-
459Six 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.
-
196The 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
-
174You 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
-
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
-
University of JohannesburgRegular Faculty
Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Physical Science |