Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim (...) here to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium. (shrink)

In the last few years repeated scandals have rocked their worlds of many industries. Stories which have hit the headlines recently have included news of * Deliberate cheating by car makers to evade emissions tests * LIBOR and FX manipulation by bankers * Falsification of drug testing results plus allegations of bribery and corruption in major pharmaceutical corporations * Unlawful tapping of phones of the famous by newspapers * Cover-ups over high death rates in hospitals. While it is not always (...) obvious what has gone wrong, there is no disguising the widespread impact on many stakeholders, and the catastrophic loss of trust and sense of betrayal that results. Matt Nixon has had a privileged insider seat in several of the organizations which came to suffer major crises, crises which inspired deep emotional responses. (shrink)

[This is an edited and improved version of "You Are Not Your Brain: Against 'Teaching to the Brain'" previously published in *Review of Higher Education and Self-Learning* 5(15), Summer 2012.] Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation (...) for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community. (shrink)

Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the (...) person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community. (shrink)

Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against (...) this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) – all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In doing so, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination and if this relates to doing science. I conclude Whitehead's process philosophy falls short of allowing for the actual creative spontaneity of a dynamic (eternal) present. (shrink)

In this condensed survey, I look to recent perspectives on evolution suggesting that cultural change likely alters the genome. Since theories of development are nested within assumptions about evolution (evo-devo), I next review some oft-cited developmental theories and other psychological theories of the 20th century to see if any match the emerging perspectives in evolutionary theory. I seek theories based neither in nature (genetics) nor nurture (the environment) but in the creative play of human communication responding to necessity. This survey (...) finally looks to more recent work to do with the appearance of independent self-consciousness in the individual following empathic group awareness. The result of such self-created group awareness and symbolic communication is seen to be cultural consciousness, unique to humanity, from which individual consciousness and personhood derive. I conclude by noting the general implications for these approaches in our schools, politics, and in ultimate ontological questions. (shrink)

This paper focuses, not on the existing conditions of institutional association, but on hoped-for conditions that would have to be met for professional relationships within higher education to aspire to what Aristotle referred to as ?virtuous friendship?. Such relationships, it is argued, constitute the social content of hope in that they look to new perspectives on institutional renewal and professional regeneration. They provide a context of mutuality and reciprocity within which individuals can begin to realise, through the acquisition of ?functional (...) capabilities?, their particular capacities. The question then arises as to the conditions necessary for generating and sustaining such relationships within the increasingly differentiated and stratified institutional settings of the higher education sector and across an academic workforce that has become fractionalised and atomised around increasingly complex divisions of academic labour. It is that question which this paper seeks to address. ?Civil society is fragile, and it needs to be extended? (Hall, 1995, p. 27). (shrink)

We emerge into everythingness. The senses mingle incestuously. Nothing is distinct or differentiated. Everything is no-thing. How is it we come to be as distinct entities? Let me personalize: In what manner did I become an "I"? Is the motive force behind this much-maligned, much-altered, much-abused body my soul? my genes? me?

[This is a commentary article on Michel Bitbol's TA: "The Tangled Dialectic of Body and Consciousness: A Metaphysical Counterpart of Radical Neurophenomenology".] -/- A summary of the major metaphysical positions reveals them to be variable enough that they do not deny experience to the researcher. Further, Merleau-Ponty’s intra-ontology and related terms are fleshed out.

Terrence Deacon has constructed a tome in which he unleashes his considerable learning in quest of several answers to the question, "What are we?" He is uniquely qualified to take an approach which details the origin and development of, first, language, then the brain, and, lastly, their "co-evolution".

Book Review of 'Ethics and AIDS in Africa: The Challenge to Our Thinking' By Anton A. van Niekerk and Loretta M. Kopelman (Eds).

ABSTRACT Despite Institutional Review Board concerns about psychological harm arising from research participation, evidence from trauma-questionnaire research suggests that participation is typically well-tolerated by participants. Yet, it is unclear how participant experiences of in-lab trauma simulations align with IRB ethical guidelines. Thus, we compared reactions to a trauma film paradigm with reactions to a positive film task or cognitive tasks. Overall, relative to other conditions, the trauma film was well-tolerated by participants: they generally reported low-to-moderate negative emotions, moderate benefits, and (...) that participation was not worse than everyday stressors. Our results have implications for the research community in designing trauma-based research. (shrink)

Role models can be highly influential in conveying ethical standards. This study investigates the influence various categories of role models have had on a population of over 1,600 undergraduate students in Texas, Oregon and Michigan. Those identifying clergy, boy scout leaders, friends and college advisors as role models exhibited less willingness to adopt questionable ethical behavior in negotation situations. Journalist and spouse role models tended to cause students to be more accepting of questionable behavior. Individuals with strong end-result and social (...) contract ethical philosophies, as well as males and those who served in the military exhibited strong tendencies toward less than ethical behavior. Individuals with strong rule ethical philosophy, high levels of religiousity, and those with a cooperative attitude in negotiations tended to adopt higher ethical standards in negotiations. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Public accounting services AICPA's code of professional conduct Enforcement of the Code of Conduct Illustrative disciplinary actions Controversial ethical issues in the accounting profession Conclusion.

Medical school curricula, although traditionally and historically dominated by science, have generally accepted, appreciated, and welcomed the inclusion of literature over the past several decades. Recent concerns about medical professional formation have led to discussions about the specific role and contribution of literature and stories. In this article, we demonstrate how professionalism and the study of literature can be brought into relationship through critical and interrogative interactions based in the literary skill of close reading. Literature in medicine can question the (...) meaning of “professionalism” itself, thereby resisting standardization in favor of diversity method and of outcome. Literature can also actively engage learners with questions about the human condition, providing a larger context within which to consider professional identity formation. Our fundamental contention is that, within a medical education framework, literature is highly suited to assist learners in questioning conventional thinking and assumptions about various dimensions of professionalism. (shrink)

As it stands, Derrida’s protest is deficient in any sense of how the discourses of South African racism have been at once historically constituted and politically constitutive. For to begin to investigate how the representation of racial difference has functioned in South Africa’s political and economic life, it is necessary to recognize and track the shifting character of these discourses. Derrida, however, blurs historical differences by conferring on the single term apartheid a spurious autonomy and agency: “The word concentrates separation…. (...) By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation” . Is it indeed the word, apartheid, or is it Derrida himself, operating here in “another regime of abstraction” , removing the word from its place in the discourse of South African racism, raising it to another power, and setting separation itself apart? Derrida is repelled by the word, yet seduced by its divisiveness, the division in the inner structure of the term itself which he elevates to a state of being.The essay’s opening analysis of the word apartheid is, then, symptomatic of a severance of word from history. When Derrida asks, “Hasn’t apartheid always been the archival record of the unnameable?” , the answer is a straightforward no. Despite its notoriety and currency overseas, the term apartheid has not always been the “watchword” of the Nationalist regime. . It has its own history, and that history is closely entwined with a developing ideology of race which has not only been created to deliberately rationalize and temper South Africa’s image at home and abroad, but can also be seen to be intimately allied to different stages of the country’s political and economic development. Because he views apartheid as a “unique appellation” , Derrida has little to say about the politically persuasive function that successive racist lexicons have served in South Africa. To face the challenge of investigating the strategic role of representation, one would have to part ways with him by releasing that pariah of a word, apartheid, from its quarantine from historical process, examining it instead in the context of developing discourses of racial difference. Anne McClintock is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. She is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British imperial culture and is the author of a monograph on Simon de Beauvoir. Rob Nixon, in the same program at Columbia, is working on the topic of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. (shrink)

Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences—and the relations between the elements they comprise—are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the learning of sequences are rarely investigated. We present three experiments that seek to examine these mechanisms during a typing task. Experiments 1 and 2 tested learning during typing single letters on each trial. (...) Experiment 3 tested for “chunking” of these letters into “words.” The results of these experiments were used to examine the mechanisms that could best account for them, with a focus on two particular proposals: statistical transitional probability learning and discriminative error-driven learning. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that error-driven learning was a better predictor of response latencies than either n-gram frequencies or transitional probabilities. No evidence for chunking was found in Experiment 3, probably due to interspersing visual cues with the motor response. In addition, learning occurred across a greater distance in Experiment 1 than Experiment 2, suggesting that the greater predictability that comes with increased structure leads to greater learnability. These results shed new light on the mechanism responsible for sequence learning. Despite the widely held assumption that transitional probability learning is essential to this process, the present results suggest instead that the sequences are learned through a process of discriminative learning, involving prediction and feedback from prediction error. (shrink)

The article reflects upon the observational practices and methods developed by the early exponents of ethology committed to naturalistic field study and explores how their approaches and techniques influenced a wider field of popular natural-history filmmaking and photography. In doing so, my focus is upon three aspects of ethological field studies: the socio-technical devices used by ethologists to bring birds closer to them, the distinctive observational and representational practices which they forged, and the analogies they used to codify behaviour. This (...) assemblage of elements included hides or screens from which to watch wild birds without disturbing them, optics to extend human vision, pens and paper to sketch and fix patterns of behaviour, watches to record timings, photography to capture action and freeze movement, and illustration and photographs to visualize behaviour. Carried through natural-history networks, the practices, methods and theories of ethologists like Huxley and Tinbergen influenced popular natural-history filmmaking and photography more broadly from the 1940s, driving a behavioural turn in these cultural practices. This popularization of the ‘ethological eye’ was further facilitated by the convergence of socio-technical devices, forms of observation and dramatization in the work of the early exponents of naturalistic field studies of birds and the popular filmmakers. (shrink)

This paper considers the nature of learning and the role of institutions in general and schools in particular in structuring learning. It outlines and commends a view of learning as a process whereby we discover ourselves as persons and thereby act to create the contexts in which we live and work. Central to this view is the idea of the 'learning school'.

This paper considers the nature of learning and the role of institutions in general and schools in particular in structuring learning. It outlines and commends a view of learning as a process whereby we discover ourselves as persons and thereby act to create the contexts in which we live and work. Central to this view is the idea of the 'learning school'.

By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans (...) underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realization of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as "the world" – as opposed to our immediate natural environment and that of other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness. (shrink)

Humanización de los servicios de salud en Iberoamérica: una revisión sistemática de la literatura Humanização dos serviços de saúde na Ibero-América: uma revisão sistemática da literatura Humanization is an ethical imperative that contributes to safeguarding human dignity in harmony with bioethical principles and deontological regulations that govern health care practices. The present study aims to explore the advances in the humanization of Ibero-American health care in the last ten years through a systematic review. Results show that such advances point to (...) understanding the phenomenon based on theoretical approaches, a growing interest in the subject in recent years, and the creation of policies, programs and strategies that should be strengthened from a comprehensive view of the human being. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Carlosama DM, Villota NG, Benavides VK, Villalobos-Galvis FH, Hernández EL, Matabanchoy SM. Humanización de los servicios de salud en Iberoamérica: una revisión sistemática de la literatura. Pers Bioet. 2019;23:245-262. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2019.23.2.6 Recibido: 21/06/2019 Aceptado: 04/09/2019. (shrink)

This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities (...) and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural protolanguage learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object – of self and world – the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being. -/- Looking beyond human self-consciousness to investigate the origin and nature of awareness itself in Part 2, reductive objective materialism is found to be of little use. Direct experience also falls short in that, in order to be transformed into objective knowledge about itself, it must always be interpreted through and limited by the symbolic contexts of culture and the idiosyncratic conceptualizations of the individual. Awareness-in-itself must thus be considered ultimately unexplainable, but this may more indicate its inexpressible transcendence of all symbolic qualifiers than its nonexistence. It is suggested that awareness is not “self-aware” (as in deity) but is instead unknowing yet identical with the only true universal: the impetus of creative unfolding. Our human knowledge, as an expression of this unfolding, is seen to emerge from our conscious experiencing and, in turn, to have the power – and enormous responsibility – of directing that experience. Our underlying symbolic worldviews are found to be autopoietic: They limit or open our conscious experience, which, in turn, confirms those worldview expectations. As we explore a future of unforeseeable technological breakthroughs on an ailing planet who patiently copes with our “success,” truly vital decisions about the nature, meaning, extent, and future of conscious experience will have to be made. (shrink)

Herein, I review the shattering moment in my life when I awoke from the dream of self to find being as part of the living world and not in my head, discovering my perspectival center to be literally everywhere. Since awakening to the world takes one beyond thought and language thus also beyond the symbolic construction of time, it is strange to place this event and its aftermath as happening long ago in my life. It is forever present. This fact (...) puts into question the reality of my daily journey from dawn to dusk with all the mundane tasks I must complete. My linear march into aging and death inexorably continues, yet it seems somehow unreal, worth a smile as the inevitable changes ensue. Still, I write of the events leading up to my time out of mind and then review the serious repercussions that followed when I was drawn back into ego only to find I did not have the conceptual tools or the maturity to understand what had occurred. I close by looking back with theories that might explain what happened. I am now ready to allow the memory to sink into peaceful oblivion and reference it from within my mind no more. Ironically, the memory itself with its façade of knowledge may prevent me from a new, unexpected mystical experience. Only by forgetting can I hope to leave a crack in the verbal armament of self, so the world soul may break through and free me once again. (shrink)

The economic theory of the consumer, which assumes individual satisfaction as its goal and individual freedom to pursue satisfaction as its sine qua non, has become an important ideological element in political economy. Some have argued that the political dimension of economics has evolved into a kind of “secular theology” that legitimates free market capitalism, which has become a kind of “religion” in the United States [Nelson: 1991, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics. (Rowman & Littlefield (...) Publishers, Inc, Savage, Maryland); 2001, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania); Thurow: 1983, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics (Random House, New York); Milbank: 1990, Theology and Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason (Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts)]. Consumer theory in its ideological form provides an important base for this religion and is no longer merely a positive framework for understanding consumer choice or estimating market demand. The paper explores the view of the human being, the “anthropology,” that is implicit in the economic theory of the consumer and compares its “theological” implications with the corresponding theological anthropologies in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The paper outlines the assumptions of consumer theory and then focuses on three aspects of the theory from a critical theological perspective: the individual in community, property ownership, and human destiny (or “eschatology” in theological terminology). The principal conclusion is that consumer theory, viewed from this perspective, leads to a reductionist and existentially harmful view of human beings. The maximization of individual satisfaction raises genuine ethical issues when viewed as a political and religious value. The paper argues that the issues could be ameliorated if economists would include more explicit treatment of a social dimension and ethical alternatives in consumer theory and if theologians would give greater attention to economic theory. (shrink)

The economic theory of the consumer, which assumes individual satisfaction as its goal and individual freedom to pursue satisfaction as its sine qua non, has become an important ideological element in political economy. Some have argued that the political dimension of economics has evolved into a kind of "secular theology" that legitimates free market capitalism, which has become a kind of "religion" in the United States [Nelson: 1991, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics. ; 2001, Economics (...) as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond ; Thurow: 1983, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics ; Milbank: 1990, Theology and Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason ]. Consumer theory in its ideological form provides an important base for this religion and is no longer merely a positive framework for understanding consumer choice or estimating market demand. The paper explores the view of the human being, the "anthropology," that is implicit in the economic theory of the consumer and compares its "theological" implications with the corresponding theological anthropologies in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The paper outlines the assumptions of consumer theory and then focuses on three aspects of the theory from a critical theological perspective: the individual in community, property ownership, and human destiny. The principal conclusion is that consumer theory, viewed from this perspective, leads to a reductionist and existentially harmful view of human beings. The maximization of individual satisfaction raises genuine ethical issues when viewed as a political and religious value. The paper argues that the issues could be ameliorated if economists would include more explicit treatment of a social dimension and ethical alternatives in consumer theory and if theologians would give greater attention to economic theory. (shrink)

Among the most significant findings of SUPPORT was that 50% of ICU patients suffered from moderate to severe pain during the last days of life. At the time of its publication late in 1995, SUPPORT was merely the latest in a long series of articles in the medical literature documenting the widespread and significant undertreatment of pain, beginning with a 1973 study of hospital inpatients. Much has been written about the phenomenon of undertreated pain and inadequate care of patients at (...) the end of life, and many positive suggestions for reform of clinical education and clinical practice have been iterated and reiterated in the two decades separating the studies. Proposals for modifying clinician behaviors in this aspect of patient care have tended to focus on particular barriers to effective pain management and palliative care. (shrink)

The ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ conference – which has now become ‘The Science of Consciousness’ conference – recently (June 5-10, 2017) took place instead at the receptive venue of the Hyatt Regency in La Jolla, California. It was well-planned and organized, which is extraordinary considering that it had to be organized all over again within a month or two when the original Shanghai location was cancelled. Things ran smoothly at La Jolla and it was well attended for an odd-year, (...) non-Tucson setting. The Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, and his able Assistant Director and logistics manager, Abi Behar Montefiore, deserve full credit for carrying off this last minute transfer, as do many others who worked in supporting capacities. (shrink)

In what follows, I suggest that, against most theories of time, there really is an actual present, a now, but that such an eternal moment cannot be found before or after time. It may even be semantically incoherent to say that such an eternal present exists since “it” is changeless and formless (presumably a dynamic chaos without location or duration) yet with creative potential. Such a field of near-infinite potential energy could have had no beginning and will have no end, (...) yet within it stirs the desire to experience that brings forth singularities, like the one that exploded into the Big Bang (experiencing itself through relative and relational spacetime). From the perspective of the eternal now of near-infinite possibilities (if such a sentence can be semantically parsed at all), there is only the timeless creative present, so the Big Bang did not happen some 13 billion years ago. Inasmuch as there is neither time past nor time future nor any time at all at the null point of forever, we must understand the Big Bang (and all other events) as taking place right here and now. In terms of the eternal now, the beginning is happening now and we just appeared (and are always just appearing) to witness it. The rest is all conscious construction; time and experience are so entangled, they need each other to exist. (shrink)

To explain the origin of anything, we must be clear about that which we are explaining. There seem to be two main meanings for the term consciousness. One might be called open in that it equates consciousness with awareness and experience and considers rudimentary sensations to have evolved at a specific point in the evolution of increasing complexity. But certainly the foundation for such sensation is a physical body. It is unclear, however, exactly what the physical requirements are for a (...) “central experiencer” to emerge in the course of evolution. Some suggest that it would require a basic brain, others a central nervous system, and others stipulate only a cellular membrane. The open definition is most often assumed by the so-called hard sciences. -/- The closed meaning of consciousness differentiates between a special sort of experience, i.e., conscious experience, and a special sort of awareness (i.e., self-awareness). This is the approach of psychoanalysis and psychology that accepts the existence of an unconscious mind. It is also the view of most phenomenological philosophers and psychologists (Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, etc.). This entry discusses several scientific and philosophical views of consciousness and its origins. (shrink)

Heightened consciousness has become a common expression in daily conversations, but it expresses a number of different concepts depending on the meaning of the speaker and is related to other phrases or terms that have slightly different connotations. This entry explores the different meanings of the term heightened consciousness and similar phrases in regard to personal development.

In a number of membrane-bound viruses, ion channels are formed by integral membrane proteins. These channel proteins include M2 from influenza A, NB from influenza B, and, possibly, Vpu from HIV-1. M2 is important in facilitating uncoating of the influenza A viral genome and is the target of amantadine, an anti-influenza drug. The biological roles of NB and Vpu are less certain. In all cases, the protein contains a single transmembrane α-helix close to its N-terminus. Channels can be formed by (...) homo-oligomerization of these proteins, yielding bundles of transmembrane helices that span the membrane and surround a central ion-permeable pore. Molecular modeling may be used to integrate and interpret available experimental data concerning the structure of such transmembrane pores. This has proved successful for the M2 channel domain, where two independently derived models are in agreement with one another, and with solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data. Simulations based on channel models may yield insights into possible ion conduction and selectivity mechanisms. BioEssays 20:992–1000, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This paper challenges the view that academic professionalism resides in the professional 'autonomy ' of the academic, the 'self-regulation' of academics as an occupational group, and the differential 'status' of academic workers. This still influential notion of academic professionalism, it is argued, leads to institutional stasis. What is required is greater reflexivity by academics in respect of their underlying professional values. In particular the piece challenges the academic community to re-think academic freedom - the bedrock of professional identity within that (...) community - in terms of increased inclusivity: 'freedom for all' rather than 'freedom for academics'. The paper touches on issues relating to practice and organisational structure, but focuses primarily on the need for academics to shift the moral bases of their claim to professionalism. In so doing, it also challenges the post-Dearing consensus that the debate on academic professionalism can be adequately conducted in terms of 'standards' and 'outcomes'. A prime purpose of the paper is to promote debate and discussion by setting a different kind of agenda and by couching that agenda within a different kind of discourse. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience claim to have begun to undermine the assumptions of the arts and educational theory community by explaining consciousness through either a reduction to mathematical functionalism or an excrescence of brain biology. I suggest that the worldview behind such reductionism is opposed to the worldview assumed by many educational practitioners and theorists. I then go on to outline a few common positions taken in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies that suggest that—though many attributes of (...) consciousness have been identified and explained—individual consciousness itself remains as much of an enigma to scientists as to the rest of us who experience it. However, I do suggest the necessity of intersubjectivity for conscious evolution. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) regarded as composed of momentary feeling events that are combined by recognition and evaluation into extended conscious episodes that bind cognitive contents with a wide range of apparent durations (0.1 secs to 2 or more secs, for us humans, depending on circumstances and context). Three necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness are identified: a) a ground of Reality, envisaged as an universal field of potentiality encompassing all possible manifestations, whether material or 'mental'; b) a transitional zone, leading to; c) a manifest world with its fundamental divisions into material, 'informational' and quale-endowed aspects. We explore ideas about the nature of these necessary conditions, how they may relate to one another and whether our suggestions have empirical implications. (shrink)