James Michael Corrigan

Recently, the Berggruen Institutes’ Noema Magazine published a duo of articles on the ‘Hard Problem’ of Consciousness that are misleading, or misinformed, on a number of fronts. I point out these problems, and show how a more veridical account of this understanding has developed over the last 158 years, and might better inform the reader. The issues with these articles, that I raise, are not limited to the problem of consciousness, but illustrate why we are unable to understand, or respect, each other, and I argue that this is a major factor in the multiple catastrophes we are now living through. The problem of consciousness is our cognitive limitation to understand the problem. Many do not see a problem, for all is matter, they say. The author of the primary article in Noema Magazine, the physicist Carlo Rovelli, has decided to make the point clear: your soul is a material, not spiritual, aspect of your being, so there is no 'hard problem' of consciousness.

The nature of experience cannot be truly understood unless the form of experience is first seen clearly. “An Introduction to Awareness” is a philosophical journey that takes the reader into the heart of the presence of nondual reality – a reality in which the “spiritual” world and the “actual” world are not separate; in which the “physical” reality of science is a practical yet imaginative construction of causal mechanisms imposed by us upon the spontaneously creative, uncaused, manifestation of Nature – a way of thinking about the world that is useful for manipulating it, yet which is not truly real. This mechanistic way of seeing Reality comes at a great cost; one that we suffer from every day because we see ourselves as causal mechanisms too. We have accepted the mythology of science that asserts that we are separate from what we experience, that the forms of phenomenal existence are the serendipitous concretions of haphazard activity, and that the nature of a thing is nothing more than the mathematical expression of its statistical probabilities – that Nature has no soul. We have allowed this tool of practical reason – science – and this simplification of reality – mathematical modeling – to overwhelm the truth of our presence – this alive presence that we are. This book shows another way to view the world, another way to construct your thoughts about it, in order to realize the wholeness of absolute reality, while still retaining the practical means of living that the modern world has given us. It explains how to use concepts in a way that does not endanger a truer understanding of reality and our participation in it.

In this paper I describe a novel application of contemplative techniques to software engineering with the goal of augmenting the intellectual capabilities of knowledge workers within the field in four areas: flexibility, attention, creativity, and trust. The augmentation of software engineers’ intellectual capabilities is proposed as a third complement to the traditional focus of methodologies on the process and environmental factors of the software development endeavor. I argue that these capabilities have been shown to be open to improvement through the practices traditionally used in spiritual traditions, but now used increasingly in other fields of knowledge work, such as in the medical profession and the education field. Historically, the intellectual capabilities of software engineers have been treated as a given within any particular software development effort. This is argued to be an aspect ripe for inclusion within software development methodologies.