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A Framework For Studying Consciousness, Jeremy Horne

CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century

Scholars have wrestled with "consciousness", one writer calling it the "hard problem". Some thirty-plus years after the Towards a Science of Consciousness, we do not seem to be any closer to an answer to "What is consciousness?". Seemingly irresolvable metaphysical problems are addressed by bootstrapping, provisional assumptions, not unlike those used by logicians and mathematicians. I bootstrap with the same ontology and epistemology applicable to everything we apprehend. Here, I argue for a version of the unity of opposites, a form of neutral monism. Something exists because of what it is not; nothing can exist by itself, singularities (analogous to …