Consciousness Mattering
A Buddhist Synthesis
Peter D. Hershock
- 224 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Consciousness Mattering
A Buddhist Synthesis
Peter D. Hershock
About This Book
Consciousness Mattering presents a contemporary Buddhist theory in which brains, bodies, environments, and cultures are relational infrastructures for human consciousness. Drawing on insights from meditation, neuroscience, physics, and evolutionary theory, it demonstrates that human consciousness is not something that occurs only in our heads and consists in the creative elaboration of relations among sensed and sensing presences, and more fundamentally between matter and what matters. Hershock argues that without consciousness there would only be either unordered sameness or nothing at all. Evolution is consciousness mattering.
Shedding new light on the co-emergence of subjective awareness and culture, the possibility of machine consciousness, the risks of algorithmic consciousness hacking, and the potentials of intentionally altered states of consciousness, Hershock invites us to consider how freely, wisely, and compassionately consciousness matters.