Does All Begin with Consciousness?

About the Book

Section 1 opens up fundamental worldview issues, first discussing implications of our world's totally-holarchic, open-ended substructure, then explaining why we should use the principle of parsimony not only conventionally but also to banish needless and overly broad simplifications-and how this has relevance to limitations of reductionist science. Section 2 explores evocative questions about consciousness from a monist perspective, pointing towards observables that are not object-like and kinds of change that are non-mechanical. This leads toward understanding consciousness as meta-change identical to creation. The essays (i) propose that what's re-organizing itself is the organism's dynamic (predictive) internal model of itself-in-its-world; (ii) examine reasons why this "continuous creation" (CC) metatheory of consciousness has generally not been "self-evident;" then (iii) elaborate the means by which conscious re-organizing is postulated to work; (iv) begin to discuss implications (for mind evolution and for entropy-levels in life-systems) of this view of consciousness; and (v) end with neurophysiological speculations. Section 3 begins with discussion of the consciousness 'hard' problem in relation to CC metatheory; then shows how that metatheory relates to two other theories of consciousness; and finishes by presenting the metatheory's social and ethical implications.

About the Author

Adam Atkin is a native New Yorker with 30 years experience in brain sciences research at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City (Research Professor in Departments of Neurology and Ophthalmology). He set up laboratories, ran research studies, did consulting and published more than 40 research papers.