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D DHALMERS
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Gratitude is like a muscle. When strong, it makes us resilient. When weak, we are easily broken.
You strengthen gratitude through conscious practice. You lose it through unconscious laziness.
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“Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.”
― David J. Chalmers
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“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter? We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness. Consciousness can be startlingly intense. It is the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us. But it can be frustratingly diaphanous: in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter. The International Dictionary of Psychology does not even try to give a straightforward characterization: Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of confusing consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it. (Sutherland 1989)”― David J. ChalmersA
wenty-five years ago, the burgeoning science of consciousness studies was rife with promise. With cutting-edge neuroimaging tools leading to new research programmes, the neuroscientist Christof Koch was so optimistic, he bet a case of wine that we’d uncover its secrets by now. The philosopher David Chalmers had serious doubts, because consciousness research is, to put it mildly, difficult. Even what Chalmers called the easy problem of consciousness is hard, and that’s what the bet was about – whether we would uncover the neural structures involved in conscious experience. So, he took the bet.
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Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can process information in complex ways, react to stimuli with sophisticated behavior, and even exhibit such complex capacities as learning, memory, and language. All this is impressive, but it is not metaphysically baffling. In contrast, the existence of conscious experience seems to be a new feature from this viewpoint. It is not something that one would have predicted from the other features alone. That is, consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. If it were not for our direct evidence in the first-person case, the hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps. Yet we know, directly, that there is conscious experience. The question is, how do we reconcile it with everything else we know?”
― David J. Chalmers,
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This summer, with much fanfare and media attention, Koch handed Chalmers a case of wine in front of an audience of 800 scholars. The science journal Nature kept score: philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0. What went wrong? It isn’t that the past 25 years of consciousness studies haven’t been productive. The field has been incredibly rich, with discoveries and applications that seem one step from science fiction. The problem is that, even with all these discoveries, we still haven’t identified any neural correlates of consciousness. That’s why Koch lost the bet.
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If the easy problem is this hard, what does that make the ‘hard problem’? Chalmers described the hard problem of consciousness as understanding why material beings like us have experience at all. Solving the hard problem would give us a secure theory of consciousness that explains the nature of conscious experience. Philosophers and scientists alike want to solve the hard problem, and to do so many are focusing on the easy problem. But all that attention is making the hard problem harder than it needs to be.
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Cuneiform was written with the wedge-shaped end of a reed, cutting into a wet clay tablet or cylinder, in many different shapes and styles for different purposes. It evolved over a long period of time under the direction of scribes in the Near East, Mesopotamia, the wider Fertile Crescent and the Indus Valley, spreading outwards with the subsequent migrations of these people to all corners of the world, including Britain well before 2,000 BC
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Now it isn’t language that is presumed necessary for consciousness, but a nervous system
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“Some say that consciousness is an "illusion," but I have little idea what this could even mean. It seems to me that we are surer of the existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world.”
― David J. Chalmers
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Angkor Wat: Angkor Wat, one of the most famous and significant temples in Cambodia, contains several carvings and bas-reliefs that depict scenes from the Ramayana, including the episodes involving Ravana. These carvings are found on the temple's walls and illustrate various parts of the epic, such as the kidnapping of Sita and the battle between Rama and Ravana.
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Ramayana in Khmer Culture: The Ramayana is known as the "Reamker" in Khmer culture, and it holds a central place in Cambodian classical dance, literature, and visual arts. The story of Ravana is an integral part of the Reamker, and his character is portrayed in Cambodian artistic and cultural expressions.
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n 2012, scientists held a conference memorialising the research of Crick, who had died eight years earlier. Here they publicly proclaimed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that ‘all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses’ experience conscious states, and that:
The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours.
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“The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.1”
― David J. Chalmers
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If we try to understand our mind, we will find that it is the source of all action. This manifests as volition, the activity of the ego. The mind is working ceaselessly. Either it is going towards something or it is turning away from something else. The senses are drawn towards their objects, but it is the mind that gets connected with the senses. It then gets connected with the ego, which makes us think, ‘I am doing this, or I am not doing this, or I will not do that’ and so on. Thus we identify ourselves with the ego and the senses through the mind.
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All spiritual practice is concerned with the control of the mind — to direct our thoughts through a channel. Thus, one part of our mind can always be directed towards a goal to be attained while the other parts of the mind may be busy with other things: It is the [three] gunas (which constitute the senses) that act upon the gunas (as sense objects); with this understanding the sadhaka does not get attached (either to actions or to their results)’ (Bhagavad Gita 3.28).
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Here lies the secret: to be intensely active, but all the time remaining a witness of one’s actions, keeping one part of the mind directed towards God, the supreme goal of life. Whenever the mind, in the midst of various activities, forgets this goal, one has to take notice and turn it back to God again
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It is not work which makes it difficult for us to meditate. It is attachment and ego-consciousness which together carry our minds away from God. But once we have fixed God as the goal of life, the mind will return again and again to God in spite of distractions.
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The Gita says clearly: ‘One who has renounced attachment to the results of karma, who is ever contented and totally non-dependent—such a person, even though very actively engaged in work, in reality does not do anything.’
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One seeks solitude only to quieten the turbulent mind. But once the mind is well-controlled, it does not matter whether one is in solitude or in a crowd. What we need to do is to develop the power to withdraw the mind and establish it in the Divine — the Atman.
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