Science and Religion Dialogue Prints
Not a member yet
399 research outputs found
Sort by
Whitehead & the Elusive Present Process Philosophy’s Creative Core
Get PDFTime’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) – all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In doing so, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination and if this relates to doing science
Krusta zinātne – kāpēc zinātniekiem ir jāsaprot krusta noslēpums, lai veidotu veiksmīgu dialogu ar kristiešiem
Get PDFFeaturing Gregory M. Nixon’s Work with Commentaries & Responses. HOLLOWS OF MEMORY. From Individual Consciousness to Panexperientialism and Beyond
Get PDFTable of Contents
Article
Preface/Introduction
Gregory M. Nixon 213-215
From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience: The Continuum of Experience
Gregory M. Nixon 216-233
Hollows of Experience
Gregory M. Nixon 234-288
Myth and Mind: The Origin of Human Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred
Gregory M. Nixon 289-337
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Commentary
Brief Comment on Gregory Nixon’s Hollows of Experience: Derrida
Frederick D. Abraham 338-341
Playing With Your Food: Review of “Hollows of Experience” by Greg Nixon
William A. Adams 342-345
Brief Commentary on Nixon's Three Papers
Roger Cook 346-347
Commentary on Nixon's From Panexperientialism to Individual Self Consciousness
Stephen Deiss 348-349
Nixon on Conscious and Non-conscious Experience
Gordon Globus 350-351
Commentary on Nixon's From Panexperientialism to Individual Self Consciousness
Syamala Hari 352-353
The Predictive Mind and Mortal Knowledge
Marc Hersch 354-368
Consciousness as Shared and Categorized Result of Experience
Tim Jarvilehto 369-371
Brief Comment on Gregory Nixon’s Myth and Mind
Joseph McCard 372-372
Commentary on Nixon's Three Papers
Marty Monteiro 373-376
Brief Commentary on Nixon's “From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience”
Richard W Moodey 377-378
Hollows of a Science of Consciousness?
Alfredo Pereira Jr. 379-380
Comment on Gregory Nixon’s “From Panexperientialism to Individual Self Consciousness”
Steven M. Rosen 381-382
Consciousness, Non-conscious Experiences and Functions, Proto-experiences and Protofunctions,
and Subjective Experiences
Ram L. P. Vimal 383-389
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Response to Commentary
Response to the Commentary of Frederick D. Abraham
Gregory M. Nixon 390-390
Response to the Commentary of William A. Adams
Gregory M. Nixon 391-392
Response to the Commentary of Syamala Hari
Gregory M. Nixon 393-394
Response to the Commentary of Marc Hersch
Gregory M. Nixon 395-398
Response to the Commentary of Joseph McCard
Gregory M. Nixon 399-399
Response to the Commentary of Steven M. Rosen
Gregory M. Nixon 400-40
HOLLOWS of EXPERIENCE
Get PDFThis essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I chapter is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural proto-language learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object — of self and world — the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being.
Looking beyond human self-consciousness to investigate the origin and nature of awareness itself in Part 2, reductive objective materialism is found to be of little use. Direct experience also falls short in that, in order to be transformed into objective knowledge about itself, it must always be interpreted through and limited by the symbolic contexts of culture and the idiosyncratic conceptualizations of the individual. Awareness in itself must thus be considered ultimately unexplainable, but this may more indicate its inexpressible transcendence of all symbolic qualifiers than its nonexistence. It is suggested that awareness is not “self-aware” (as in deity) but is instead unknowing yet identical with the only true universal: the impetus of creative unfolding. Our human knowledge, as an expression of this unfolding, is seen to emerge from our conscious experiencing and, in turn, to have the power — and enormous responsibility — of directing that experience. Our underlying symbolic worldviews are found to be autopoietic: They limit or open our conscious experience, which, in turn, confirms those worldview expectations. As we explore a future of unforeseeable technological breakthroughs on an ailing planet who patiently copes with our “success,” truly vital decisions about the nature, meaning, and future of conscious experience will have to be made. Can we transcend our culturally conditioned selves
How Unconditioned Consciousness, Infinite Information, Potential Energy, and Time Created Our Universe
Get PDFSince the cause and nature of consciousness and its derivation from the universe have never been satisfactorily explained by conventional reductive science, I offer here a rationally imaginative basis for a new scientific paradigm. This new view not only explains the origin of the physical universe, but also that potential consciousness, time, mass/energy and infinite holographic information are rooted in original spin momentum of unconditioned pre-cosmic (empty) space (see appendix) – the absolute source of all relative phenomenal existence
Experimental Support of Spin-mediated Consciousness Theory from Various Sources
Get PDFThis paper summarizes experimental support to spin-mediated consciousness theory from various sources including the results of our own. In doing so, we also provide explanations based on this theory to experimental phenomena such as out-of-body experience and sensed presence, quantum-like cognitive functions and optical illusions. Whether one agrees or not with the spin-mediated consciousness theory is for one alone to judge. In any event, the importance of the experimental results mentioned in this paper is obvious: quantum effects play important roles in brain/cognitive functions despite of the denials and suspicions of the naysayer and skeptics
68th annual scientific conference of the University of Latvia. Faculty of Theology section. "Science and Religion Dialogue".
Get PDFLU 68. zinātniskā konference. Teoloģijas fakultātes sekcija „Zinātnes un Reliģijas dialogs”.
I sēde
2010. gada 11. februārī, Latvijas universitāte, Raiņa bulv. 19, Mazā zāle
(video skatīties http://www.lu.lv/par/mediji/video/konferences/2010/religijaunzinatne/11022010/)
Vadītājs Normunds Titāns
1. Juris Cālītis, „Kā 19. gadsimtā tika izdomātas 'reliģija' un 'zinātne'”.
2. Normunds Titāns, „Teoloģijas kā zinātnes vieta universitātē”.
3. Elizabete Taivāne, „Reliģijas izpratne mūsdienu Krievijas reliģiju pētniecībā: semi-zinātniskais modelis”.
4. Valdis Tēraudkalns, „Sociālās zinātnes un teoloģija – sadarbības partneres vai pretinieces?”
5. Ilze Jansone, „Literāri-reliģiska teksta fenomens: narratīva vēstījuma atšķirības un interpretācija no literatūrzinātnes un reliģijas filosofijas aspekta”.
6. Dace Dišlere Musta, „Teoloģijas un psiho-sociālo zinātņu saskarsme pastorālpsiholoģijā”.
7. Jānis Rudzītis, „Kā zinātne palīdz izprast reliģiju: Kumrānas gadījums”.
8. Andris Namnieks, „Zinātnisko metožu izmantošana liturģijas pētniecībā”.
9. Laila Čakare, „Akadēmiskā un baznīcas pieeja psalmu tulkošanā”.
10. Olga Petrova, „Šahīds islāmā un tā zinātniskie skaidrojumi”
About the Nature of Time
Get PDFThe identification of the experienced time te and geometric time tg involves well-known problems. Physicist is troubled by the reversibility of tg contra irreversibility of te, by the conflict between determinism of Schrödinger equation and the non-determinism of state function reduction, and by the poorly understood the origin of the arrow of tg. In biology the second law of thermodynamics might be violated in its standard form for short time intervals. Neuroscientist knows that the moment of sensory experience has a finite duration, does not understand what memories really are, and is bothered by the Libet's puzzling finding that neural activity seems to precede conscious decision. These problems are discussed in the framework of Topological Geometrodynamics (TGD) and TGD inspired theory of consciousness constructed as a generalization of quantum measurement theory. In TGD space-times are regarded as 4-dimensional surfaces of 8-dimensional space-time H=M4×CP2 and obey classical field equations. The basic notions of consciousness theory are quantum jump and self. Subjective time is identified as a sequence of quantum jumps. Self has as a geometric correlate a fixed volume of H- "causal diamond"-defining the perceptive field of self. Quantum states are regarded as quantum superpositions of space-time surfaces of H and by quantum classical correspondence assumed to shift towards the geometric past of H quantum jump by quantum jump. This creates the illusion that perceiver moves to the direction of the geometric future. Self is curious about the geometric future and induces the shift bringing it to its perceptive field. Macroscopic quantum coherence and the identification of space-times as surfaces in H play a crucial role in this picture allowing to understand also other problematic aspects in the relationship between experienced and geometric time
