Contents

REFEREED PAPERS

Benny Shanon
Ayahuasca Visualizations: A Structural Typology  abstract
Barry Dainton
The Gaze of Consciousness  abstract
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Size, Power, Death: Constituents in the Making of Human Morality  abstract

CONFERENCE REPORTS

Rüdiger Vaas
Consciousness and Its Place In Nature: TSC Conference, Skövde, Sweden, August 2001  full text
Julian Candy
 Scientific and Spiritual Persepectives on Meditation: Beyond the Brain Conference, Ripon, UK, August 2001 full text

REVIEW ARTICLE AND BOOK REVIEWS

Gary Furhman
Methods, Maps & Transformations: Reflections on Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness,
  ed. Max Velmans
John McCrone
Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World
David Hodgson
 John R. Searle, Rationality In Action
Tuomo Jämsä
N. Praetorius, Principles of Cognition, Language and Action

ABSTRACTS

Barry Dainton

The Gaze of Consciousness

According to one influential view, consciousness has an awareness -- content structure: any experience consists of the awareness of some content. I focus on one version of this dualism, and argue that it should be rejected. My principal argument is directed at the status of the supposed contents of awareness; I argue that neither of the principal options is tenable, albeit for different reasons. Although the doctrine in question may seem to be supported by the findings of researchers in meditative traditions, I question whether this evidence supports the dualism that is my target here. To conclude, I introduce an innocuous mode of pure awareness.

Correspondence: Barry Dainton, Department of Philosophy, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK.

Benny Shanon

Ayahuasca Visualizations: A Structural Typology

This paper is part of an ongoing project devoted to the investigation of the psychotropic brew Ayahuasca from a cognitive–psychological perspective. This perspective contrasts with those of practically all investigations of Ayahuasca which pertain either to the natural sciences — notably botany, pharmacology, brain science and clinical medicine — or to anthropology. Here, I discuss the visualizations induced by Ayahuasca from a structural, as opposed to contentual, point of view. A typology of the structural forms in which visualizations may appear is drawn. Also examined are the various types of interaction a person can have with his/her visions and aspects pertaining to the semantics of visions and their narrative structure. The distinctions drawn are readily applicable to hallucinatory and visionary experiences induced by other agents and in other contexts. Thus, the present typology may be regarded as presenting the foundations for the cognitive–psychological study of such experiences at large.

Correspondence: B. Shanon, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, Email: msshanon@mscc.huji.ac.il

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Size, Power, Death. Constituents in the Making of Human Morality

The purpose of this paper is to show how size, power, and death are inter- related constituents of human morality and how, from this perspective, the roots of morality are submerged in an awareness and fear of death. A complete analysis of human morality would require a study of affinitive constituents of human morality, notably, empathy and play, and these from both an ontogenetic and phylogenetic perspective. The study here thus presents structural constituents of human morality from one side only.

The paper begins with a discussion of size as a biological marker of power. It then shows how vulnerability is a biological fact of life and how power is a bulwark against vulnerability. It goes on to identify ways in which the biological value of size, i.e., power, is culturally transformed and how, as transformed, it is tied to the biological fact of death. The paper draws critically and constructively on the work of researchers in evolutionary ethics and in cultural studies of evil and death. Major implications of the paper, discussed in the last section, show that pan-cultural dimensions of human nature cannot be omitted from investigations of human morality short of rendering the investigation incomplete at best and inaccurate at worst, or, in other words, that the uniquely human awareness and fear of death are impervious to any form of reductionism — whether genetic, neuronal, modular, algorithmic, or computational.

Correspondence: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Box 722, Yachats, OR 97498, USA.

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