MAKING SENSE OF GOD: HOW I GOT TO THE BRAIN

Abstract. I describe the development of my work in relating brain research and religion from my personal roots in my family of origin through my professional responsibilities as a pastor, a clinician, and a theological educator to my developing what I call “a neurotheological approach” to faith and ministry. My early correlations gave simplistic attention to bimodal consciousness as an interpretive tool for understanding religion. Subsequently came a more sophisticated exploration of whole-brain functioning and suggested cultural correlates. Currently, I am explicating tae humanizing brain as reflective of our living in an open system, a universe that is unfolding and evolving, a universe in the hands of the whole-making, integrating, emerging God whose reality far exceeds the insights of cultural construction. As we humans relate to this God, attachment and aspiration are reciprocal.     

Nietzsche on conscious and unconscious thought

ABSTRACT

While much recent attention has been directed towards Nietzsche’s reflections on the mind, and on consciousness in particular, his often-suggestive comments about thinking have thus far avoided comparable scrutiny. Starting from Nietzsche’s claims that we ‘think constantly, but [do] not know it’, and that only our conscious thinking ‘takes place in words,’ I draw out the distinct strands that underpin such remarks. The opening half of the paper focuses upon Nietzsche’s understanding of unconscious thinking, and the role of affects therein. In what remains, I consider the difference (for Nietzsche) between conscious and unconscious thought, with a particular focus on two important readings. The first, put forward by Paul Katsafanas, claims that conscious states alone have conceptually-articulated content. The second, defended most prominently by Mattia Riccardi, argues that Nietzsche’s various claims evince a form of HOT (higher-order thought) theory. I argue that neither reading is quite right, and instead propose an alternative interpretation of conscious thinking ‘in words’, which draws on work on inner speech.     

Access,phenomenology and sorites

The non‐transitivity of the relation looks the same as has been used to argue that the relation has the same phenomenal character as is non‐transitive—a result that jeopardizes certain theories of consciousness. In this paper, I argue against this conclusion while granting the premise by dissociating lookings and phenomenology; an idea that some might find counter‐intuitive. However, such an intuition is left unsupported once phenomenology and cognitive access are distinguished from each other; a distinction that is conceptually and empirically grounded.     

Improvisation: The Astonishing Bridge to Our Inner Music

Musical improvisation is the expressive capacity of a performer fostered by access to their own “productive” (creative) or “reproductive” (mnestic) tonal imagery: a field of consciousness that includes experiences, images that are internal, combined, distorted, associated, or in competition between themselves. In the highly original form of life that is jazz, narrating means directing time: a time of epiphanies and introversions, of intuitions and revelations, of syncopated rhythms and aesthetic insights, which appear and disappear on the edges of interference between consciousness and the unconscious. The performing urgency of gestures, voices, and sounds, although arranged in the same scene, highlights the difference in individual time. In this intense activity of opposition and resolution the experience becomes an unstable territory that rests on the capacity of the body to remember, decide, anticipate, and invent. The ego reveals itself to be an emerging representation of our nerve structures and, even if conscious organization continues to be attributed to it, its role is not at all crucial. Unity, if anything, means coordination. The conscious ego is the expression of the body. In its ultimate form its unity is a biological problem.     

Extended family constellations workshop efficacy on intuition measure and experience

This study explored the efficacy of an intuition-oriented family constellations process workshop in influencing intuition and consciousness of extended family constellations. Participants were eight white South Africans (male = 1, female = 7; age range = 36 to 62 years). They took a pre-test and post-test measure on their intuition gains from the family constellations process in addition to responding to semi-structured questions on their perceptions and experiences of intuition and ancestral connections. Results suggest the participants experienced gains in intuition and experienced some, variable, form of ancestral connection. Intuition was described as a holistic, inspirational, bodily experience, flowing from an unknown or indeterminate source. Additionally, ancestral connection was experienced bodily and as a felt sense of energy. Results suggest the participants to have experienced gains in intuition and some level of ancestral connection.     

Animal foraging and the evolution of goal-directed cognition

Foraging- and feeding-related behaviors across eumetazoans share similar molecular mechanisms, suggesting the early evolution of an optimal foraging behavior called area-restricted search (ARS), involving mechanisms of dopamine and glutamate in the modulation of behavioral focus. Similar mechanisms in the vertebrate basal ganglia control motor behavior and cognition and reveal an evolutionary progression toward increasing internal connections between prefrontal cortex and striatum in moving from amphibian to primate. The basal ganglia in higher vertebrates show the ability to transfer dopaminergic activity from unconditioned stimuli to conditioned stimuli. The evolutionary role of dopamine in the modulation of goal-directed behavior and cognition is further supported by pathologies of human goal-directed cognition, which have motor and cognitive dysfunction and organize themselves, with respect to dopaminergic activity, along the gradient described by ARS, from perseverative to unfocused. The evidence strongly supports the evolution of goal-directed cognition out of mechanisms initially in control of spatial foraging but, through increasing cortical connections, eventually used to forage for information.     

Artificial consciousness, artificial emotions, and autonomous robots

Nowadays for robots, the notion of behavior is reduced to a simple factual concept at the level of the movements. On another hand, consciousness is a very cultural concept, founding the main property of human beings, according to themselves. We propose to develop a computable transposition of the consciousness concepts into artificial brains, able to express emotions and consciousness facts. The production of such artificial brains allows the intentional and really adaptive behavior for the autonomous robots. Such a system managing the robot’s behavior will be made of two parts: the first one computes and generates, in a constructivist manner, a representation for the robot moving in its environment, and using symbols and concepts. The other part achieves the representation of the previous one using morphologies in a dynamic geometrical way. The robot’s body will be seen for itself as the morphologic apprehension of its material substrata. The model goes strictly by the notion of massive multi-agent’s organizations with a morphologic control.     

Comparison of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral one-session exposure treatments for small animal phobias

This study evaluated the efficacy of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral one-session exposure treatment procedures with and without programmed generalization for participants with small animal phobias. Forty participants were randomly assigned to the treatment and generalization conditions. Both treatments produced significant improvements from pre-test to post-test and these results were maintained for 1 year. The treatment effect sizes ranged from large to very large across behavioral, self-report, and subjectively rated measures. Participants in the behavioral treatment condition reported that the treatment was significantly more intrusive than participants in the cognitive-behavioral treatment group. The programmed generalization condition did not produce additional measured benefit. The results are discussed in terms of the overall effectiveness of one-session exposure treatment components for small animal phobias.     

The universe of our concerns: the human as person in the praxis of analysis

Since its inception, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists have used the reductionistic methods of science to explain both human development and analytic practice. The most recent iteration of this tendency uses attachment as the explanatory principle. This disposition has created theories that understand the human solely as an organism. While this is a satisfactory way to view human development, it is not appropriate for the practice of analysis. In this context, the human must be viewed as a person that is explicable in his/her own terms. Interpretation based on reductionism eliminates personhood. Humans appear as persons in 'the feeling of what happens' or of 'being there', and, on the basis of this experience, develop stories in which their personhood evolves. The psychoanalytic, philosophical and neuro-scientific basis for this view of the human as person is discussed, and its relevance for analytic practice is considered.     

This new science of ours: a more or less systematic history of consciousness and transcendence. Part I

This paper is a search for the origins and nature of human consciousness. This portion, the first part of two, takes up a signal work of Jung and one of Freud, both published in 1911 and both deriving thinking as the first embodiment of higher mental functions. Thinking and consciousness (and subsequently spirit) are elaborated in terms of the nature and vicissitudes of libido. Jung's less well understood theory regarding a quantitative libido is particularly addressed as are his non-Cartesian ways of reasoning. Also addressed is Jung's turning away in the final analysis from a frankly metaphysical and transcendent position as compared to the pre-Socratic philosophers with whom focused thinking began in the western world. Differentiation is made between mechanistic and energetic field dynamics in how reality is viewed.