Teasers

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Just as cognitive organisms can never compare their conceptual organizations of experience with the structure of an independent objective reality, so the... teacher can never compare the model he or she has constructed of a child's conceptualizations with what actually goes on in the child's head. In the one case as in the other, the best that can be achieved is model that remains viable within the range of available experience... [more]	[T]here are powers arising from within ourselves that are already at work overcoming the deficiency and dubious nature of our rational ego-consciousness via the new aperspectival awareness whose manifestations are surging forth everywhere. The aperspective consciousness structure is a consciousness of the whole, an integral consciousness encompassing all time and embracing both man's distant past and his approaching future as a living present... [more]
	There is the widespread misconception that reinforcement is the effect of certain well-known commodities, such as cookies, money, and social approval. It is a misconception, not because organisms will not work quite hard to obtain these commodities, but because it obscures the one thing that is often by far the most reinforcing for a cognitive organism: to achieve a satisfactory organization, a viable way of dealing with some sector of experience. This fact adds a different dimension to the conception of reinforcement because whatever constitutes the rewarding consequence in these cases is generated wholly within the organism's own system... [more]
I think it is fair to say that a medicalized and pathologizing culture delivers a consistent and persistent message that if we are having a painful experience then there is something wrong and the only major task is to right this wrong by getting rid of the experience.... The approach to these disorders is essentially to eradicate them or at least lessen their effect on a person. Initially when Freud talked about anxiety he viewed it as a signal that something was wrong and not the problem. Now the major approach to anxiety involves its eradication, eradication of the signal... [more]	...for someone able to act out of ego-freedom, the world and even his daily life will become transparent. And when this happens, the events and phenomena of his surroundings will set themselves right. Both the social and the technological systems (which result from an over-emphasized rationality whose deficient emphasis has made them possible) will restructure themselves since they are incongruous with the new mode of realization and its restructuration of the world... [more]
This new, self-constituting consciousness structure uncovers and surpasses the ultimate and most profound antithesis of rationalism between faith and knowledge, religion and science. Not only because it becomes gradually apparent to what an unsettling degree scientific theses themselves often emerge from presuppositions based on belief... but also because antitheses of this kind are not reconcilable with the new consciousness structure. It is in the transparency of faith and knowledge, and not with their aid, that the sphere of Being becomes perceptible in its entire diaphaneity... [more]
The question of what worldview is fit to guide personal and societal decisions may well be the most critical question of our generation... [more]	I believe it's extremely important to see that naturalism itself, despite the smug and arrogant tone of the so-called New Atheists, is in very serious philosophical hot water: one can't sensibly believe it... [more]
The fundamental reason conventional science has been so minimally effective in increasing our understanding of consciousness is that the epistemology of physics, molecular biology, and neuroscience is not suited to the area of consciousness; a new scientific epistemology is needed... [more]	Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism... [more]