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The End of Faith
Sam Harris
[...]
The basic (and, I think, uncontestable) fact is that almost every human being experiences the duality of subject and object in some measure, and most of us feel it powerfully nearly every moment of our lives.
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the feeling that we call “I” is one of the most pervasive and salient features of human life: and its effects upon the world, as six billion “selves” pursue diverse and often incompatible ends, rival those that can be ascribed to almost any other phenomenon in nature.
Clearly, there is nothing optimal—or even necessarily viable—about our present form of subjectivity.
Almost every problem we have can be ascribed to the fact that human beings are utterly beguiled by their feelings of separateness.
It would seem that a spirituality that undermined such dualism, through the mere contemplation of consciousness, could not help but improve our situation.
Whether or not great numbers of human beings will ever be in a position to explore this terrain depends on how our discourse on religion proceeds.
There is clearly no greater obstacle to a truly empirical approach to spiritual experience than our current beliefs about God.
[...]
From:
Sam Harris
The End of Faith:
Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2004
P. 214
Willem Wilmink (1936-2003):
Vader
Vader kocht
ooit
een verzameld werk:
een bundel gedichten
van degelijk merk.
Bij wat
hij mooi vond
zette hij strepen
een enkele keer
een uitroepteken.
Bij tijd
en wijle
herlees ik die
zeer summiere
biografie:
In een code
van strepen en stippen
steeg het water
hem naar de lippen.
Een vreemde tijger
Hoe kan
men een zoon van vijf
troosten voor doodsgedachten?
Alle bedenksels falen,
behalve de reïncarnatie.
Dus oude
oma is nu
een tijger?
Ja jongen,
maar niet in Artis,
niet in een kooi,
niet een tijger die ijsbeert.
Zij die
haar leven lang leed
onder de tyrannie
van geldgebrek, echtgenoot, crisis,
roddel en burenruzies,
die verzoend heeft en vergoelijkt,
die doof was voor alle kwaad
en tenslotte voor Alles doof was,
zij is een
tijger met gruwelijk felle,
gruwelijk mooie ogen,
en wee de man in de wildernis
die haar ontmoet:
opgevreten is hij,
eer hij beseft dat er iets op hem toespringt.
Een vreemde
tijger is het,
een tijger die soms een wonderlijke
droom heeft: een pasgedweild stoepje,
een pijpenrek met de woorden
‘Het is geen man
die niet roken kan’.
Maar een
sterke tijger:
die de droom van zich afschudt als regen
en met lange trefzekere sprongen
het dier bereikt of de jager
of de pelgrim bij de rivier.
Een tijger
zonder genade.
Een tijger die wraakneemt.
J.A. Dèr Mouw (1863-1919):
’T IS
ZOMER; ZONDAGMORGEN. EEN TONEEL
Zie ’k plots’ling voor me uit verre jongensjaren:
Ik lig in ’t gras; er liggen rozeblaren
Overal om me, roze en wit en geel;
Mijn moeder
speelt piano, ’t laatste deel
Van Gounod’s Faust. En ’t leek op eens, als waren
Aan ’t trillen ergens in mij zelf de snaren,
En ’t bonsde door mijn borst tot aan mijn keel.
En ’k
huilde en huilde, tot mijn moeder kwam,
En me aaide en kuste en me in haar armen nam,
En ’k gaf, gelukkig, haar de liefste naam. -
’K zie
rozen. Ik word grijs. De herinnering
Voel ’k trillen in mijn keel, en ’t is me, als zing
Ik stil: Anges des cieux, portez mon âme.
First and Second Breakthrough on Consciousness
Thomas Metzinger
I believe, but cannot prove, that a First Breakthrough on Consciousness is actually around the corner. “Actually around the corner” means: less than 50 years away. My intuition is that, roughly, all we need for this first breakthrough are four convincing stories.
The first story will be about global integration, about the dynamical self-organization of long-range binding operations in the human brain. It will probably involve something like synchrony in multiple frequency bands, and will let us understand how a unified model of the world can emerge in our own heads.
The second story will be about “transparency”: Why is it that we are unable to consciously experience most of the images our brain generates as images? The answer to this question will give us a real world. The transparency-tale has to do with not being able to see earlier processing stages and becoming a naive realist.
The third story will focus on the Now, the emergence of a psychological moment - on a deeper understanding of what William James called the “specious present”. Experts on short term memory and neural network modelers will tell this story for us.
As it unfolds, it will explain the emergence of a subjective present and let us understand how conscious experience, in its simplest and most essential form, is the presence of a world.
Interestingly, today almost everybody in the consciousness community already agrees on some version of the fourth story: Consciousness is directly linked to attentional processing, more precisely, to a hidden mechanism constantly holding information available for attention. The subjective presence of a world is a clever strategy of making integrated information available for attention.
I believe, but cannot prove, that this will allow us to find the global neural correlate for consciousness. However, being a philosopher, I want much more than that—I am also interested in precise concepts.
What I will be waiting for is the young mathematician who then comes along and suddenly allows us to see how all of these four stories were actually only one: The genius who gives us a formal model describing the information flow in this neural correlate, and in just the right way.
She will harvest the fruits of generations or researchers before her, and this will be the First Breakthrough on Consciousness.
Then three things will happen.
1. The Second Breakthrough on Consciousness will take much longer. Things will get messy and complicated. The philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness will get bogged down in diabolic details and ugly technical problems.
Public attention will soon shift away from the problem of consciousness per se. Instead, new generations of young researchers will now focus on the nature of self and social cognition.
2. The overall development will have an unexpectedly strong cultural impact. People will not want to face their own mortality.
There will be fundamentalist and anti-rational counter movements against the scientific image of man. At the same time crude new ideologies propagating vulgar forms of materialism and primitive forms of hedonism will spring up.
Scientists will realize that one can not reductively explain the human mind and then simply look another way, leaving the consequences for someone else to deal with.
3. We will be able to influence consciousness in ways we have never dreamt of. There will be a new form of technology —Consciousness Technology— exclusively focusing on how to manipulate the neural correlate of consciousness in ever more fine-grained, efficient, and risk-free ways.
People will realize that we need some sort of applied ethics for this new type of technology.
And hopefully we will all together start to tell a new story—a story about how to live with these brains and about what a good state of consciousness actually is.
Uit www.edge.org.
Thomas Metzinger (1958) is hoogleraar filosofie aan de Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
Interview Audio Audio Audio Video Tekst Tekst Boek Boek
Sam Harris is auteur van The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
Interview Interview Boek Recensies
Albert Einstein: The World As I See It.
Neal Donald Walsch: What God Wants