Ah - back to "The Irreducible Mind" - of which, my Kindle tells me, I am only 40% through -
The path taken by the authors is academic, exhaustive, and at time tortuous. There is a reason for this, and a good one - the conclusion that they are aiming for - that is, that there are unknown powers and even individual life after death - is fraught with skepticism and outright mockery - not by myself or many of the readers, but by the mainstream scientific community. It is this community that requires the tortuous proof. And yet the authors know that they will persuade few; without the use of sarcasm, they clearly show that the world view of the empirical scientist is as obstinate to change as that of the most fervent of religious believers. It is the young, the undergraduate and graduate students they wish to persuade before it is too late, not because they fear for anyone's immortal soul, but because they want an expanded field of inquiry which will enable us to gain knowledge about the whole which can only be done by including the unusual, the weird, or the generally hidden (odd dreams, unusual coincidence, visits from the "the other side," etc). And so we come to the idea of the "homonucleus" when discussing such things as intentionality and memory.
Think of memory - what is your conception of it? I bet it's the same as mine, which is the same as most psychologists and neuropsychologists; that is, a memory storage area, like file cabinets or, for many nowadays, electronic computer storage. But here's the problem: to retrieve the information requires someone behind the retrieval, with both the intention of what he wants and knowledge of where the information is stored. Thus comes the idea of an infinite regression, or of one being inside another inside another. This being is called the "homonucleus", or smaller being in a larger one, and it of course does not solve the problem of the empirical scientist. Who is the intendor? Where are HIS memory files of the memory files?
The answers I think the authors are looking for are revealed in these statements (of generality, they admit) they quote by psychologist Henry Bergson: that the conscious "overflows" the organism; that the brain is the "point of insertion of mind in matter." That is, that consciousness is all around us, not dependent on the brain, but rather using the brain to be actualized in our dimension of understanding (or becomes us by the intersection of mind and matter).
There will be much, much more on this in the book; but we can see the general direction, which has been stated by many experimental quantum theorists such as Ervin Lazlo: that is, that the universe is information, and that we are loci in that information web. For the purpose of this book, following Fred Myers, that would make after-death awareness or survival possible, if not very different. We shall see what things new come in the next 500 pages. FK
The path taken by the authors is academic, exhaustive, and at time tortuous. There is a reason for this, and a good one - the conclusion that they are aiming for - that is, that there are unknown powers and even individual life after death - is fraught with skepticism and outright mockery - not by myself or many of the readers, but by the mainstream scientific community. It is this community that requires the tortuous proof. And yet the authors know that they will persuade few; without the use of sarcasm, they clearly show that the world view of the empirical scientist is as obstinate to change as that of the most fervent of religious believers. It is the young, the undergraduate and graduate students they wish to persuade before it is too late, not because they fear for anyone's immortal soul, but because they want an expanded field of inquiry which will enable us to gain knowledge about the whole which can only be done by including the unusual, the weird, or the generally hidden (odd dreams, unusual coincidence, visits from the "the other side," etc). And so we come to the idea of the "homonucleus" when discussing such things as intentionality and memory.
Think of memory - what is your conception of it? I bet it's the same as mine, which is the same as most psychologists and neuropsychologists; that is, a memory storage area, like file cabinets or, for many nowadays, electronic computer storage. But here's the problem: to retrieve the information requires someone behind the retrieval, with both the intention of what he wants and knowledge of where the information is stored. Thus comes the idea of an infinite regression, or of one being inside another inside another. This being is called the "homonucleus", or smaller being in a larger one, and it of course does not solve the problem of the empirical scientist. Who is the intendor? Where are HIS memory files of the memory files?
The answers I think the authors are looking for are revealed in these statements (of generality, they admit) they quote by psychologist Henry Bergson: that the conscious "overflows" the organism; that the brain is the "point of insertion of mind in matter." That is, that consciousness is all around us, not dependent on the brain, but rather using the brain to be actualized in our dimension of understanding (or becomes us by the intersection of mind and matter).
There will be much, much more on this in the book; but we can see the general direction, which has been stated by many experimental quantum theorists such as Ervin Lazlo: that is, that the universe is information, and that we are loci in that information web. For the purpose of this book, following Fred Myers, that would make after-death awareness or survival possible, if not very different. We shall see what things new come in the next 500 pages. FK
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