The integral consciousness -- The internal universe -- The evolution of consciousness -- The within of things -- The systemic nature of evolution -- Stages of consciousness and culture -- The spiral of development -- Tribal consciousness -- Warrior consciousness -- Traditional consciousness -- Modernist consciousness -- Postmodern consciousness -- The spiral as a whole -- What is the real evidence for the spiral? -- The integral stage of consciousness -- Life conditions for integral consciousness -- The values of integral (...) consciousness -- Integral consciousness in the context of history -- Practicing the integral lifestylevalue metabolism -- Postintegral consciousness -- Integral politics -- The politics of the spiral -- Integral politics and global governance -- Is global governance an unrealistic fantasy? -- Is global governance too dangerouswhat are the safeguards? -- Global governance and integral consciousness cocreate each other -- Integral spirituality -- The development of spiritual traditions -- Public spirituality in the integral age -- Beauty, truth, and goodnessphilosophical spirituality -- The practice of beauty, truth, and goodness -- The revelation of evolution -- The founders of integral philosophy -- Ken Wilber in context -- The evolution of philosophy as a human endeavor -- Hegel, the first integral philosopher -- Bergson, the first post-darwinian integral philosopher -- Whitehead, spiritual philosopher for the ages -- Teilhard de Chardin, master of the internal universe -- Gebser, prophet of integral consciousness -- Developmental psychology and the mapping of the internal universe -- Habermas, architect of integral foundations -- Wilber, framer of integral philosophys twenty-first-century synthesis -- What I add to integral philosophy -- The integral reality frame -- Metaphysics and the evolution of reality frames -- The integral map of reality -- Integral philosophy and human spirituality -- Some critiques of the integral reality frame -- Structures of the human mind -- Lines of development recognized by psychologists -- Wilber's theory of the lines of development -- A critique of Wilber's theory of developmental lines -- An alternative theory of the structures of consciousness -- The self as a whole -- The directions of evolution -- Evolution and the idea of progress -- Unity, complexity, and consciousness -- Directions of evolution in the internal universe -- The dialectical quality of the master patterns of evolution -- Potential applications of a dialectical understanding of evolution. (shrink)

(2002). Conscious Evolution of Humanity: Using Systems Thinking to Construct Agoras of the Global Village. Announcing the 47th Annual Conference 2003 of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISS) www.isss.org. World Futures: Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 335-338.

Analysis of the use of the key term the people shows that it has varied both semantically and syntactically along the time-line of the evolution of the CPC.

It is suggested that some limitations of current designs for medical AI systems stem from the failure of those designs to address issues of artificial consciousness. Consciousness would appear to play a key role in the expertise, particularly the moral expertise, of human medical agents, including, for example, autonomous weighting of options in diagnosis; planning treatment; use of imaginative creativity to generate courses of action; sensorimotor flexibility and sensitivity; empathetic and morally appropriate responsiveness; and so on. Thus, it is argued, (...) a plausible design constraint for a successful ethical machine medical or care agent is for it to at least model, if not reproduce, relevant aspects of consciousness and associated abilities. In order to provide theoretical grounding for such an enterprise we examine some key philosophical issues that concern the machine modelling of consciousness and ethics, and we show how questions relating to the first research goal are relevant to medical machine ethics. We believe that this will overcome a blanket skepticism concerning the relevance of understanding consciousness, to the design and construction of artificial ethical agents for medical or care contexts. It is thus argued that it would be prudent for designers of MME agents to reflect on issues to do with consciousness and medical expertise; to become more aware of relevant research in the field of machine consciousness ; and to incorporate insights gained from these efforts into their designs. (shrink)

I compare a ‘realist’ with a ‘social–relational’ perspective on our judgments of the moral status of artificial agents (AAs). I develop a realist position according to which the moral status of a being—particularly in relation to moral patiency attribution—is closely bound up with that being’s ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). For a realist, both moral status and experiential capacity are objective properties of agents. A social relationist denies the existence of any such objective properties (...) in the case of either moral status or consciousness, suggesting that the determination of such properties rests solely upon social attribution or consensus. A wide variety of social interactions between us and various kinds of artificial agent will no doubt proliferate in future generations, and the social–relational view may well be right that the appearance of CSS features in such artificial beings will make moral role attribution socially prevalent in human–AA relations. But there is still the question of what actual CSS states a given AA is capable of undergoing, independently of the appearances. This is not just a matter of changes in the structure of social existence that seem inevitable as human–AA interaction becomes more prevalent. The social world is itself enabled and constrained by the physical world, and by the biological features of living social participants. Properties analogous to certain key features in biological CSS are what need to be present for nonbiological CSS. Working out the details of such features will be an objective scientific inquiry. (shrink)

In what ways should we include future humanoid robots, and other kinds of artificial agents, in our moral universe? We consider the Organic view, which maintains that artificial humanoid agents, based on current computational technologies, could not count as full-blooded moral agents, nor as appropriate targets of intrinsic moral concern. On this view, artificial humanoids lack certain key properties of biological organisms, which preclude them from having full moral status. Computationally controlled systems, however advanced in their cognitive or informational capacities, (...) are, it is proposed, unlikely to possess sentience and hence will fail to be able to exercise the kind of empathic rationality that is a prerequisite for being a moral agent. The organic view also argues that sentience and teleology require biologically based forms of self-organization and autonomous self-maintenance. The organic view may not be correct, but at least it needs to be taken seriously in the future development of the field of Machine Ethics. (shrink)

In this challenging and provocative book, Steve Fuller contends that our continuing faith in science in the face of its actual history is best understood as the secular residue of a religiously inspired belief in divine providence. Our faith in science is the promise of a life as it shall be, as science will make it one day. Just as men once put their faith in God's activity in the world, so we now travel to a land promised by (...) science. In "Science", Fuller suggests that the two destinations might be the same one. Fuller sympathetically explores what it might mean to live scientifically. Can science give a sense of completeness to one's life? Can it account for the entirety of what it is to be human? And what does our continuing belief in scientific progress say about us as a species? In answering these questions, Fuller ranges widely over the history of science and religion - from Aristotle and the atomists to Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists - and takes a close look at what science is, how its purpose has changed over the years, and what role religion and in more recent years atheism have played in its progression. Science, argues Fuller, is now undergoing its own version of secularization. We are ceasing to trust science in its institutional forms, formulated by an anointed class of science priests, and instead we are witnessing the emergence of what Fuller calls Protscience' - all sorts of people, from the New Age movement to anti-evolutionists, claiming scientific authority as their own. Fuller shows that these groups are no more anti-scientific than Protestant sects were atheistic. Fearless and thought-provoking, Science questions some of our most fundamental beliefs about the nature and role of science, and is a distinct and important contribution to debates about evolution, intelligent design, atheism, humanism, the notion of scientific progress, and the public understanding of science. (shrink)

This article criticizes the thesis, Suggested by wittgenstein and elaborated and defended by malcolm and others, That the concepts of numerical identity and difference do not apply to pains, Afterimages, Sudden thoughts, And other contents of consciousness. I argue that the arguments offered in support of this thesis cannot account for much of our common practice and language concerning these contents while acknowledging that these categories apply to these contents can account for these practices and language as well as for (...) the examples malcolm emphasizes. On the basis of this analysis I draw some conclusions about the relation of ordinary language to common sense. (shrink)

Janet Lee Mitchell. Conscious Evolution. Ballantine Books, 1990, 210 pages.

While there is now general agreement that memory gives rise to both conscious and unconscious influences, there remains disagreement concerning the process architecture underlying these distinct influences. Do they arise from independent underlying systems or from systems that are interactive ? In the current paper we present a novel “inside-out” technique that can be used with the process-dissociation paradigm to arrive at more concrete conclusions concerning this central question and demonstrate this technique via a meta-analysis of currently published findings. (...) Our results suggest that the data presented in these studies vary in ways most consistent with the assumption that conscious and unconscious influences behave independently. (shrink)

This article supports the idea that synthesis, rather than analysis, is the most powerful and promising route towards understanding the essence of brain function being understood at all. It discusses ‘understanding by doing’, outlines a methodology for the use of deep computer simulation and robotics in pursuing such a synthesis, and then briefly introduces the author’s ongoing, long-term attempt to build a neurologically plausible and hopefully at least subconscious being, whom he hopes will eventually answer to the name of Lucy.

Secreted Frizzled‐related proteins (SFRPs) are modulators of the intermeshing pathways in which signals are transduced by Wnt ligands through Frizzled (Fz) membrane receptors. The Wnt networks influence biological processes ranging from developmental cell fate, cell polarity and adhesion to tumorigenesis and apoptosis. In the five or six years since their discovery, the SFRPs have emerged as dynamically expressed proteins able to bind both Wnts and Fz, with distinctive structural properties in which cysteine‐rich domains from Fz‐ and from netrin‐like proteins are (...) juxtaposed. The abundant expression of SFRP genes in the early embryo, altered expression patterns in disease states, and potential significance in the evolution of the vertebrate body plan, make these intriguing molecules relevant to investigations in diverse fields of biology and biomedical sciences. BioEssays 24:811–820, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Despite its explanatory clout, the theory of evolution has thus far compiled a modest record with respect to predictive power—that other major hallmark of scientific theories. This is considered by many to be an acceptable limitation of a theory that deals with events and processes that are intrinsically random. However, whether this is an inherent restriction or simply the sign of an incomplete theory is an open question. In an attempt to help answer that question, we propose a classification scheme (...) for several types of prediction that might occur with regard to evolutionary systems, then explore the nature of these predictions in a system that simulates the evolution of neural architectures. This provides a platform from which to consider the relevance of such observations for real biological systems and illuminates a variety of key issues pertaining to prediction in those environments. (shrink)

For Peter Sloterdijk, Friedrich Nietzsche represents nothing short of a "catastrophe in the history of language" -- a new evangelist for a linguistics of narcissistic jubilation. Nietzsche offered a philosophical declaration of independence from humility, a meeting-point of sobriety and megalomania that for Sloterdijk has come to define the very project of philosophy. Yet for all the significance of this language-event named Nietzsche, Nietzsche's contributions have too often been elided and the contradictions at the root of his philosophy too often (...) edited out. As Sloterdijk observes, "Never has an author so insisted on distinction and yet attracted such vulgarity." Nietzsche Apostle, drawn from a speech Sloterdijk gave in 2000 on the hundredth anniversary of Nietzsche's death, looks at the ways in which Nietzsche has been branded over the years through selective compilation, and at the ways in which Nietzsche turned himself into a brand -- a brand announced by his proclaimed "fifth Gospel," _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_. For Sloterdijk, the focus should not be on the figure of Zarathustra or on the "will to power" often used as a kind of philosophical shorthand to sum up Nietzsche's work, but on Zarathustra's act of "speaking" itself. _Nietzsche Apostle_ offers a brief history of self-praise and self-affirmation, an examination of the evolution of boasting, and a very original approach to Nietzsche, philosophy's first designer brand of individualism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Against Yoga Theory: A Standard Objection Some Inadequate Responses to the Standard Objection The Standard Objection and Testimony Higher Up the Scale Conclusion.

Animal activists sometimes engage in vigils and acts of witnessing as forms of political protest. For example, the Animal Save Movement, a global activist network, regards witnessing the suffering of non-human animals as a moral duty of veganism. The act of witnessing is intended to non-violently communicate both attitudes and principles. These forms of activism are unlike other forms of protest, relying for much of their force upon passive, non-confrontational actions. This article explores the ethical character of vigils and witnessing (...) in order to evaluate their role in animal rights activism. It argues that the love-based ethic behind the Animal Save Movement's form of witnessing is overly demanding, overly expansive and overly deferential towards wrongdoers. In its place, this article offers a narrower account of witnessing, detached from controversial spiritual elements. Vigils and conscious acts of witnessing, it is claimed, are political acts aimed at fulfilling duties to seek justice for non-human animals. (shrink)

Consciousness represents the core of the new paradigm, the unitary, systemic vision, and comprehension that emerges in every field of science, culture, and spirituality. For centuries, consciousness has been divided from matter, the soul from the physical body. Now, in this historical beginning of globalization, we need a new holistic model, a global paradigm based on consciousness that can explain the unitary evolutionary process, the psychosomatic unity of human being, the neurophysiological roots of harmony between peoples and the way to (...) personal and collective evolution of consciousness in order to realize a more conscious, peaceful, and sustainable planetary future. Consciousness is the key of human evolution. (shrink)

Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country for his late 1980s Critique of Cynical Reason, which confronted headlong the "enlightened false consciousness" of Habermasian critical theory. Two decades later, after spending seven years in India studying Eastern philosophy, he is now attracting renewed interest for his writings on politics and globalization and for his magnum opus Spheres, a three-volume archaeology of the human attempt to dwell within spaces, from womb to globe: Bubbles, 1998; Globes, 1999; Foam, 2004, all forthcoming (...) from Semiotext. In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk answers questions posed by German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, commenting on such issues as technological mutation, development media, communication technologies, and his own intellectual itinerary.Iconoclastic and provocative, alternatively sparkling and bombastic, a child of '68 and a libertarian, Sloterdijk is the most exciting and controversial German philosopher to appear on the world scene since Nietzsche and Heidegger. Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk remains convinced that contemporary philosophers have to think dangerously and let themselves be "kidnapped" by contemporary "hypercomplexities"; they must forsake our present humanist and nationalist world for a wider horizon at once ecological and global.Neither Sun nor Death is the best introduction available to Sloterdijk's philosophical theory of globalization. It reveals a philosophe extraordinaire, encyclopedic and provocative, as much at ease with current French Theory as with Heidegger and Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh. (shrink)

Despite Kant's belief in a universal causal determinism among phenomena and his rejection of any noumenal agency in brutes, he nevertheless rejected Descartes's hypothesis that brutes are machines. Explaining Kant's response to Descartes forms the basis for this discussion of the nature of consciousness and matter in Kant's system. Kant's numerous remarks on animal psychology-as found in his lecture notes and reflections on metaphysics and anthropology-suggest a theory of consciousness and self-consciousness at odds with that traditionally ascribed to him.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) has emerged in recent years as a dynamic and quickly growing segment of the U.S. financial services industry involving over $2 trillion in professionally managed assets. Its conceptual origins can be found in the early history of civilization, with it's modern roots in the 1960s. This paper provides an overview of the breadth and depth of the concept and practice of socially and environmentally responsible investing, describes the investment strategies that together define SRI as currently practiced (...) in the U.S., offers several observations about some of the factors fueling its dramatic growth, and presents data showing that investors who choose to invest in a socially and environmentally responsible manner can do so without giving up investment returns. SRI has matured to a point where virtually any investment need can be met through portfolio design that integrates an investor's personal values, institutional mission, and/or social priorities. The socially responsible investment industry in the United States is a young phenomenon. Even referring to it as an "industry" ten years ago may have been a bit of a stretch. While it has grown dramatically in recent years, it is an area of work, of study and of practical application that continues to evolve in many significant ways. One intriguing example of the ongoing development of the field can be found in the analysis of the language used to describe it. The terms social investing, socially responsible investing, ethical investing, socially aware investing, socially conscious investing, green investing, values-based investing, and mission-based or mission-related investing all refer to the same general process and are often used interchangeably. (shrink)

William Lynch has persistently questioned the politics underlying my appeal to science and technology studies’ flagship symmetry principle. He believes that it licenses the worst features of the ‘post-truth condition’. I respond in two parts, the first facing the future and the second facing the past. In the first part, I argue that the symmetry principle will be crucial in decisions that society will increasingly need to make concerning the inclusion of animals and machines on grounds of sentience, consciousness, intelligence, (...) etc. In the second part, I argue that the symmetry principle has been in fact at the core of the ‘justice as fairness’ idea that has been at the core of both liberal and socialist democracies. Difficulties start once the means of expression and communication are made widely available and the standards of fairness are subject to continual questioning and renegotiation. (shrink)

The complexity that we observe in nature can often be explained in terms of cooperative behavior. For example, the major transitions of evolution required the emergence of cooperation among the lower-level units of selection, which led to specialization through division-of-labor ultimately resulting in spontaneous order. There are two aspects to address explaining how such cooperation is sustained: how free-riders are prevented from free-riding on the benefits of cooperative tasks, and just as importantly, how those social benefits arise. We review these (...) problems from an economic perspective, and highlight how ideas from economics can help us to better understand how the benefits of social interactions arise, how they are sustained, and how they affect the underlying social dilemmas. (shrink)

Trevena and Miller provide further evidence that readiness potentials occur in the brain prior to the time that participants claim to have initiated a voluntary movement, a contention originally forwarded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl . In their examination of this issue, though, aspects of their data lead them to question whether their measurement of the initiation of a voluntary movement was accurate. The current article addresses this concern by providing a direct analysis of biases in this task. This (...) was done by asking participants to make subjective timing decisions regarding a stimulus that could be measured objectively. Our findings suggest that their timing task was indeed biased such that participants' tend to report events as happening approximately 70 ms later than they actually happened. Implications for the original Libet et al. claims are discussed. (shrink)

This article is a response to William Lynch’s, ‘Social Epistemology Transformed: Steve Fuller’s Account of Knowledge as a Divine Spark for Human Domination,’ an extended and thoughtful reflection on my Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History. I grant that Lynch has captured well, albeit critically, the spirit and content of the book – and the thirty-year intellectual journey that led to it. In this piece, I respond at two levels. First, I justify my posture towards my predecessors and contemporaries, (...) which Lynch shrewdly sees as my opposition to deference. However, most of the response concerns an elaboration of my theodicy-focussed sense of social epistemology, which is long-standing but only started to become prominent about ten years ago, in light of my involvement in the evolution controversies. Here I aim to draw together a set of my abiding interests – scientific, theological and philosophical – in trying to provide a normative foundation for the future of humanity. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics has long been notorious. Part of the problem is that it has not been recognized that Wittgenstein, in fact, had two chief post-Tractatus conceptions of mathematics. I have labelled these the calculus conception and the language-game conception. The calculus conception forms a distinct middle period. The goal of my article is to provide a new framework for examining Wittgenstein's philosophies of mathematics and the evolution of his career as a whole. I posit the Hardyian Picture, modelled (...) on the Augustinian Picture, to provide a structure for Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein's calculus period has not been properly recognized, so I give a detailed account of the tenets of that stage in Wittgenstein's career. Wittgenstein's notorious remarks on contradiction are the test case for my theory of his transition. I show that the bizarreness of those remarks is largely due to the calculus conception, but that Wittgenstein's later language-game account of mathematics keeps the rejection of the Hardyian Picture while correcting the calculus conception's mistakes. (shrink)

Current approaches to machine consciousness (MC) tend to offer a range of characteristic responses to critics of the enterprise. Many of these responses seem to marginalize phenomenal consciousness, by presupposing a 'thin' conception of phenomenality. This conception is, we will argue, largely shared by anti- computationalist critics of MC. On the thin conception, physiological or neural or functional or organizational features are secondary accompaniments to consciousness rather than primary components of consciousness itself. We outline an alternative, 'thick' conception of phenomenality. (...) This shows some signposts in the direction of a more adequate approach to MC. (shrink)

Attempts to understand visual attention have produced models based on location, in which attention selects particular regions of space, and models based on other visual attributes . Previous studies of inattentional blindness have contributed to our understanding of attention by suggesting that the detection of an unexpected object depends on the distance of that object from the spatial focus of attention. When the distance of a briefly flashed object from both fixation and the focus of attention is systematically varied, detection (...) appears to have a location-based component. However, the likelihood that people will detect an unexpected event in sustained and dynamic displays may depend on more than just spatial location. We investigated the influence of spatial location on inattentional blindness under precisely controlled, sustained and dynamic conditions. We found that although location-based models cannot fully account for the detection of unexpected objects, spatial location does play a role even when displays are visible for an extended period. (shrink)

The concept of an 'assumption' is discussed, and it is suggested that the psychological model implied by normal usage is misleading. A new model is proposed which distinguishes between 'assumptions', as constraints upon the thinking process, and 'postulates', as corresponding potential or actual propositional vocalizations. Some evidence for this model is provided, and its implications, particularly for the process of assumption identification, are discussed. It is suggested that assumption identification requires lateral thinking, and needs to be separated from problem-solving. The (...) discussion is offered as an instance of an appropriate type of fusion of psychological and informal-logical approaches. (shrink)

If you accept evolutionary theory, can you also believe in God? Are human beings superior to other animals, or is this just a human prejudice? Does Darwin have implications for heated issues like euthanasia and animal rights? Does evolution tell us the purpose of life, or does it imply that life has no ultimate purpose? Does evolution tell us what is morally right and wrong, or does it imply that ultimately 'nothing' is right or wrong? In this fascinating and intriguing (...) book, Steve Stewart-Williams addresses these and other fundamental philosophical questions raised by evolutionary theory and the exciting new field of evolutionary psychology. Drawing on biology, psychology and philosophy, he argues that Darwinian science supports a view of a godless universe devoid of ultimate purpose or moral structure, but that we can still live a good life and a happy life within the confines of this view. (shrink)

This research was motivated by the author’s personal experiences with various breathing methods as well as meaningful breathing experiences reported by clients, colleagues and friends. The meaning of breathing is discussed in relation to consciousness, bodiliness, spirituality, illness prevention and health promotion. Experiencing the meaning of breathing is to experience more meaning in life itself. Experiential vignettes confirm that breathing skills may be regarded as an original method of survival, energy control, improving quality of life, preventing illness and promoting health. (...) Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 1 May 2006. (shrink)

Why is human history a catalogue of one war after another? Physicalist and sociobiological explanations of war seem to be lacking, especially when we consider archaeological and ethnographic evidence for the absence of war amongst hunter-gatherer societies and during the early to middle Neolithic period of history. James DeMeo's book Saharasia suggests that the 'age of war' only began at around 4000 BCE, amongst particular human groups who inhabited areas of Central Asia and the Middle East. He sees it as (...) the result of an environmental disaster which occurred at this time: the dessication of the 'Saharasia' region. I summarize DeMeo's findings, but disagree with his Reichian analysis. I propose that the real factor was the intensified ego-consciousness which these groups developed at this time. I suggest how and why this 'sharpened sense of ego' arose, and at how it gave rise to -- and still gives rise to -- war. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that the content and frequency of mind-wandering episodes—the occurrence of thoughts that are both stimulus-independent and task-unrelated—are closely related to an individual’s future-related concerns. Whether this relationship is shaped by the affective changes that are usually associated with future-related concerns still remains unclear, however. In this study, we induced the anticipation of a negatively valenced event and examined whether the ensuing affective changes were related to the occurrence and content of mind-wandering during an unrelated attentional task. (...) We found that the increase in negative affect following concern induction predicted the general frequency of mind-wandering episodes. Furthermore, mind-wandering episodes specifically directed at the induced concern were related to a lower decrease in negative affect during the attentional task. These results suggest that the negative emotional impact of future-related concerns is an important factor to be taken into consideration for the subsequent occurrence of mind-wandering episodes, which might in turn be involved in the maintenance of negative affect over time. (shrink)