Category: Science

What is Consciousness?–Getting our Categories Straight and Asking the Right Questions

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I know some of you–perhaps many of you–have followed the work of Dr. Robert L. Kuhn on his TV and now Youtube programs “Closer to Truth.” If you have not visited the web site lately, it has been marvelously redesigned and Robert is ever at work with new horizons…see closertotruth.com.  The program looks at the broad categories of Cosmos, Consciousness, and Meaning, drawing upon a wide range of scientific, historical, and philosphical approaches.

I received the following from Robert this week and pass it along with his permission:

My comprehensive review of theories of consciousness, A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications, derived in part from Closer To Truth, was just published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology — and will appear in print in August.

In the paper, I seek an organizing framework for diverse theories of consciousness and to explore their impact on big questions. My central theses are twofold: (i) understanding consciousness at this point cannot be limited to selected ways of thinking or knowing, but should seek expansive yet rational diversity, and (ii) issues related to consciousness, such as AI consciousness, virtual immortality, meaning/purpose/value, life after death, free will, etc., cannot be understood except in the light of particular theories of consciousness. In addition, I want to present consciousness and its significance to broad scientific and scholarly communities.

The paper has good visibility in scientific circles. Any promotion in other communities via social media and/or personal networks welcome (but not expected).

I know Robert has worked on this harder than anything he has ever produced…and the results are remarkable.  I may have mentioned here before that I have a whole series of interviews with Dr. Kuhn which you can find very conveniently collected here: https://closertotruth.com/contributor/james-tabor/

On an even more personal note, I had Robert as a guest in the LAST university class I taught, capping off my 45 year career, when I “retired” in July 2022. Here is a recording of that class for those interested:

New Closer to Truth Web Site–The Best Thing out There!

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Dr. Robert L Kuhn’s newly designed Closer to Truth web site is truly stunningly done. Rich content, endless fascination…I know of nothing on the internet that compares. You can subscribe for free. Program content is also available on Youtube and via major Podcasts. If you are mainly interested in the “Big Questions” as I am, this is the BEST thing out there. Check it out.

Click on Image for 45s Introduction to the newly Designed Site

I am also very pleased to note my own contributor page has been wholly reorganized with videos I did not even remember I had done with Dr. Kuhn over the years, links to my books, and an updated Bio. Check it out here–a good place to start in diving into Closer to Truth!

James Tabor

 

John Dominic Crossan–Don’t Miss this Interview!

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Over the decades I have heard dozens of interviews with John Crossan, listened to his lectures, read his books, and spent time together in Jerusalem in 2007 with him and his wife Sarah, in endless conversation, visiting some of the “off the beaten tourist paths” places with Shimon Gibson. He and I have our differences on getting at the “historical Jesus,” but we agree on far more than we disagree, and I am happy to stand in his shadow and continue to listen and learn from him.

I just finished listening for the second time (!) to his recent two hour free-ranging interview with Youtube host Derek Lambert of Mythvision Podcast–which includes an hour of Q & A from viewers–really great questions. I have never heard him better–a wonderful combination of his personal experience, his latest insights on Jesus and early Christianity, but also deep dives into his broader theological, philosophical, and scientific outlook on our lives and history on planet earth at the wonderful age of 88, with his characteristic graciousness to all, sprinkled with his Irish wit and charm! Pure delight. Don’t miss it.

What really stood out for me, beyond the many excellent historical points about Jesus and earliest Christianity in its Roman contexts, were his existential perspectives about the process of “Evolution”–which I would equate to my own understanding of what has been called “Process Theism,” as per Whitehead and Hartshorne. Terms like God, Atheism, Theism, Theodicy, Eschatology–easily fail in common usage to reflect much precision of meaning, skewered as they are by . But all in all, Crossan’s vision of “Reality” as both transcendent and distributively “just”–in the way he lays things out, I find profoundly moving.

I usually try to chose categories for Blog posts from a topical “drop down” menu, but for this one I come up with a thick cluster: Death, Future, God, Historical Jesus, Horrors of History, La Condition Humanine, Philosophical Musings, Religion and History, the Bible, the Earth, Time…as I said, “wide-ranging”!

Here is the link–I hope you benefit from the accumulative scholarship and life wisdom of “Dom,” as I have:

The Day the Earth Died (Almost)

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Of his discovery, DePalma said, “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.”

The current issue of The New Yorker (April 8, 2019 print edition) has a “grippingly sobering” article by Douglas Preston titled “The Day the Dinosaurs Died.” No matter what you know of or have heard about this “event,” if we can minimize it with such a vapid characterization, one should read Preston’s account for its sheer art of narration–not to mention the remarkable discoveries of DePalma.

For we North Americans it hits “home” in a particularly disturbing way, since we are close to “Ground Zero” for the most cataclysmic disasters in our earth’s “recent” living history–namely the Yucatán peninsula. Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” should be watched and listened to monthly if not weekly by our  homo stultus species, and yet it comes across like a peaceful wave of nostalgic longing compared to the utterly TERRIFYING cosmic violence and chaos of our Solar “System.” Freud, Norman O. Brown, Becker, and Koestler, all had it right. We desperately “long to count” in our tiny little socially constructed perceptual “worlds” projected onto a “physical” reality that seems utterly dead to our longings and dreams. And yes, frightening “things happen” outside these Gates of Eden in the Land of Nod that yields only thorns and thistles. Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. Ah, but the Serpent me beguiled and I did eat. The Bible tells me so.

 

Some Thoughts on “Virtual Immortality” from Dr. Robert L. Kuhn

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Many of my readers know the extraordinary PBS program hosted by Dr. Robert Kuhn, “Closer to Truth.” Simply put, Kuhn explores the deepest questions of our existence related to Cosmos, Consciousness, and Meaning…

Here is one of Kuhn’s most provocative published articles titled “Virtual Immortality” published in Skeptic Magazine in 2016. I use it in my classes:

Kuhn - Virtual Immortality - Skeptic Magazine - 21-2 - 2016

On the Meaning of Life

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It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature’s secrets.

Pythagorus of Samos, 570-496 BCE

Can Human Brain Consciousness be Replicated?

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Robert Kuhn, an old friend, colleague, and producer of the amazing PBS program “Closer to Truth,” (see my own contributions here) has a most provocative piece at LiveScience titled: “The Singularity, Virtual Immortality and the Trouble with Consciousness.” Will science replicate the human brain and thus produce the phenomenon we all experience our conscious “inner-self,”–what Plato and Freud called the “Ego”?

According to techno-futurists, the exponential development of technology in general and artificial intelligence (“AI”) in particular — including the complete digital replication of human brains — will radically transform humanity via two revolutions. The first is the “singularity,” when artificial intelligence will redesign itself recursively and progressively, such that AI will become vastly more powerful than human intelligence (“superstrong AI”). The second revolution will be “virtual immortality,” when the fullness of our mental selves can be uploaded perfectly to nonbiological media (such as silicon chips), and our mental selves will live on beyond the demise of our fleshy, physical bodies.

AI singularity and virtual immortality would mark a startling, transhuman world that techno-futurists envision as inevitable and perhaps just over the horizon. They do not question whether their vision can be actualized; they only debate when will it occur, with estimates ranging from 10 to 100 years. [Artificial Intelligence: Friendly or Frightening?]

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