On the Nature of Consciousness

Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, Stanley Rothman

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 1995
• eBook ISBN: 9780300143812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

What is the relation between mystical experience and ordinary consciousness, between the principles of modern physics and the patterns of perception in all moving creatures, between our human self-consciousness and the more primary sentience of protozoa? This book pursues an inquiry into consciousness that ranges from ancient Greece to empirical neuro-psychology to the experiential traditions of introspection and meditation.

Harry Hunt begins by reviewing the renewed interest in ordinary consciousness and in altered and transpersonal states of consciousness. He then presents competing views of consciousness in cognition, neurophysiology, and animal psychology, developing a view of perceptual awareness as the core of consciousness potentially shared across species. Hunt next brings together the separate strands of neo-realist approaches to perception and thought, the phenomenology of imagery and synesthesia, and cognitive theories of metaphor. He develops an original cognitive theory of mystical experience that combines Buddhist meditative descriptions of consciousness and Heidegger's sense of Being. In relating both of these to James J. Gibson's views on perception, he avoids the various "new age" supernaturalisms that so often blight the transpersonal literature. Other themes include the relation between consciousness and time; the common perceptual-metaphoric rooting of parallels between consciousness and modern physics; and the communal basis of transpersonal states as reflected in a sociology of mysticism and a reinterpretation of parapsychological research.

Harry T. Hunt is professor of psychology at Brock University in Ontario and author of The Multiplicity of Dreams, published by Yale University Press.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Consciousness in Context: Psychology, Philosophy, Culture
• 1. The Most Fundamental of Empirical Questions or the Most Misguided - What Is Consciousness?
• 2. Cognition and Consciousness
• Part II. Consciousness, Brain, and Organism: How Much Can Neurophysiology Tell Us about Consciousness?
• 3. Consciousness as Emergent: The Irrelevance of Specific Neurophysiology
• 4. Consciousness as Localized: Neural Zones of Convergence and Consciousness Awareness System(s)
• 5. Animal Consciousness: The Emergence of Primary Sentience in Protozoa and Self-Referential Consciousness in the Higher Primates
• Part III. The Phenomenology of Consciousness
• 6. William James and the Stream of Consciousness: Metaphor Without, Mirror Within
• Part IV. The Imagistic Bases of Consciousness: Ordinary and Nonordinary, Contemporary and Ancient
• 7. Synesthesia: The Inner Face of Thought and Meaning
• 8. The Multiplicity of Image: Phenomenology and Some Limitations of Laboratory Research
• 9. Sensus Commuais: A History of the Cross-Modal Theory of Mind
• Part V. Transpersonal Experience and the Reflexivity of Human Existence
• 10. A Cognitive Psychology of Transpersonal States
• 11. Heidegger, Mahayana Buddhism, and Gibson’s Ambient Array: A Logos of Sentience
• Part VI. Consciousness and Reality
• 12. Consciousness as Time
• 13. Consciousness as Space: Physics, Consciousness, and the Primacy of Perception
• Part VII. Concluding Sociological Postscript
• 14. Consciousness as Society
• Notes
• References
• Index