Bio: Dada Gunamuktananda has trained in meditation, yoga and natural health sciences in Australia, the Philippines and India. He has been a meditation teacher of Ananda Marga since 1995 and has taught and lectured on meditation in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.
www.anandamarga.org
Title: Consciousness : The Final Frontier
Synopsis: The exploration of inner space, our own consciousness, is ultimately connected to our discovery of outer space. Just as the world becomes a smaller place with increase in communication and transport technology, so the universe becomes a smaller place with the increase in meditation technology!
"To a physicalist, the conscious-realist mind-body problem might appear to be a bait and switch that dodges hard and interesting questions: What is consciousness for ? When and how did it arise in evolution ? How does it now arise from brain activity ? Now, the switch from the ontology of physicalism to the ontology of conscious realism changes the relevant questions. Consciousness is fundamental. So to ask what consciousness is for is to ask why something exists rather than nothing. To ask how consciousness arose in a physicalist evolution is mistaken. Instead we ask how the dynamics of conscious agents, when projected onto appropriate MUIs, yields current evolutionary theory as a special case. To ask how consciousness arises from brain activity is also mistaken. Brains are complex icons representing heterarchies of interacting conscious agents. So instead we ask how neurobiology serves as a user interface to such heterarchies. Conscious realism, it is true, dodges some tough mysteries posed by physicalism, but it replaces them with new, and equally engaging,
scientific problems.
Nobody explains everything. If you want to solve the mind-body problem you can take the physical as given and explain the genesis of conscious experience, or take conscious experience as given and explain the genesis of the physical. Explaining the genesis of conscious experience from the physical has proved, so far, intractable. Explaining the genesis of the physical from conscious experience has proved quite feasible. This is good news: We do not need a mutation that endows a new conceptual apparatus to transform the mind-body problem from a mystery to a routine scientific subject, we just need a change in the direction in which we seek an explanation. We can start with a mathematically precise theory of conscious agents and their interactions. We can, according to the norms of methodological naturalism, devise and test theories of how conscious agents construct physical objects and their properties, even space and time themselves. In the process we need relinquish no method or result of physicalist science, but instead we aim to exhibit each such result as a special case in a more comprehensive, conscious realist, framework."
One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.
The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.” He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.”
