WELCOME To The New SCR!
Welcome to the new edition of Science & Consciousness Review. I particularly want to thank Virgil Griffith, who programmed the new site and made it much easier to use, while Thomas Ramsøy and Sidney d’Mello faithfully kept the flow of SCR articles alive. Thomas was also deeply involved in developing SCR 2.0, and has now […]
Welcome to the new edition of Science & Consciousness Review.
I particularly want to thank Virgil Griffith, who programmed the new site and made it much easier to use, while Thomas Ramsøy and Sidney d’Mello faithfully kept the flow of SCR articles alive. Thomas was also deeply involved in developing SCR 2.0, and has now become a content editor. Dr. Uma Ramamurthy and Professor Stan Franklin gave helpful feedback. Finally, Professor Stu Hameroff was kind enough to invite us to add SCR to the website of the Center for Consciousness Stutdies at the University of Arizona.
Please give us your feedback! We can only know how SCR 2.0 is doing by your thoughtful comments. Please explore our site and tell us your feelings about the layout, features and content. You are invited to sign up for our newsletter, and to contribute to SCR articles — brief reviews of scientific publications about conscious experience. This is a good way for all of us to help create a common ground for the rebirth of consciousness studies. See our Author Instructions for more.
In the coming weeks we will be adding tutorial powerpoints, interesting links, lectures from the recent University of Arizona WebCourse on Consciousness, and much more. We also hope to have lively web seminars allowing online discussions with experts in the field.
Our goal is to encourage a healthy community of consciousness fans, people who are openminded skeptics. SCR isn’t mainly for those who believe they have all the answers, and it isn’t really for those who think there’s nothing to be discovered. Some of us work in the field, others are graduate students or undergrads, or simply lovers of the subject from all walks of life. All are warmly welcomed.
Consciousness is our common heritage. It is how we come to understand each other’s humanity, and it is also one of the major frontiers of science, as Science magazine just wrote, for its 125th anniversary edition. Even the arts are avenues for deepening our conscious experiences of musical sounds, visual sights, emotional feelings, ideas, people and narratives. Religious and philosophical thinkers have debated personal experience for a long, long time. Science is a latecomer, but it’s beginning to make up for lost time.
Scientists use public observations, but even they are conscious as private individuals. There is a tradition of excellent scientific observers of consciousness, from William James to Gustav Fechner, down to many people in the current revival of interest. A famous consciousness researcher recently worked with his wife to record and publish his experiences of having a pontine stroke; Alan Hobson’s report is a piece of heroic science, and we are thankful that Alan has recovered well. Here we simply note that Hobson’s reports about his experiences during a personal crisis were meant to explore new evidence about consciousness.
We are all walking experiments on consciousness!
It’s a ton of fun, a lot of work, and a great source of satisfaction. Please join us.
Thank God for getting this opportunity and hopefully other future opportunities to comment on other’s articles and even talk about my own subject that concerns us all, being myself included in Baars’s italicized “We”. His fully italicized sentence “We are all walking experiments on consciousness” is pertinently and significantly concluding his article. The sentence bears philosophy in each of its component words. Likewise, I want to make a special personal sentence after his to stand in parellel with this established philosopher’s sentence with his supposed permission:”I am a walking experiment on consciousness”, and apparently leaving the “We” on my will to enjoy my own special experiment alone. Soon, when I am invited by, to use a gentleman’s term, “friendly audience at one of Tuxon’s meetings” I will let you all know about my special “phenomenal experience”.
These two quoted terms in my previous sentence belong to the same gentleman, the established philosopher (psychologist) Mr. Patrick Wilken who used them in a couple of e-mail letters exchanged with him that proved to me the still available consciousness in the world, and that I can be listened to. Thanks to Wilken, Hameroff, Chalmers for their replying e-mails, and finally thank you Baars. With efforts of such people who are exerting efforts in the field, our hope to move toward a science of consciousness do grow.
I try to explain but you just dont understan. Rylee Janel.