Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards Jr. (1745–1801) was a White congregationalist theologian who grew up in Massachusetts but spent most of his career in Connecticut, where he worked as a pastor. He was the son of the prominent theologian Jonathan Edwards Sr. This chapter is an excerpt from a pamphlet which, as its full title explains, contains “A sermon preached before the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and for the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage, at their annual meeting in New Haven, September 15, 1791.” It rebuts several common defenses of slavery and examines the negative effects of slavery on enslavers, enslaved people, and society as a whole. Edwards also expresses deeply racist ideas, describing the prospect of Black and White people intermarrying after abolition as utterly “mortifying.” This is an instructive example of how even abolitionists are not always committed to racial equality.

The idea that individual nerve cells might have conscious experiences has been around ever since cells were identified in the seventeenth century, but in the era of modern neuroscience the case for individual human neuronal experience has received little attention. A series of arguments will be presented suggesting that all the human conscious experiences that we talk about are events in individual neurons, not global to the brain or organism. We conclude that cellular consciousness is the only plausible way to explain ‘our’ experiences within current physics and biology, however implausible it might at first seem. This implies that our experiences are multiple in space as well as time, consistent with the neuroscience watchword that there is ‘no single place where everything comes together in the brain’. The central argument is that events of experience must involve rich integration of information and individual neurons are the only places in brains where integration of information occurs. Any more global ‘binding’ is neither required nor physically possible. The detailed nature of events of integration of signals in a neuron’s dendrites remains uncertain but recent developments provide some candidates.

The Consensus Statement of the Third International Congress on Concussion in Sport in November 2008 defined concussion as a “complex pathophysiologic process affecting the brain, induced by traumatic biochemical forces.” Definitions of concussion vary slightly between various professional organizations of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and orthopedic surgeons, but all share the common characteristics of trauma affecting the head or body resulting in transient neurologic deficits or symptoms. Underlying the symptoms of concussion is a complex pathophysiologic process at the cellular level. While concussion is typically thought of as resulting from a direct impact to the head, a concussion can also be sustained as a result of an impact to the body causing the force of the impact to be transmitted to and absorbed by the brain.