Bill Harris What Does It Mean To Be Consciousness

Native Americans believed that we are and should be one with Mother Nature. Many believes stem from them being so Intune with the wind, ground, tress/plants and animals. They believe that everything is connected and to be fully connected they needed to have these special ceremonies. These ceremonies included peyote and strong tobaccos to reach true enlightenment and to become one with yourself. Also in these ceremonies you typically are on a journey to find yourself or see things you need to strengthen within yourself. Since I have started mediating and looking further in depth about meditating, I have learned that many feel that you cannot reach true enlightenment in ordinary consciousness. I believe that this “ordinary consciousness” is somewhat

     Waking consciousness is the mental state that includes moving and thinking, along with anything else done while we are awake and alert. Behavior during this period is as normal as it can be. Although behavior can differ

The unconscious is a group of thoughts, feelings, urges or memories that are suppressed beneath the conscious. We may think or feel something and not fully understand why that occurs, this can be considered the unconscious. These thoughts can enter the conscious by being distorted or disguised this is usually because they are kept out to stop fear anxiety. An example of this would be a slip of the tongue, where you say something because you were unconsciously thinking it.

According to David Chalmer’s paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, easy problems is explaining the functions in the brain. Such as how the brain process information, categorizes, discriminates, and reacts to environmental stimuli, or can differentiate between being asleep and wake. What Chalmer calls “easy problems” represent an ability and a the performance of a function. These functions or as Chalmer labels them, phenomena, can be explained with science. Chalmer does state that these phenomena are not actually easy, but easy in a relative term.

Conscious - This is the part of the mind that is aware of itself. It means that you are aware of what you do, such as reading this assignment, what the circumstances of what you do are and what your feelings are.

“Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems—appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots—but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins.” (p.147)

When we have a spiritual awakening, we leave a more limited sense of ourselves and the world around us for a more expanded one. We begin to redefine who we believe that we really are. We begin to see the interconnectedness of all things. We begin to believe that there is something more meaningful to our experience. Because of this we might start to see new meaning and wisdom in spiritual texts.

I find it nearly impossible for a person not to be Spiritual Conscious. I am always paying attention to what it is that my body or mind is needing or wanting. Being Spiritual Conscious is the best thing a person a can for themselves because are allowing themselves to not only be aware of their now needs, wants and actions, but over time you because more open to the world that sounds you and you understand that everything you do is going to be a lesson and it is your job to learn from those lessons in order to

A hemispherectomy is a surgical process in which the brain of a patient is halved and one of these parts is then removed. The procedure is only ever carried out on individuals who are very young, as their brains are still flexible, pliable enough that the remaining portion will then take on the functions of the half that had been removed. Though this process is rather rare, only carried out when the child in question is experiences dramatic seizures that can only be halted in this way, it brings a crucial element to the table, far beyond the medical benefit for one. Hemispherectomies prove that patients can survive with only half of the brain, and thus, if the

In Chapter 4 the topic that is discussed is the state of conscious and the different forms. Conscious is defined as being the immediate awareness you have of mental activity, internal sensations and external stimuli. Circadian rhythms become regulated by the “master clock” or suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The SCN also reduces the amount of melatonin produced when light is detected. Having an increased amount of melatonin causes sleepiness.

Consciousness is the way beings have their own personal experiences in their minds. In other words, how they experience every day situations in their own personal view or perspective. Ned Block (1995) explains that “phenomenal consciousness is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something ‘it is like’ to be in that state.” Susan Blackmore (2012) said that consciousness was subjective; meaning consciousness is personal and cannot be shared with anyone else. Study and research on consciousness has advanced and increased in the past years. The Laboratory of Nuero Imaging states that humans have at least 70,000 thoughts racing through their heads on a normal day. These thoughts make up a part of our consciousness; our ongoing dose of qualia, or private internal experiences. It is obvious that humans have consciousness, but do other organisms share this capability? One experiment compared the cognitive ability of humans and great apes at the early stages of their development. Mammals, like apes and monkeys, do have consciousness based on anecdotal evidence, research, and experiments.

When I first started this course I thought I knew a good amount about consciousness or cognition. As the semester went on I realized I did not know as much as I thought, but I ended up learning more than I ever thought possible. Every week I felt as if my knowledge was increasing day by day. Before this class most of my knowledge came through personal experience or doing some research for my own curiosity. This semester brought more insight into many different topics, but the ones I feel that I grew the most were anxiety, depression, music and its effect on the brain, and love and romance.

Consciousness is both an effect and a cause: it is the cumulative effect of our thinking, and it is because of our consciousness that we experience life as we do. Not surprisingly, we find a similar view of consciousness in the writings of Judge Thomas Troward, a pillar of New Thought whose teachings influenced Ernest Holmes. Troward taught that when an end is secure in mind, the means to that end is also secure. However, let us not delude ourselves into thinking that because we have something in mind, that we will necessarily have it in hand; nor should we try to ignore the fundamental difference between grasping an idea, and grasping at an object. Although securing a thing in mind is a necessary precursor to securing the experience of it in the world, the mental equivalent is not the physical fact. It is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize a good thing when you see it, if you do not already have in mind the knowledge, belief, image and understanding of what is good for you. Consequently, until we are able to secure our good, mentally, we are not able to embrace, embody, express and experience that good as a fact of our life. Fortunately though, both the end we have in mind, and the means to it, are aspects of one 's consciousness, and by having the end securely in mind we do have the means to that end. This is somewhat similar to the fact that when we know our destination, the necessary means of travel is also known. For instance, if we intend to cross a room, we

Consciousness is the ability to experience pain and pleasure and to reflect on this experiences while being aware of who you are and where you at in space and time. Kandel raised questions about consciousness when he spoke about being in the Garden. Kandel loved being in garden, it brought him peace, Kandel did not consciously choose the botanic garden at Wave Hill. First he felt at peace, his sensory nerves and neurons chose the garden, his unconscious mind found peace and then later consciously he realized that he enjoyed being at the garden. Kandel never consciously said, it’s a nice garden and I like it, it was the other way around. First he felt it and then he acknowledged it. Do humans have free will? If only after we react to a stimulus we then become aware of it. Is free will just an illusion that we humans conjured so that we feel like we are in control? This scene brought up many question about free will, like do humans have free will if we only realize what happened after we process it through our senses and by then, the decision was already made and there is nothing an individual could do to change it. Our unconscious mind already made to decisions for us. For Kandel to finally get the answers on how an emotion like fear has total control on an individual, he mapped exterior facial expressions of humans and their emotional states, then experiment how the subject react consciously and unconsciously to those images. His result suggest that a stimulus is

There is no way to distinguish between being awake and asleep. Perhaps, even now we are dreaming, this not my body, and I am not writing this paper for philosophy but I am really lying in bed somewhere sleeping. However, dreams are based on reality. Whether this hand is real or dreamed, it is my hand, and it exists somewhere. Also, certain things are true in any context. Two plus three equals five and in no context can it be said to be untrue. The power to distinguish cannot be called into doubt as long as we hold that there is a reality