This collection of essays, addresses, and one interview come from the years 1966-73 and cover a wide spectrum of interest, dealing with such general topics as 'The Absence of God in Modern Culture' and 'The Future of Christianity.'.

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

entirety to contemporary readers." --Book Jacket.

Bernard Lonergan devoted much of his life's work to developing a generalized method of inquiry, an integrated view which would overcome the fragmentation of knowledge in our time. In Topics in Education Lonergan adapts that concern to the practical needs of educators. Traditionalist and modernist notions of education are both criticized. Lonergan attempts to work out, in the context of the human good and the 'new learning,' the rudiments of a philosophy of education based on his well-known discovery of (...) norms in the unfolding of intelligent, reasonable, and responsible consciousness. He explores how the scientific revolution has changed ways of understanding reality, and examines the implications of this revolution for education. Topics in Education, the first publication of his 1959 lectures, follows Lonergan on his early explorations of human development, studies the theories ofJean Piaget and others, and concludes with his own original ideas in the realms of ethics, art, and history. Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), a professor of theology, taught at Regis College, Harvard University, and Boston College. An established author known for his Insight and Method in Theology, Lonergan received numerous honorary doctorates, was a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1971 and was named as an original members of the International Theological Commission by Pope Paul VI. (shrink)

Can we make progress exploring consciousness? Or is it forever beyond human reach? In science we never know the ultimate outcome of the journey. We can only take whatever steps our current knowledge affords. This paper explores today's evidence from the viewpoint of Global Workspace theory. First, we ask what kind of evidence has the most direct bearing on the question. The answer given here is ‘contrastive analysis’ -- a set of paired comparisons between similar conscious and unconscious processes. This (...) body of evidence is already quite large, and constrains any possible theory . Because it involves both conscious and unconscious events, it deals directly with our own subjective experience, as anyone can tell by trying the demonstrations in this article. (shrink)

The scholastic philosopher is interested in definition for a different reason than the lexicographer and linguist. The philosopher is trying to learn things. Fe defines, after investigating reality, in an attempt to describe reality clearly and to sum up some aspect of his understanding of reality. Hence, we find our scholastic philosophers adopting as a main feature of their method this insistence on defining, on precise and detailed explanation of their definitions, and on proving that their definitions da correctly express (...) what a nature or activity is. A dictionary of the language of scholastic philosophy fitted to the needs of beginners and of undergraduate students of the subject is not available in English. (shrink)

In the last decade, careful studies of the living brain have opened the way for human consciousness to return to the heights it held before the behavioristic coup of 1913. This is illustrated by seven cases: the discovery of widespread brain activation during conscious perception; high levels of regional brain metabolism in the resting state of consciousness, dropping drastically in unconscious states; the brain correlates of inner speech; visual imagery; fringe consciousness; executive functions of the self; and volition. Other papers (...) in this issue expand on many of these points. . In the past, evidence based on subjective reports was often neglected . It is still true that brain evidence has greater credibility than subjective reports, no matter how reliable. What is new is increasing convergence between subjective experiences and brain observations. For that reason it is no longer rare to see the word 'consciousness' and 'subjectivity' in major science journals. No one so far has discovered a gulf dividing mind and brain. On the contrary, the new evidence supports the central role of consciousness as it was regarded over more than two millenia of written thought. In a sense this was predictable. Nature is full of unexpected convergences -- between fruit fly genes and the human body, between the arc of a tennis ball and the orbit of Mars, and between consciousness and the brain. These convergences show once again the remarkable unity of the observable universe. (shrink)

This volume is an edited version, recreated from tapes and auditors' notes, of the ten lectures that Canadian Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan, delivered on his Insight.

Insight is Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. It aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, a comprehensive view of knowledge and understanding, and to state what one needs to understand and how one proceeds to understand it. In Lonergan's own words: 'Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, and invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments (...) of understanding.' The editors of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan have established the definitive text for Insight after examining all the variant forms in Lonergan's manuscripts and papers. The volume includes introductory material and annotation to enable the reader to appreciate more fully this challenging work. (shrink)

When are psychologists entitled to call a certain theoretical construct "consciousness?" Over the past few decades cognitive psychologists have reintroduced almost the entire conceptual vocabulary of common sense psychology, but now in a way that is tied explicitly to reliable empirical observations, and to compelling and increasingly adequate theoretical models. Nevertheless, until the past few years most cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists avoided dealing with consciousness. Today there is an increasing willingness to do so. But is "consciousness" different from other theoretical (...) entities like "working memory" or "mental imagery"? Some argue that under no circumstances can empirical science speak of consciousness as such, while others claim that the scientific goal is "knowing what it is like to be a bat" --- to share an organism's conscious experience . The Bat Criterion is ominously reminiscent of the protracted debate on the consciousness of ants and amoebas that caused so much uneasiness in psychology around 1900. It seems to demand that we first solve the mind-body problem as a condition of doing sensible science, and thereby creates the risk of endless, fruitless controversy. The endless philosophical debate about consciousness helped trigger the Behaviorist revolution about 1913, which threw out the baby of consciousness with the bathwater of perennial, circular debate. We've been that way; let's not go back to it. This paper maintains that the position of behavioristic denial is far too restrictive, but that the Bat Criterion is far too demanding --- that in fact, we only need to specify comparable pairs of psychological phenomena that differ only in the fact that one member of any pair is conscious, while the other is not. This "method of contrastive analysis" is a generalization of the experimental method, with consciousness as a variable whose interaction with other psychological and biological phenomena can be assessed in standard ways. As usual in science, this strategy is pragmatic: If it appears to yield sensible results, it can be a stepping-stone toward further understanding . This paper describes five sets of well-established pairs of phenomena that meet these criteria. Others are presented elsewhere, with more of a theoretical interpretation . Here I simply want to show that any adequate theory of conscious experience must satisfy these demanding but achievable empirical constraints. (shrink)

„Fenomenologia: natura, znaczenie, ograniczenia” to przekład publikacji Bernarda J. F. Lonergana pt. „Phenomenology” nature, significance, limitations”. Tenże dwunasty wykład kanadyjskiego filozofia o fenomenologii traktuje o jej definicji, przedmiocie, naturze, znaczeniu i zasługach oraz związkach z innymi naukami. Wprowadza czytelnika w główne koncepcje tej szkoły filozoficznej i zapoznaje z autorami, dla których ten sposób myślenia jest charakterystyczny. Filozof w szczególności zwraca uwagę na to, iż jest to metoda badań, w której istotną rolę odgrywa wgląd. Warto zauważyć, że kategoria wglądu w epistemologii (...) Bernarda J. F. Lonergana — XX-wiecznego myśliciela i księdza filozofującego na pograniczu fenomenologii, tomizmu i hermeneutyki — jest kluczowa. Przekładu dokonała Dominika Dziurosz-Serafinowicz. (shrink)

This paper reports the social and medical characteristics of women resident in Aberdeen city who were sterilized in 195162 and 197152 women were offered sterilization, the majority being lower social class mothers with five or more children who were sterilized concurrently with abortion; the small number of upper social class women had one or two children and were sterilized for medical or obstetric reasons. By 196172, women themselves requested sterilization, the two–three child family was the norm, the proportion of upper (...) social class women continued to increase, and interval sterilization was gaining ground. (shrink)

?In everday language, the word ?attention? implies control of access to consciousness, and we adopt this usage here. Attention itself can be either voluntary or automatic. This can be readily modeled in the theory. Further, a contrastive analysis of spontaneously self?attributed vs. self?alien experiences suggests that ?self? can be interpreted as the more enduring, higher levels of the dominant context hierarchy, which create continuity over the changing flow of events. Since context is by definition unconscious in GW theory, self in (...) this sense is thought to be inherently unconscious as well. This proposal is consistent with a great deal of objective evidence. However, aspects of self may become known through ?conscious self-monitoring,? a process that ??is useful for self-evaluation and self?control. The results of conscious self-monitoring are combined with self?evaluation criteria, presumably of social origin, to produce a stable ?self?concept?, which functions as a supervisory system within the larger self organization. (shrink)

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part . . . The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner 'state' in which the thinking comes to pass.

This work is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to a scholarly and systematic analysis of how soldiers returning from battle have been, or should be, treated morally. Long-scattered historical material is pulled together from a variety of sources to show why and how the early medieval custom of imposing penances on returning warriors first originated, and then, by the end of the Middle Ages, had lapsed into disuse.

I describe and explain evidence regarding a key role for autism spectrum cognition in human technology; tradeoffs of autistic cognition with social skills; and a model of how cumulative technological culture evolves. This model involves positive feedback whereby increased technical complexity selects for enhanced social learning of mechanistic concepts and skills, leading to further advances in technology.