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Antti Revonsuo and Krista Tarkko
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Binding In Dreams abstract
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Jeffrey Hershfield
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A Note on the Possibility of Silicon Brains and Fading Qualia
abstract
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Ronald Lee Johnson
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Poetics of Emptiness abstract
POETRY
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Joseph Goguen
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Perception
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Ivo Mosley
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Baal
CONFERENCE REPORTS
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Bill Faw
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Search for ‘Facts’, ‘Truth’ or ‘Enlightenment’: You get them all in the
Big Tent of Tucson 2002 — and Quantum too! full
text
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Steven Ravett Brown
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On Conference Styles: Personal Reflections Provoked by ASSC–6
full text
CORRIGENDA
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Typographical corrections to the paper by W.L. Miranker, ‘A quantum state
model of consciousness’, JCS, 9, No. 3 (2002)
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REVIEW ARTICLES AND BOOK REVIEWS
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J. Andrew Ross
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First-Person Consciousness: Honderich and McGinn Reviewed
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Arkady Plotnitsky
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The Quantum Brain and Its Doubles: Review of Giuseppe Vitiello’s My
Double Unveiled
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Douglas Meehan
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G. Aschersleben, T. Bachmann & J. Müssler (ed.), Cognitive
Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events
Douglas Meehan
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Seán Ó Nualláin (ed.), Spatial Cognition
Tim Bayne
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Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will
ABSTRACTS
Jeffrey Hershfield
A Note on the Possibility of Silicon Brains and Fading Qualia
John Searle and David Chalmers have each invoked the silicon-brain thought
experiment, though to very different effect. Searle uses the possibility
of silicon brains to argue that there is no ontological connection between
consciousness and causal/functional role. Chalmers, on the other hand,
thinks the possibility of silicon brains is grounds for positing a nomological
connection between functional structure and consciousness (the principle
of organizational invariance). In this article I attempt to explain how
they manage to draw such divergent conclusions from the very same thought
experiment. I argue that Searle’s hypothesis of the Background coupled
with the connection principle militate against his own interpretation of
the silicon-brain thought experiment. This leaves him with no alternative,
in his bid to undermine the principle of organizational invariance, but
to assume the role of the apostate and disavow the silicon-brain thought
experiment.
Correspondence: Jeffrey Hershfield, Department of Philosophy, Wichita
State University, 1845 North Fairmount, Campus Box 74, Wichita, KS 67260-0074,
USA. Email: hershfie@twsuvm.uc.twsu.edu
Ronald Lee Johnson
Poetics of Emptiness
Mysticism and the search for experiences of expanded consciousness
are nothing new to the modern era, although their incorporation into the
academic world is shakier. Robert Forman, writing in this journal, calls
mysticism his ‘somewhat unusual but increasingly accepted field’ (Forman,
1998, p. 185) Forman calls the prima facie experience of mysticism the
‘pure consciousness event’ (PCE) where the practitioner becomes ‘utterly
silent inside, as though in a gap between thoughts’. During this event,
one becomes ‘completely perception and thought- free’. He defines the pure
consciousness event as ‘a wakeful, but contentless . . . consciousness’
(p. 186).
These experiences are reported in virtually all religious traditions.
In Buddhism the essence of this state is captured in the term Sunyata,
usually translated as ‘emptiness’, and Forman equates the PCE with ‘sunyata’
and ‘emptiness’ in his article (p. 190). The purpose of this present paper,
which looks to literature more than religion, is to identify a number of
poems and poets that speak directly to this state, and to propose that
poetry writing and reading can even produce this state.
Correspondence: rlj@pdx.edu
Antti Revonsuo and Krista Tarkko
Binding in Dreams. The Bizarreness of Dream Images and the Unity of Consciousness
Binding can be described at three different levels: In neuroscience it
refers to the integration of single-cell activities to form functional
neural assemblies, especially in response to global stimulus properties;
in cognitive science it refers to the integration of distributed modular
input processing to form unified representations for memory and action,
and in consciousness studies it refers to the unity of phenomenal consciousness
(Revonsuo, 1999). To describe and explain the unity of consciousness, detailed
phenomenological descriptions of binding at the phenomenal level and clarification
of the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms are required. The disunity
of consciousness during dreaming is a fruitful avenue to study phenomenal
binding and its mechanisms. The notion of the ‘bizarreness’ of dreams is
closely related to the concept of ‘binding’: bizarreness can be reconceptualized
as referring to different types of unusual combinations of features in
the binding of dream images coherently together. The present study concentrates
on the representation of human characters and the bizarreness found in
these representations. We developed a rating scale that distinguishes different
types of bizarreness on the basis of the unusual combinations of elements
that are manifested in dream images. The data consisted of 592 dream reports
in the home-based dream diaries of 52 students. The results indicate that
about half of the human characters appearing in our dreams contain bizarre
elements, and that certain types of bizarreness are more frequent than
others. Phenomenal features intrinsic to the representation of a person
(visual outlook, familiarity, semantic knowledge) are less frequently bizarre
than is the external relation between the person and the context (for example,
the place). Thus, binding the local features of a representation coherently
together appears to be less prone to errors than binding several different
information streams together into a coherent phenomenal model of the world.
Correspondence: Antti Revonsuo, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department
of Philosophy, University of Turku, FIN-20014, Turku, Finland.
Email: antti.revonsuo@utu.fi
