Just another link in the chain reaction of global creative expression.
Attention can be delicious. But I always feel like I’m very busy. And I am, but I’m also not always very efficient. So, it takes me longer to do some things than it takes some others to do the same things. In an effort to increase my efficiency sometimes I do things like read an article while I eat. Usually, that’s OK and I never thought much about it until I found, while reading an article once, that I couldn’t taste something I’d never tried before.
…or can we?
I once invited a fellow musician to jam with me by a waterfall. I thought it would be cool. She was a classically trained violinist and I brought along my acoustic guitar. We found a good spot, close enough to the falls to have the scenic beauty, but far enough away to not be deafened and have it drown out the sound of our unamplified instruments.
I told her I would play a progression in E Minor. As a heavy metal guitarist from Continue reading “We Can Jam If We Want To”
Sh!
All we ever really deal with are models. To say a thing is or isn’t actually a thing could really be utter nonsense. Even the words ‘consciousness’ and ‘reality’ are just models. They are words that are part of a language that we developed and use to communicate our thoughts and ideas to one another. We all know this but it’s something that’s easy to take for granted.
I’m not trying to convince anyone of my beliefs about the nature of consciousness and reality (at least not yet 😊) I just want to bring more awareness to the idea that models of consciousness and reality are just that: models. Continue reading “Consciousness! It’s Only a Model”
For how long have we wondered what we are? Where we came from? Why we are here? Did Lucy wonder about these things over 3 million years ago? Do apes wonder about it? How about dolphins or dogs or pigs? Bacteria? I believe we owe this wonder to consciousness: the awareness of ourselves, our surroundings, and our place within it. The exact definition of consciousness may be debated by some, or many, but I think this will serve my purposes today. For at least a few millennia we, as a species, have been trying to figure out and describe what this is exactly. It has been proving very hard to pin down and some of the greatest minds we’ve known have set to work on figuring it out. Some approach it from a purely philosophical angle, others from a scientific one, and many from a religious or artistic standpoint. Some of them have even tried some combination of some or all of the above and then some.
Continue reading “On the Road to a Science of Consciousness”