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303Everything I Believe Might Be a Delusion. Whoa! Tucson 2004: Ten years on, and are we any nearer to a Science of Consciousness?Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (12): 68-88. 2004.Having agreed to review Tucson 2004, I am embarrassed to admit that I fell asleep eight times during the conference. This cannot have been entirely due to jet lag as I only fell asleep once in 1998, twice in 2000, and four times in 2002. It seems to be a geometric progression correlating with elapsed time. As this was the tenth anniversary conference several speakers indulged in nostalgic reminiscences, but I thought that readers of JCS might prefer a less rose-tinted account which, among other …Read more
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2142Social mirrors and shared experiential worldsJournal of Consciousness Studies 8 (4): 3-36. 2001.We humans have a formidable armamentarium of social display behaviours, including song-and-dance, the visual arts, and role-play. Of these, role-play is probably the crucial adaptation which makes us most different from other apes. Human childhood, a sheltered period of ‘extended irresponsibility’, allows us to develop our powers of make-believe and role-play, prerequisites for human cooperation, culture, and reflective consciousness. Social mirror theory, originating with Dilthey, Baldwin, Cool…Read more
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163Science and Spirit in StockholmJournal of Consciousness Studies 18 (7-8): 7-8. 2011.I find it hard to say whether TSC this year was the most balanced or the most biased since the first I attended in 1998. That year there were 35 plenary talks, of which 27 were distinctly materialist — that is, they assumed that consciousness ‘arises’ from ‘physical’ processes in the brain. This year there were also 35 plenaries, with 24 devoted to physicalist accounts. I cannot claim absolute precision for these figures, because it is not always easy to make black-and-white distinctions. Resear…Read more
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24How collective representations can change the structure of the brainJournal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11): 43-57. 2008.Culture not only influences human psychology and perceptions of self, others and reality, it also, in certain contexts, influences the quality and degree of consciousness itself. If the brain gives shape to consciousness, then we would expect culture to have a corresponding impact on the functional anatomy and microstructure of the brain. The concept of 'collective representations', as developed by Durkheim, refers to the often crucial components of human life that have meaningful existence only…Read more
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764Six Keynote Papers on Consciousness with some Comments on their Social Implications: TSC Conference, Hong Kong, 10-14 June 2009Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (1-2): 217-227. 2010.Six keynote papers presented at TSC 2009 — by Susan Greenfield, Wolf Singer, Stuart Hameroff, Jonathan Schooler, Hakwan Lau, and David Chalmers—are reviewed below in order to investigate to what extent social analysis can be usefully applied in different areas of consciousness studies. The six papers did not ostensibly address social aspects of consciousness; nevertheless I hope to show that it is often beneficial to consider the possible social implications in any consciousness- related work.
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200The human revolution: Editorial introduction to 'honest fakes and language origins' by Chris KnightJournal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11): 226-235. 2008.It is now more than twenty years since Knight (1987) first presented his paradigm-shifting theory of how and why the ‘human revolution’ occurred — and had to occur — in modern humans who, as climates dried under ice age conditions and African rainforests shrank, found themselves surrounded by vast prairies and savannahs, with rich herds of game animals roaming across them. The temptation for male hunters, far from any home base, to eat the best portions of meat at the kill site — as do other soc…Read more
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179You Do an Empirical Experiment and You Get an Empirical Result. What Can Any Anthropologist Tell Me That Could Change That?Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11): 7-41. 2008.Do you think the quotation in my title is reasonable or unreasonable? I find it unreasonable, but I know that many will not. Two people can react to the same idea, opinion, or data in opposite ways, and the reasons for this are often ideological. Ideology always has a political origin — in this case perhaps reflecting turf wars, career promotion, self-legitimation, the privileged status of science in post-industrial societies, and the need to say the right things in order to get research …Read more
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36The neural correlates of work and play: What brain imaging research and animal cartoons can tell us about social displays, self-consciousness, and the evolution of the human brainJournal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11): 93-121. 2008.Children seem to have a profound implicit knowledge of human behaviour, because they laugh at Bugs Bunny cartoons where much of the humour depends on animals behaving like humans and our intuitive recognition that this is absurd. Scientists, on the other hand, have problems defining what this 'human difference' is. I suggest these problems are of cultural origin. For example, the industrial revolution and the protestant work ethic have created a world in which work is valued over play, object in…Read more
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University of JohannesburgRegular Faculty
Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Physical Science |