Presenting a look at the human mind's capacity while criticizing artificial intelligence, the author makes suggestions about classical and quantum physics and ..

Do you think the quotation in my title is reasonable or unreasonable? I find it unreasonable, but I know that many will not. Two people can react to the same idea, opinion, or data in opposite ways, and the reasons for this are often ideological. Ideology always has a political origin — in this case perhaps reflecting turf wars, career promotion, self-legitimation, the privileged status of science in post-industrial societies, and the need to say the right things in order to (...) get research funding. The very concept of ‘hard science’ is ideological, implying that one part of our experience is ‘objective’ (meaning that it confers authority on scientists) and the other part is ‘subjective’(meaning that the opinions of non-scientists are of little worth).What we call ‘objective’ is of course a mental model built on the basis of experiences which we call ‘subjective’. There are many possible ways of carving up experience, but none that leads to a useful or non-political distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. (shrink)

There is considerable confusion surrounding the notion of consciousness. This confusion can be partially resolved by clarifying the referents of the word 'consciousness'. Doing so, however, reveals a more insidious problem, namely, the role played by personal beliefs in understanding consciousness. In particular, as revealed by a comprehensive survey, such beliefs range along a material- transcendent dimension, with the choice of notions of consciousness corresponding to materialist, conservatively transcendent, or extraordinarily transcendent positions. Further empirical research has revealed that those with (...) more transcendent beliefs tend to have a more rational and curious approach to the world than those with more materialist beliefs. And, indeed, transcendent beliefs are also associated with greater intelligence. Although the possibility of a developmental sequence from materialist to transcendent beliefs is suggested, given the nature of fundamental beliefs, it does not appear that reconciliation between them is possible. Thus, although the confusion surrounding the study of consciousness can be clarified, the situation giving rise to the confusion cannot be eliminated. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiries into the nature of consciousness have long been intrinsically tied to questions regarding the nature of the self. Although philosophers of mind seldom make reference to the role of cultural context in shaping consciousness, since antiquity culture has played a notable role in philosophical conceptions of the self. Western philosophers, from Plato to Locke, have emphasized an individualistic view of the self that is autonomous and consistent across situations, while Eastern philosophers, such as Lao Tzu and Confucius, have (...) argued for a collectivistic view of the self, one that is interconnected to others and embedded within specific social contexts and situations. Here we argue that a comprehensive theory of consciousness needs to account for the role of cultural context and its bidirectional interaction with neural and genetic mechanisms in shaping a variety of conscious phenomena, from visual perception to self- awareness. We review recent evidence of cultural variation in neurobiological mechanisms underlying these phenomena and discuss the implications of these cultural neuroscience findings for the study of consciousness. (shrink)