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  1. Social mirrors and shared experiential worlds.Charles Whitehead - 2001 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (4):3-36.
    We humans have a formidable armamentarium of social display behaviours, including song-and-dance, the visual arts, and role-play. Of these, role-play is probably the crucial adaptation which makes us most different from other apes. Human childhood, a sheltered period of ‘extended irresponsibility’, allows us to develop our powers of make-believe and role-play, prerequisites for human cooperation, culture, and reflective consciousness. Social mirror theory, originating with Dilthey, Baldwin, Cooley and Mead, holds that there cannot be mirrors in the mind without mirrors in (...)
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  2. You Do an Empirical Experiment and You Get an Empirical Result. What Can Any Anthropologist Tell Me That Could Change That?Charles Whitehead - 2008 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11):7-41.
    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 (...)
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  3. Everything I Believe Might Be a Delusion. Whoa! Tucson 2004: Ten years on, and are we any nearer to a Science of Consciousness?Charles Whitehead - 2004 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (12):68-88.
    Having agreed to review Tucson 2004, I am embarrassed to admit that I fell asleep eight times during the conference. This cannot have been entirely due to jet lag as I only fell asleep once in 1998, twice in 2000, and four times in 2002. It seems to be a geometric progression correlating with elapsed time. As this was the tenth anniversary conference several speakers indulged in nostalgic reminiscences, but I thought that readers of JCS might prefer a less rose-tinted (...)
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  4. Why Consciousness Conferences Are Not Really Getting Us Anywhere.Charles Whitehead & Tjiniman Murinbata - 2000 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (6):81-85.
    In 1998 I asked my friend Tjiniman, who is a stone-age hunter, to give us his non-western perspective on ‘Tucson III’ (Murinbata&Whitehead, 1998).Most people thought I just made Tjiniman up and the whole thing was intended as a joke, and he has spent the last two years worrying about this. Since then he has gained a modest BSc in Social Anthropology, though in my view the examiners failed to appreciate some of his less obvious insights, and he deserved a higher (...)
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  5. A stone-age anthropologist looks at Tucson III'.Tjiniman Murinbata & Charles Whitehead - 1998 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 5 (4):504-507.
    There is more than one ‘hard problem'. Just as it is hard for consciousness to grasp itself, it is also hard to examine your own society from the ‘outside'. The same problem applies to scientific paradigms , our taken-for-granted assumptions generally, and the collective representations that sustain them -- such as soup spoons and scientific conferences . To get an ‘outside’ view of ‘Tucson III', I asked my friend Tjiniman, who is a stone-age hunter, to help me out. He is (...)
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  6. Science and Spirit in Stockholm.Charles Whitehead - 2011 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (7-8):7-8.
    I find it hard to say whether TSC this year was the most balanced or the most biased since the first I attended in 1998. That year there were 35 plenary talks, of which 27 were distinctly materialist — that is, they assumed that consciousness ‘arises’ from ‘physical’ processes in the brain. This year there were also 35 plenaries, with 24 devoted to physicalist accounts. I cannot claim absolute precision for these figures, because it is not always easy to make (...)
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  7. The human revolution: Editorial introduction to 'honest fakes and language origins' by Chris Knight.Charles Whitehead - 2008 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11):226-235.
    It is now more than twenty years since Knight (1987) first presented his paradigm-shifting theory of how and why the ‘human revolution’ occurred — and had to occur — in modern humans who, as climates dried under ice age conditions and African rainforests shrank, found themselves surrounded by vast prairies and savannahs, with rich herds of game animals roaming across them. The temptation for male hunters, far from any home base, to eat the best portions of meat at the kill (...)
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  8. Cultural distortions of self-and reality-perception.Charles Whitehead - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (7-8):7-8.
    This essay explores the cultural and political processes which shape human worldviews. I examine the functions, mechanisms, and consequences of cultural distortions of perception, and the evolution of the western scientific worldview from its ancient animistic roots. From the evidence reviewed here I infer that collective deceptions are endemic in human culture, that physicalism is a collective deception and that the 'hard problem' of consciousness, defined in physicalist terms, is a false problem.
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  9. Six Keynote Papers on Consciousness with some Comments on their Social Implications: TSC Conference, Hong Kong, 10-14 June 2009.Charles Whitehead - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (1-2):217-227.
    Six keynote papers presented at TSC 2009 — by Susan Greenfield, Wolf Singer, Stuart Hameroff, Jonathan Schooler, Hakwan Lau, and David Chalmers—are reviewed below in order to investigate to what extent social analysis can be usefully applied in different areas of consciousness studies. The six papers did not ostensibly address social aspects of consciousness; nevertheless I hope to show that it is often beneficial to consider the possible social implications in any consciousness- related work.
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