Embryonic stem cells are actively debated in political and public policy arenas. However, the connections between stem cell innovation and overall health care policy are seldom elucidated. As with many controversial aspects of medical care, the stem cell debate bridges to a variety of social conversations beyond abortion. Some issues, such as translational medicine, commercialization, patient and public safety, health care spending, physician practice, and access to insurance and health care services, are core health policy concerns. Other issues, such as (...) economic development, technologic progress, fiscal politics, and tort reform, are only indirectly related to the health care system but are frequently seen through a health care lens. These connections will help determine whether the stem cell debate reaches a resolution, and what that resolution might be. (shrink)

The essay seeks to harness the diverse and innovative work to date of legal semiotics. It seeks to bring together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a preclusion to identifying fertile avenues for research.

Essays on stem cell policy seem to fall into three categories. Some essays in this collection are about logic and principles. Others are about practices and beliefs. The former group draws lines and defends them, a normative project. The latter group attempts to explain the lines that already exist, a descriptive project that may have important normative goals. Still other essays, by scientists, are about growing stem cell lines instead of drawing them.The purpose of this essay is to situate the (...) lines being drawn around stem cell science in the larger landscape of health policy. I am interested in the things that cause health policy to take particular directions and the consequences of those directions for cost, access, and quality — all of which are determined in part by biomedical innovations such as those potentially derived from stem cells. (shrink)

In this paper, I will provide a phenomenological analysis of somatic obsessions at times present in obsessive–compulsive disorder. I will compare two different types of bodily obsessions, which have a different neurological-physiological underpinning: anguishing awareness of one’s own heartbeat and of one’s own breathing. In addition, I will contrast these two with how one experiences one’s own liver. I will use the concepts "tactility obsessions” and "motility obsessions”, which I have coined for the purpose of this comparison. In other words, (...) these are obsessions concerning the felt sense of one’s autonomous organs and obsessions concerning one’s ability to voluntarily move. Ultimately, I claim that the core lived experience in somatic obsessive–compulsive disorder should not only be understood as having to do with intruding and "distorted thoughts” concerning bodily processes, but could also be understood as having to do with a felt sense of our organs interrupting and intruding our daily lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: It is pointed out that the organisation of an organism necessarily involves fields which are the only means to make an approximately simultaneous tuning of the different subsystems of the organism-as-a-whole. Nature uses the olfactory fields, the acoustic fields, the electromagnetic fields and quantum-vacuum fields. Fields with their ability to comprehend the whole organism are the natural basis of a global interaction between organisms and of collective consciousness. Evidences are presented that electromagnetic potential fields mediate the collective field of (...) consciousness. This result offers for the first time experimental access to the study of collective consciousness by measuring the field-related information-carrying potentials and their derivatives, the electric and magnetic fields between different individuals. The electrodynamic interaction of different brains/minds generates induction and in this way excitement, enhancement in the baseline of the interacting brains? activity. A list of empirical evidences is presented here proving the existence of this "interactive excitement" effect in the known phenomenon of collective consciousness. The fundamental phenomenon of the collective consciousness is known as " social facilitation " or "group effect ". The character and completion of consciousness are outlined in the frame of this picture, and the role of the "group effect " or " social facilitation " as a primary factor in developing consciousness is described. A quantum-physical model of a multi-layered consciousness is presented, where the layering is expressed by the subsequent subtlety of the masses of the material carriers of information. I show that as the mental levels get deeper and more sensitive the couplings are on more and more global scales of their environment. I point out that direct, immediate action in distance actually exists in the electromagnetic field, which is the coupling, mediator field between waves and particles. I show how the environmental, natural and cosmic fields are determinative sources of our consciousness. The results presented point out that the Collective Field of Consciousness is a significant physical factor of the biosphere. I show that the morphogenetic field has an electromagnetic nature. EM fields are vacuum fields. Different basic forms of vacuum fields exist, and all kinds of fields, including the particle-mediated fields as well, when overlapping each other, seem to be in a direct resonant coupling, and form a complex, merged biofield. The vacuum model of consciousness presented here points to the inductive generation of consciousness, and to its self-initiating nature. Individual and collective methods, as well as the experimental possibilities of a global healing and improving the consciousness field of mankind are suggested. Keywords: olfactory, acoustic, electromagnetic, vacuum fields, generation of consciousness, evolution of collective consciousness, social evolution, completion of consciousness, healing. (shrink)

The ArgumentWhile postmodernism has had very little influence in biology, it can provide a framework for discussing the context in which biology is done. Here, four biological views of the body/self are contrasted: the neural, immunological, genetic, and Phenotypic bodies. Each physical view of the body extrapolates into a different model of the body politic, and each posits a different relationship between bodies of knowledge. The neural view of the body models a body politic wherein society is defined by its (...) culture and laws. The genetic view privileges views of polities based on ethnicity and race. The immune body extrapolates into polities that can defend themselves against other such polities. The phenotypic view of the body politic stands in opposition to these three major perspectives and integrates them without given any predominance. The view of science as a “neural” body of knowledge contends that science is aperspectival and objective. The perspective of the “immune” body is that science exists to defend the interests of its creators. The genetic view of science is that science is the basis of all culture. The extrapolation of the phenotypic body to science insists upon the utilitarian rationale for scientific enterprises. In all instances, the genetic view of the body/body politic/body of science is presently in ascendance. (shrink)

Buddhism has always produced epistemological systems, and those of the Mahāyāna, in particular, always showed knowledge and perception to be inherently delusive. “Higher” forms of Buddhism have a degenerative philosophy of history according to which a sort of Golden Age was disrupted by the rise and gradual development of knowledge and the delusion inherent in it, which have reached their apex in our time – the final phase of the “Era of Darkness.” From this standpoint, this paper intends to show (...) science, in which Marcuse saw an inherent instrumental/technological interest, to have been developed by delusion and to have simultaneously furthered the development of delusion, to the point at which they begot the deadly ecological crisis proper to this concluding phase of the Era of Darkness – which reveals as such the delusion at its root, achieving the latter’s empirical reductio ad absurdum and offering us the possibility of eradicating it and thus healing our minds and, hopefully, our world. (shrink)

(1999). Is the postmodern self a feminised citizen? Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 2, Feminism, Identity and Difference, pp. 80-99.

“In reality, there are no final choices,” says academic philosopher Michael Grosso, author of The Final Choice. “As long as we are conscious beings we are free to keep making new and hopefully better choices” (p. xiii). With this up-front qualification, Grosso embarks on an inspiring examination of how we might make new and better choices as a species, and why it is imperative for us to do so if we are to survive and thrive. Here is the motif that (...) informs Grosso’s narrative in The Final Choice: What at bottom drives all living things? The goal of life seems to be more life, self-replication with infinite variations. …The tendency among mammals, and humans in particular, is toward greater mobility, freedom and detachment from the environment. Human life is especially mobile and already has begun to move beyond the planetary habitat to explore outer space habitats. If the goal of life is more life — in a word, survival — the function of our nonphysical psychic potential may be to mediate survival of bodily death…. If the goal of life is more life, higher, freer, more complex forms of life, then our psychic potentials represent the power of life transcending its biological template. Psi is the wedge of life driving against the constraints of physical reality, against the boundaries of time and space. Psi is the medium in which new forms of life carry us beyond the boundaries of physical environment [p. 11]. Grosso considers the near-death experience (NDE) as “perhaps the most important psychological phenomenon of the 20th century, as shocking and counter-intuitive as quantum mechanics….” He adds, “We have millions of repetitions of the near-death experience … and can study and analyze it with the tools of science and other intellectual disciplines. The NDE experientially provides access to a greater mental, indeed spiritual sphere of being” (p. xii). Grosso raises the possibility that, with environmental collapse now in sight, a global version of a near-death experience may be forming, analogous to a human approaching death. It’s the sort of thing one might predict from the life force, whose evolutionary vector is toward more life, more survival, a future. And just as individual NDEs result in a radical transformation and reorientation of the person undergoing them, our planetary citizenry, en masse, may similarly change channels in our priorities, values, and how we live our lives. If so, we just might squeak by. (I’m reminded of a hallway conversation I once had with the late physicist David Bohm. I asked him his opinion of the future of humankind: “Do you think we’ll make it?” He paused, thinking intently, then said, “Yes. Barely.”) Grosso’s stated goal in The Final Choice is “to create a new, fact-based mythology of transcendence.” For him, this entails two aspects of transcendence: “the survival of consciousness after death and, no less momentous, the idea of an extended transpersonal mind. Pim van Lommel (2010) calls it ‘endless consciousness’ or following the Upanishads, Erwin Schrödinger (1963) referred to the one mind. Later, Larry Dossey (2013) coined the phrase ‘nonlocal mind’ and has described in detail how we can make sense of being part of the one mind in his book of that title” (pp. xi-xii). (Full disclosure: whether Grosso’s favorable nod to my work influences this review is for the reader to decide.) Grosso employs a nonlocal model of consciousness — consciousness that is not localized or confined to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, nor to specific points in time, such as the present. Nonlocal mind is Mind at Large, as Aldous Huxley and others have called it. Survival follows, because mind that is boundless or nonlocal with respect to time is seemingly eternal or immortal; and mind nonlocal or boundless with respect to space is omnipresent. So the critical question becomes: What is the evidence that mind is nonlocal? Grosso shows how consciousness variously manifests nonlocally, making the case for Mind at Large, a universal or unitary mind of which each individual mind is a part. Grosso wrote the first edition of The Final Choice in 1985. This revised edition takes into account a plethora of findings by consciousness researchers that have emerged in the nearly three decades separating the two editions. (shrink)