"This leads all too easily to the idea that while someone is awake they must always be conscious of something or other. And that leads along the slippery path to the idea that if we knew what to look for we could peer inside someone's brain and find out which processes were the conscious ones and which the unconscious ones. But this is all nonsense. All we will ever find is the neural correlates of thoughts, perceptions, memories and the verbal and attentional processes that lead us to think we are conscious. When we finally have a better theory of consciousness to replace these popular delusions we will see that there is no hard problem, no magic difference and no NCCs. "
Susan Blackmore has never taken the reports and research on Pure Consciousness during TM seriously. But in fact, it DOES provide a way of establishing the neural correlates of consciousenss without content, which is her main objection to the idea that the search is worth doing. In fact, I make a prediction: once non-TMer researchers start looking at the EEG of TMers closely, that is to say, at the EEG microstate level, they will be motivated to looki more closely at Pure Consciousness using the most sophisticated and expensive equipment they have available, and that this will lead to Blackmore eating her words (eventually). L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Susan Blackmore has a new essay about consciousness research on her website. Food for thought: "Consciousness is not some weird and wonderful product of some brain processes but not others. Rather, it is an illusion constructed by a clever brain and body in a complex social world. We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will." http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457 http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457
