According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe ‘dream of the butterfly,’ which seals the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, is often interpreted as undergirded by the bipolarity of dreaming and awakening or by the elusive interchange of identities between Zhuangzi and the butterfly, dreamer and dreamed. In this paper I argue that the underlying structure of the story may be better interpreted as exhibiting not two, but three stages of development, consistently echoing other tripartite parables in the Zhuangzi. In my reinterpretation I rely on the phenomenology (...) of dreams proposed by the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, which distinguishes among three states: the primal dream, characterized by atemporality and wholeness; wakefulness, characterized by temporality and analytic thinking; and the creative dream, in which reality discloses itself as a meaningful, holistic unity. I suggest that Zhuangzi’s parable describes a similar self-transformative threefold process culminating in the joyous freedom of a shifting multifaceted subjectivity centered in the timeless pivot of the Dao. (shrink)

This multifaceted essay emerges from a host of sources within diverse academic settings. Its central thesis is guided by physicist John A. Wheeler's thoughts on the quantum enigma. Wheeler concludes, following Niels Bohr, that we are co-participants within the universal self-organizing process. This notion merges with concepts from Peirce's process philosophy, Eastern thought, issues of topology, and border theory in cultural studies and social science, while surrounding itself with such key terms as complementarity, interdependence, interrelatedness, vagueness, generality, incompleteness, inconsistency, and (...) mestizaje. Ultimately, a sense of semiosic process pervades in light of combined homogenous and hetergenous tendencies. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to discuss the cultural hindrances and assets that promote constructive self-to-others relationships and active citizenship. Building on Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, we argue that in contemporary societies the public and the private dimensions of the enemy have conflated, as the result of two concurrent phenomena: the politicization of otherness and the privatization of enemies. An integrated framework including approaches of social psychology and semiotic cultural psychology is proposed to account for both phenomena. The notions (...) of symbolic universes and semiotic capital are introduced as key concepts to understand the current socio-political dynamics and to promote fairer, more inclusive societies. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for two claims. The first is that all social and political thinking lies along a continuum and that the structure of each thought along the continuum is that of a basic desire for self-determination. Self-determination, I argued, occurs in a variety of ways including, importantly, at a variety of levels of intention. On the one hand, there are the relatively unreflective ways of understanding oneself as autonomous. I attributed this way of thinking of the Neo-Aristotelian (...) conception of practical reason which is characteristic of conservatism. On the other side of the continuum, there is a rigoristic version of Kantian moral philosophy in which, to be autonomous, one must act exclusively from duty or from purely economic motivation. The second claims is that populism can be understood as a clash between different practical conceptions of autonomy which are brought into conflict as a result of the process of modern rationalization. This clash can, I argued, be clarified and also alleviated by appreciating that what the values which stand opposed in the “us vs. them” of populism and liberalism are based on a fundamentally similar conception of the value of autonomy but have come into conflict by sometime contingent historical processes which can be undone or steered in a different direction. (shrink)

An account is given of a recent proposal to complete modern quantum theory by adding a characterisation of consciousness. The resulting theory is applied to give mechanisms for typical parapsychological phenomena, and ways of testing it are discussed.