 1933 Nikola Tesla said he would soon be able to photograph people’s thoughts.
Is IBM going to be equally wrong?
Maybe not. Surveying leading neurotech experts has turned up some support—albeit limited and carefully qualified—for the company’s prediction. And oddly enough, one reason is that Tesla’s prediction is—in very limited ways as well—coming true too.
Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to produce rough representations of images as actually seen by a subject’s visual cortex. 
There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.”
It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. Yet there’s still a lot we don’t know.
In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. And better understanding them means we can skillfully stimulate the neural substrates of those states—which, in turn, means we can strengthen them. Because as the famous saying by the Canadian scientist Donald Hebb goes, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” ...
In this article Rick Hanson goes on to explain how you can intentionally change your brain to create lasting happiness and well-being. While medicine will advance in the next half century, we are not on a crash-course for achieving immortality by curing all disease. Bodies simply wear down with use. We are on a crash-course, however, with technologies that let us store unthinkable amounts of data and run gargantuan simulations. Therefore, well before we understand how brains work, we will find ourselves able to digitally copy the brain's structure and able to download the conscious mind into a computer. 
….When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.
Miriam Greenspan - excerpts from a Sun Magazine 
A deluge of visual information hits our eyes every second, yet we’re able to focus on the minuscule fraction that’s relevant to our goals. When we try to find our way through an unfamiliar area of town, for example, we manage to ignore the foliage, litter and strolling pedestrians, and focus our attention on the street signs.
Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that the brain’s control center syncs up to its visual center with high-frequency brain waves, directing attention to select features of the visual world.
“It’s been known that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in focusing our attention, but the mystery was how,” said neuroscientist Robert Desimone, who led the study, published in Science Friday. “Now we have some insight into how it has that focusing role — through this synchrony with our sensory systems.”
This novel understanding of attention may inform future studies on disorders like schizophrenia and ADHD, in which patients are easily distracted and the prefrontal cortex is thought to be impaired. The region’s newly discovered role as a source of synchronized brain activity may be crucial to understanding these diseases. 
If we assume that the prefrontal cortex permits metacognition, then the answer is simple: species that fail to demonstrate metacognition tend to lack brain areas that resemble the prefrontal cortex. But because this area serves many cognitive functions and is well connected to the rest of the brain, the region is probably not the sole locus of metacognition. In other words, the prefrontal cortex may be necessary but not sufficient for self-awareness. Some psychologists speculate that self-awareness may arise in animals with greater overall cognitive ability, larger brain size or a higher degree of connectivity among brain areas. Identifying the precise structural differences that make some creatures self-aware and others not is quite challenging. Most important, it is difficult to pinpoint and compare subtle structural differences across species in the face of more dramatic differences in brain morphology. For example, dolphins and chimpanzees both demonstrate metacognition, but their brains look completely different.
By Robert O. Duncan | Scientific American 
The heart generates a continuous series of electromagnetic pulses in which the time interval between each beat varies in a dynamic and complex manner. The heart’s ever-present rhythmic field has a powerful influence on processes throughout the body. We have demonstrated, for example, that brain rhythms naturally synchronize to the heart’s rhythmic activity, and also that during sustained feelings of love or appreciation, the blood pressure and respiratory rhythms, among other oscillatory systems, entrain to the heart’s rhythm.
via Mindful Muscle Blog Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, discusses consciousness, qualia, and self. 
The thoughts our brain/mind produces include situations we have yet to experience, yet are fearful of, angry or worried about. We’re pretty much creatures of habit, after all, and our habits go back thousands of years. Much of our behavior is reactionary, initiated when we’re faced with situations that cause us to be fearful or angry. Our primitive brains – specifically the amygdala, take us into fight-or-flight mode in order to survive. Within seconds our brains are flooded with chemicals, our heart-rate changes, our blood rushes from our extremities to our body’s core to guard our important organs, and we’re prepared to run or stand our ground and fight the saber-toothed tiger.
Problem is, we’re not fighting saber-toothed tigers anymore.
via Intent Blog Richard Dawkins speaks about subjective consciousness. The complete video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntp4eGrfRNs&NR=1# . See also http://www.youtube.com... 
In his book The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size Danish science journalist Tor Norretranders presents a scientifically sound and intellectually stimulating theory of conscious experience. “The user illusion” refers to a computer users idea of how the computer works based on how they interact with it. The bits and bytes are concealed by a largely metaphorical, extremely simplified, and not necessarily accurate illusion. Norretranders central thesis is that consciousness is our user illusion of ourselves. Consciousness arises after much information has been discarded. Conscious experience is a manageable distillation, essence, of our extremely rich raw experience. The User Illusion is incredibly readable in spite of its plethora of references. Norretranders pulls from innumerable sources, most notably Gödel, Libet, and Shannon. He integrates a wide array of prior research, tying together ideas from information theory, thermodynamics, physics, psychology, and philosophy to substantiate his theory; this is indeed the strongest aspect of the book.
Norretranders builds his theory of consciousness on the tenants of information theory. He makes sure the reader understands the basics before he applies them to his broader claims. The take home message is the notion of information and exformation. Exformation is discarded information. Norretrander uses the example of grocery shopping, among others. At the register the prices of the individual items are summed, it is this number, the total, that we are interested in. The sum is useful to us, it tells us how much money to take out of our wallet, the individual prices are not, they are irrelevant once we obtain the total. The author then extrapolates to consciousness, explaining that a huge amount of information must be discarded along the path from unconscious to conscious experience.
via Serendip's Exchange |
The Indian sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of the emergence of superconsciousness in ever more people, and this, he said, is the harbinger of the next evolution of human consciousness. In a similar vein, the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser spoke of the coming of four-dimensional integral consciousness, rising from the prior stages of archaic, magical and mythical consciousness. The Canadian mystic Richard Bucke called the new consciousness “cosmic,” and in the colorful spiral dynamics developed by Chris Cowan and Don Beck, it’s the turquoise stage of collective individualism, cosmic spirituality and Earth changes. For philosopher Ken Wilber, these developments signify an evolutionary transition from the mental consciousness characteristic of both animals and humans, to subtle consciousness, which is archetypal, transindividual and intuitive, to causal consciousness, and then, ultimately, to “consciousness as such.”
Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof summed up the characteristics of the emerging consciousness as “transpersonal.”
There is remarkable agreement among these visionary concepts. Superconsciousness, integral consciousness, cosmic consciousness, turquoise-stage consciousness, and consciousness as such are all forms of consciousness that transcend the divide between you and me, the individual and the world, the human being and nature. If these thinkers are right, this kind of consciousness will be the next stage in the evolution of the consciousness of our species. 
A new computer simulation support a long-held theory that social interactions may have triggered brain evolution in human ancestors... Via Wildcat2030 
“Your principal mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by sensation, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is.”
- G.I. Gurdjieff
shared on subrealism blogspot. 
Consciousness is an especially big problem for fake brains. It is a highly complicated property that only comes about when countless parts operate together in a certain way. Just as a single molecule of water is not wet, neither is a single neuron conscious, and while the behaviour of water at ever greater scales is well understood, the same is not true of neurons. Unless it can be explained away as an illusion, consciousness will remain the essential difference between virtual and real brains.
[image: Professor Henry Markram, head of the Blue Brain Project, in a lab of the Brain Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.] 
[I]f it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be “memes versus us,” because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The “independent” mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to “side with” our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.
- Happy 70th Birthday, Dan Dennett - via brainpickings.org 
“Thinking about sense-objects will attach you to sense-objects; grow attached, and you become addicted; thwart your addiction, it turns to anger; be angry, and you confuse your mind; confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience; forget experience, you lose discrimination; lose discrimination, and you miss life’s only purpose.”
you may find value in reading Swami Nirmalananda Giri's lesson in its entirety. - @Ddrrnt 
The startling amazingness of consciousness self-evident to people who recognize it vividly — they can see that they are conscious and they can see that consciousness is something really special — something formless, empty, unfathomable, and even transcendental or mystical in nature. It transcends the body and the mind, it transcends the physical material world, it transcends thoughts and emotions. It is more fundamental than anything. It seems to be the ultimate fabric of reality itself.
When consciousness is directly recognized to this extent, it is obvious that consciousness is not a process or a substance or anything material or reducible for that matter – and it takes place in a completely different dimension from everything else — it’s not mediated by one particular sense or even by the cognitive faculty that thinks thoughts. It is a necessary condition for all of the senses and the mind, but it’s not identical to any of them. It’s something else altogether.
by Nova Spivack - Minding the Planet 
The particles and atoms in your body are “entangled” with each other: they receive and transmit information not just by biochemical means, but by the remarkable process known in quantum physics as “phase-conjugate quantum resonance.” Phase-conjugate quantum resonance is a term used by physicists that means that the particles are “non-locally entangled.” It is thanks to the existence of this ultrafast, ultrasubtle, but enormously efficient way of transmitting information that your body can be alive, and stay alive.
What’s revealed at the leading edge of quantum physics and quantum biology is that your body is not just a biochemical system: it’s also a “macroscopic quantum system.” Quantum systems were believed to exist only at the submicroscopic level, where quanta are in the state known as “coherent,” which means that they are able to get into synch with each other.
by Ervin Laszlo 
Biologist Glen Rein at the popular Institute of HeartMath, in Boulder Creek, California, conducted a study of people who entered a state of heartfelt appreciation or unconditional love, what he referred to as “heart consciousness.” He found that these people could actually alter the winding and unwinding of DNA (genetic material) in solution.
It did not matter whether the participants were holding the DNA in a test tube or not. By allowing their hearts to be full of positive and loving emotions, the participants in this study were able to affect DNA in a test tube!
What’s more: when the same people held loving feelings in their hearts, their heart rhythms became extremely coherent. Their electrocardiograms (ECGs) were analyzed by sophisticated frequency-analysis software. Whenever they held the loving, appreciative thoughts, their heart rhythms followed a more coherent rhythmic pattern.
Concentration, meditation, and learning to direct the mind according to your own will, prove that you are not your mind. Can the mind control itself, or does it need some higher power to control it? This leads you to realize that you are separate from the mind, otherwise how can you master it? It is you, the real you that is directing the mind. The ability to focus the mind or stop its activities in accordance with your willpower awakens the understanding that you are not your mind, and this is a great step toward self-realization. 
To a large extent consciousness has been dethroned from the central role it used to occupy in the study of our mental lives. Freud persuaded us that there is more going on mentally than we are consciously aware of, and that sometimes others can know more about what we are thinking and feeling than we do. Now we are also learning more and more from neuroscience and neurobiology about how much of what we do is the result of unconscious processes and mechanisms. And we are discovering that there are different levels of consciousness, different kinds of awareness, and that much of our thinking and decision-making can go on without it. So a more pressing question might be, what is consciousness for? Is it just a mere mental accompaniment to what is going to happen anyway? In that case it may be our sense of self and self-control that is most in need of revision.
by Barry Smith |
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