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Psychology

Psychology

Consciousness

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Consciousness: Where We Are At, Imants Barušs Oct 2017

Consciousness: Where We Are At, Imants Barušs

Psychology

It is useful every couple of years to take a bird’s eye view of consciousness studies and reflect on what we see. When I look, I still see two streams, one of which is the social and political framework for the study of consciousness, and the other of which is the substance of what we know about consciousness. The former is still largely defined by the extent to which the scientific study of consciousness has been freed from a materialist agenda. The latter includes recent research into the clarity of cognitive functioning in the absence of sufficient neurological support for …


Speculations About The Direct Effects Of Intention On Physical Manifestation, Imants Barušs Jan 2009

Speculations About The Direct Effects Of Intention On Physical Manifestation, Imants Barušs

Psychology

A possible mechanism by which mental acts may be synchronized with physical states is postulated. It is argued that a layer of deep consciousness, similar to David Bohm’s implicate order, underlies and gives rise to both subjective, intentional consciousness and objective, physical manifestation. The influence of volition at the level of intentional consciousness can be conceptualized in the context of the Kochen-Specker theorem as the exercise of the unconstrained choice of observables, and, at the level of deep consciousness, as modulation of the activity of the creation and annihilation operators of a quantum field. The discrete nature of observations …


Quantum Theories Of Consciousness, Imants Barušs Jan 2006

Quantum Theories Of Consciousness, Imants Barušs

Psychology

The assumption is often made in conventional cognitive science that consciousness is a computational process resulting from macroscopic neural activity as described by classical physics. That assumption has been questioned both because it has been unsuccessful in explaining consciousness and because it is based on outdated ideas about the nature of matter. More contemporary quantum theories may be more successful for understanding cognition. For example, Mari Jibu, Kunio Yasue, and Yasushi Takahashi have proposed a theory of memory as a spinor field underlying cortical dipoles in which quantum mechanical tunnelling instantiates memory decay and in which the creation of Goldstone …


The Art Of Science: Science Of The Future In Light Of Alterations Of Consciousness, Imants Barušs Jan 2001

The Art Of Science: Science Of The Future In Light Of Alterations Of Consciousness, Imants Barušs

Psychology

In presenting the data concerning altered states of consciousness in an even-handed manner, I have found that I cannot at the outset assume that materialism is the correct theory of reality. As demonstrated by survey data, the beliefs about consciousness and reality of academics and scientists who could write about consciousness in the academic literature range along a material-transcendent dimension from materialist through conservatively transcendent to extraordinarily transcendent positions, each with its corresponding notions of consciousness and proper methodology. Scientists need to undertake a process of self-examination in order to determine their personal beliefs and learn to set them aside …


Overview Of Consciousness Research, Imants Barušs Jan 2000

Overview Of Consciousness Research, Imants Barušs

Psychology

The purpose of this paper is to orient the reader to the contemporary scientific study of consciousness. One of the most noticeable features of research concerning consciousness is that there are three domains of discourse, the physiological, computational and experiential, each with its own methodology, and concerns. While confusion is often expressed about what it is that one is discussing, there are four main categories of definitions of the term consciousness: consciousness is the registration, processing and acting on information; behavioural consciousness is the explicit knowledge of one's situation, mental states or actions as demonstrated by one's behaviour; subjective consciousness …


Beliefs About Consciousness And Reality Of Participants At ‘Tucson Ii’, Imants Barušs, Robert J. Moore Jan 1998

Beliefs About Consciousness And Reality Of Participants At ‘Tucson Ii’, Imants Barušs, Robert J. Moore

Psychology

In previous studies we had found correlations between the material-transcendent dimension underlying the Western intellectual tradition and the diversity of ideas concerning consciousness. In the course of our work we developed the Beliefs About Consciousness and Reality Questionnaire that could be used for measuring fundamental beliefs about consciousness and reality. A survey of participants at the scientific meeting Toward a Science of Consciousness 1996 “Tucson II” was conducted using this questionnaire. Results from 212 respondents indicated scores substantially in the transcendent direction, both for scales underlying the questionnaire as well as for some of its individual items, relative to a …


Measurement Of Beliefs About Consciousness And Reality, Imants Barušs, Robert J. Moore Jan 1992

Measurement Of Beliefs About Consciousness And Reality, Imants Barušs, Robert J. Moore

Psychology

No abstract provided.