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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11


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Biosocial selfhood: overcoming the ‘body-social problem’ within the individuation of the human self
Joe Higgins1

Abstract In a recent paper, Kyselo(2014) argues that an enactive approach to selfhood can overcome ‘the body-social problem’: "the question for philosophy of cognitive science about how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual self" (Kyselo 2014, p. 4; see also Kyselo and Di Paolo (2013)). Kyselo’s claim is that we should conceive of the human self as a socially enacted phenomenon that is bodily mediated. Whilst there is much to be praised about this claim, I will demonstrate in this paper that such a conception of self ultimately leads to a strained interpretation of how bodily and social processes are related. To this end, I will begin the paper by elucidating the body-social problem as it appears in modern cognitive science and then expounding Kyselo’s solution, which relies on a novel interpretation of Jonas’s(1966/2001) concept of needful freedom. In response to this solution, I will highlight two problems which Kyselo’s account cannot overcome in its current state. I will argue that a more satisfactory solution to the body-social problem involves a reconception of the human body as irrevocably socially constituted and the human social world as irrevocably bodily constituted. On this view, even the most minimal sense of selfhood cannot privilege either bodily or social processes; instead, the two are ontologically entwined such that humans are biosocial selves.

Keywords Selfhood. Cognitive science. Embodiment. Ensocialment. Body-social problem. Enactivism

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11097-017-9514-2?wt_mc=alerts.TOCjournals&utm_source=toc&utm_medium=email&utm_content=11097&utm_campaign=

I was hoping we might talk here about the above paper, which is available as a free download at the link. It's hard to tell that the whole paper is there since there are only miniscule arrows at the sides of the pages to take you from page to page. Also want to quote some passages from the paper for consideration in our extended discussion of an ontology that can encompass consciousness and mind. This paper turns our attention again to the subject of language as it functions in human history and life.
". . . For Maturana, language is the mechanism by which the human experiential world obtains its complex character. That is, it is through initiation into language that humans enter into a unique relational domain of conceptual rationality (Maturana 1995, 2002). However, I do not think that our ability to form and act on conceptual thoughts – thereby to occupy a unique experiential domain of rationality – rests on our ability to use language. Instead, I believe such abilities, including the ability to use language, are subserved by the inherent social normativity of our bodies. At a developmental level, this inherent social normativity is evident in the neonatal potential to recognize and interact withother humans, with our bodies beingessential to the achievement of such social accomplishments. For instance, newborns have been shown to respond to human interaction within minutes of birth, often imitating facial gestures (Meltzoff and Moore 1977, 1983; Gallagher and Meltzoff 1996; Nagy et al. 2013) and certain hand movements (Nagy et al. 2005). Importantly, they imitate gestures only from other humans (Johnson 2000), suggesting that there is an inherent human disposition towards parsing the world into human and non-human entities (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001). After these nascent abilities to recognise and interact with others are established, newborns gradually begin to display further capacities such as gaze-following at approximately 9 months of age(Senju, Johnson and Csibra,2008), joint attention at 9–14 months(Phillips et al.1992) and comprehension of goal-directed behaviour at 18 months (Meltzoff 1995; Meltzoff and Brooks 2001). Such imitative abilities clearly support the idea that bodily activity is socially imbued, in that neonates are inherently sensitive to social interaction from the first tentative moments of post-pregnancy life.

The empirical data thus gives us two crucial pieces of information: firstly, human newborns seemingly have inherent embodied capabilities for social interaction; secondly, through these embodied interactions with others, infants begin to build a repertoire of increasingly complex cognitive capacities. Of course, such neonatal abilities do not give an unequivocal answer as to when a foetus or neonate becomes a bona fide human self. Yet at whatever time one wishes to claim a neonate develops awareness of self, which is typically taken to emerge with basic bodily self-awareness (Gallagher 2005, pp. 72 –85), one must also acknowledge that such awareness is simultaneously a modulatory normative process and, therefore, a social activity. The claim (as we will see in more depth shortly) is not that bodily (self-)understanding emerges within a social world, but that it is concurrently a kind of social (self-)understanding of one’s own presence (and modulatory capacity) that belongs to the normative experiential world of biosociality. In other words, if one accepts the view that awareness of self emerges with basic bodily self-awareness, and combines this view with the empirically supported view that neonatal bodily activity is socially imbued, then one’s fledgling awareness of self should also be considered socially imbued.

Unlike Kyselo (2014), who claims that human selfhood emerges as our self-identifying biological bodies engage in social interactions, such that selfhood is "an achievement[…] between individuals" (p. 8), my view is that selfhood is not ‘achieved’ on the back of a nascent bodily identity, but is present with the earliest indicators of individuation. Any bodily identity is a biosocial self, in that human bodily processes always occur within the experiential space of normative biosociality. This means that the organic body is simultaneously a social body as far as the human self is concerned. There is no longer ambiguity over its ontological status: the body’s organic persistence is concurrently an expression of lived sociality. The point of the neonatal considerations is that whereas Maturana and others contend that human occupation of a unique experiential domain rests on language (in the traditional sense of verbal language), I am claiming that such experience is present from the earliest moments of life through our nascent capacity for bodily-social expression. As far as humans are concerned, our biological bodies are socially saturated from the first moments of life through to our very last moments, meaning that ‘bodily’ and ‘social’ processes should both be considered ‘bodily-social’, orbiosocial processes.

In terms of interaction dynamics, the idea is that bodily activity is permeated by social norms (or social ‘ways of being’) and these social norms then feed back into individuals’ canalized range of potential bodily actions which will, in turn, generate and modulate further norms which will then instantiate further feedback (and so on). We are distinct from ‘mere animals’ because we inhabit an experiential world of social normativity that is in no way separate from our organismic bodies, but is instantiated and maintained by them. This normativity, which is literally embodied across collectives of individuals and to which we are inherently disposed, serves as a constant store of historically accumulated cognitive possibilities that are permanently in a state of dynamic modulation by intersubjective activity. We are human because we engage with this normativity, living through a biosocial world in which embodiment and ensocialment are unified. . . ."

To understand this claim in more detail, consider that any bodily activity will potentially modulate the normative possibilities of how that activity is executed, for oneself and for
others. This relies on the idea that just as the expressive embodiment of two individuals plays a participatory role in generating a dyadic relational domain that the individuals enact together, society-wide collectives of (embodied) individuals can be seen as playing participatory roles in generating society-wide relational domains that are enacted across a society. So the perceived bodily activity of any given individual is normatively laden so as to be a modulator of the various relational domains that we participate in (and emancipate ourselves from). To move one’s body is thus not merely to perturb the physical world; it is also a communicatory perturbation of the socio-normative world that we enact.

Bodies, then, have more than a merely ‘mediatory’ role in the individuation of a socially enacted self: they are the tangible disclosure of the socially enacted world. As we will come to see, relevant to this disclosure is the idea that human bodies are inscribed throughout life with social meanings that they cannot but express, such that they are inevitably implicated in the self-other generation of relational processes that constitute the individuation of the human self. Humans are thus biosocial entities because we occupy a relational domain of experience in which our bodies are (socio-)normatively laden, so as to generate a holistic network of norms through which behavioural and cognitive dynamics are looped.

Running with this idea, one could claim that our bodies are close to being ‘linguistic’ in the sense employed by Cuffari et al. (2014), in that we are bodily sensitive to the social world in such a way that intersubjective activity is habitually rendered intelligible. Indeed, my view of human bodily existence being biosocial chimes happily with Cuffari et al.’s (2014) claim that our "world-engagement is an integrated whole of embodied interpreting[…] embedded in horizons of social normativity"(p. 1115). However, care needs to be taken in not underselling the fundamental nature of the biosociality that I am proposing. It is important that embodiment and ensocialment are not separable à la Kyselo’s theory of selfhood. Unlike Kyselo’s enactive approach, in which bodily and social processes ultimately seem to occupy separate spheres of activity that must be reconciled with one another, the biosocial approach to existence rejects the possibility of fundamental separation for bodily and social
processes. Having a normatively laden body is not something that we gradually develop as we grow into a sociocultural world; rather, by occupying a relational domain of biosociality, it is something that we ontologically are. Our biological bodies and social environment belong to one and the same experiential space.

With this in mind, it is no longer enough to say that bodily existence involves a living body in a social world; instead, it is being a living social body. Human corporeality is always more than mere flesh: the body is ensconced in social purpose so that it simply is a social entity. The mistake that Kyselo (2014) rightly wished to avoid (see section 2) – that social or bodily processes are thought of as merely contextual – is now fundamentally bypassed. Without the body’s entanglement with sociality, the meaning that an agent generates through its environmental activity would be little different from the basic self-perpetuation of sucrose-seeking bacteria or sunflowers (cf. Thompson 2007, pp.98 –107; Varela 1991, pp.85 –87).
It is the imbrication of sociality and a lived body that distinguishes human ontological make-up from that of non-human animals, plants and basic autopoietic structures. For a
body to be just a body in the strictly physical sense is for it to be extracted from the collectively mediated social norms that are constitutive of humanity’s lifeworld (Ikäheimo 2009, p.36). And without the body, there is no relational medium in which the generation and modulation of social norms can take place. . . ."

 
I was hoping we might talk here about the above paper ... "
Perhaps we might consider why spirit mediums generally don't see any bodily apparitions and what the inference there is, or why some apparitions have a sort of immaterial body ( including clothes ) that doesn't seem to serve any material purpose, yet certainly could reflect the social aspects discussed above. Another point might be how a functioning body is responsible for supplying biochemistry that's proven to directly affect personality ( just think estrogen and testosterone to start ). How would a biologically non-functioning immaterial body provide the equivalent afterlife chemistry required to maintain a stable personality? Could such an apparition in the absence of everything else still be considered a "person". I've broached these considerations before. Maybe now we're just catching up.
 
This is a reply to a recent post from @USI Calgary in case the link-back doesn't show up.

I'm certainly no expert either, but in simplest terms, the way I interpreted the paper was that it was about how the way that we communicate effects our interpretation of what's being communicated. So it's not so much a claim that reality per se is linguistic, but that the disparity between reality and how we convey it to others is largely dependent on the tools we use to communicate, particularly text.

The problem concerning language is that, while its development extends human aptitudes for expression, communication, and the organizing of life/of the living in societies, its formalization of concepts and categories produces what Frederick Jameson has called 'the prison-house of language' -- a condition within which references and meanings become reified, hardened, contextualized within understandings of what is 'real' that are useful in stages of human development but inadequate for the expression of new experiences and insights. In formal languages we confuse words with things taken to be defined and understood once and for all, while our experience and insights continually expand in a world within which, as members of the human species, we are immersed in continuous change, development, and understanding both social and individual.

So a prime example for you might be Pony's poetry.* For someone else it might be a scientific paper. Both are attempts to convey a type of reality, the former being largely an expression of subjective experience, while the latter attempts to extrapolate objective properties. Both contain truths.

Agreed that we recognize both subjective and objective aspects in and of the global, holistic, lived 'reality' in which we exist, but it is the interrelation of subjectivity and objectivity that we need to understand. It is this interrelation, in its manifold ambiguities, that we need to examine if we are to understand our own being and the world's being.

ETA: You've asked some additional questions about links I've recently posted, Randle, and I will respond to them as soon as I can.

Meant to add, as per the asterisk, a comment re: "Pony's poetry." I think you meant to refer to Merleau-Ponty who hasn't written any poetry I know of. The poet I frequently quote is Wallace Stevens.
 
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In earlier parts of this thread I've quoted Hans Jonas and quote passages from his work. Here is a link to the first three essays in his The Phenomenology of Life at Google Books, which I recommend as texts helpful for us in our current discussions about consciousness and ontology:

The Phenomenon of Life
 
In earlier parts of this thread I've quoted Hans Jonas and quote passages from his work. Here is a link to the first three essays in his The Phenomenology of Life at Google Books, which I recommend as texts helpful for us in our current discussions about consciousness and ontology: The Phenomenon of Life
The content seems plainly obvious ( to me ) for the most part. By that, I mean that a lot of it is simply stated observations of things that seem to be the case without any particular point as to why those observations are being presented. Perhaps the point of it all has eluded me. What do you think it is? What part do you find the most relevant to your present perspective?
 
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http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~ezequiel/dipaolo-jonas.pdf

"This view is complemented by an unusual companion: Darwinism. By introducing continuity in the realm of living, evolution succeeds in divesting humans of a special place in the book of life. But in so doing, evolution contains the overcoming of its own materialist premises – it isn’t human beings that lose their existence and inwardness (for how could any scientific theory honestly negate our strivings and our enjoyments, when we experience these firsthand?), it is other organisms that regain some of it.

Jonas locates this passage to inwardness at the origin of life itself. At its centre lies metabolism, an ongoing turnover of matter and energy which actively builds the conditions for its own continuation. In close parallel to systemic theories developed a couple of decades later (like the theory of autopoiesis), Jonas sees metabolism as the building and perpetuation of a self-distinct physical unity. Organisms never actually coincide with their material constitution. In constant flux, they maintain an organization which assures durability in the face of randomizing events and gives them an identity where form prevails over matter. Such is the revolutionary break that life brings into the universe."
 
Perhaps we might consider why spirit mediums generally don't see any bodily apparitions and what the inference there is, or why some apparitions have a sort of immaterial body ( including clothes ) that doesn't seem to serve any material purpose, yet certainly could reflect the social aspects discussed above. Another point might be how a functioning body is responsible for supplying biochemistry that's proven to directly affect personality ( just think estrogen and testosterone to start ). How would a biologically non-functioning immaterial body provide the equivalent afterlife chemistry required to maintain a stable personality? Could such an apparition in the absence of everything else still be considered a "person". I've broached these considerations before. Maybe now we're just catching up.

Randle, as a preface to responding to the question you pose here I'd ask that you read the first of the essays presented in Google Books' presentation of Hans Jonas's The Phenomenology of Life, linked just above. I think we all should read at least this first essay to ground our understanding of the relationship between physics and metaphysics.

The Phenomenon of Life
 
The content seems plainly obvious ( to me ) for the most part. By that, I mean that a lot of it is simply stated observations of things that seem to be the case without any particular point as to why those observations are being presented. Perhaps the point of it all has eluded me. What do you think it is? What part do you find the most relevant to your present perspective?

Han Jonas is a major contributor to phenomenological-existential philosophy, of which I have long been an advocate and exponent.

Now that Steve has found and linked a pdf of Jonas's The Phenomenology of Life I recommend that you read the whole of it, and also the paper by Ezekial that Steve linked on the occasionof the book's republication. Both should help you to reposition your thinking from your materialist presuppositions. :)
 
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http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~ezequiel/dipaolo-jonas.pdf

"This view is complemented by an unusual companion: Darwinism. By introducing continuity in the realm of living, evolution succeeds in divesting humans of a special place in the book of life. But in so doing, evolution contains the overcoming of its own materialist premises – it isn’t human beings that lose their existence and inwardness (for how could any scientific theory honestly negate our strivings and our enjoyments, when we experience these firsthand?), it is other organisms that regain some of it.

Jonas locates this passage to inwardness at the origin of life itself. At its centre lies metabolism, an ongoing turnover of matter and energy which actively builds the conditions for its own continuation. In close parallel to systemic theories developed a couple of decades later (like the theory of autopoiesis), Jonas sees metabolism as the building and perpetuation of a self-distinct physical unity. Organisms never actually coincide with their material constitution. In constant flux, they maintain an organization which assures durability in the face of randomizing events and gives them an identity where form prevails over matter. Such is the revolutionary break that life brings into the universe."

So glad you found the Ezekial paper, which is very good indeed as a general introduction to Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life. These concluding paragraphs are also highly relevant here:

"With roots on vision, human beings introduce a further widening of mediacy by interposing between an object of perception and the perceiver a manipulable image that can render the object present at will and guide action eidetically. Freedom of action is expanded where before only engagement with an actual situation was possible. Imagemaking also brings forth the experiences of truth and falsehood and slides a veil of representation and symbolism between humans and their world.

Human beings eventually turn their image-mediative skills upon themselves (presumably thanks also to social mediation, though this is never raised by Jonas). They objectify their selves and become aware of their lives as something to be shaped in the light of an image. As persons, they know their own mortality and are therefore open to aspirations and frustrations. Their centre of inwardness is divided against itself by becoming an object and a project for itself and so only humans can know happiness and unhappiness.

All this is covered in a single book. The extraordinary journey finishes with essays on the practical uses of theory, a comparison between gnostic and existential nihilism, Jonas’s 1964 address where he famously stood up against Heidegger and a reflection on immortality and the modern temper. There is an immense richness in the stages that lead up to this final phase, partly in the strength of Jonas’s discussion but even more so in the room and clues he leaves for further development as signposts along a terrain that still needs to be charted. Probably like no other recent thinker Jonas has brought human existence closer to nature."
 
Ok looks like this is not complete...I'll keep looking.

The first 26 pages are missing at the outset in the pdf, but these can probably be read at the Google Books link I posted earlier. Hope there are not additional lucanae.

Also, thank you for posting the additional paragraphs from the Ezekial paper which are very important for us to consider here. I didn't see a 'like' button beneath that post so couldn't 'like' it. I more than like it; I love it. :)
 
http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~ezequiel/dipaolo-jonas.pdf

"This view is complemented by an unusual companion: Darwinism. By introducing continuity in the realm of living, evolution succeeds in divesting humans of a special place in the book of life. But in so doing, evolution contains the overcoming of its own materialist premises – it isn’t human beings that lose their existence and inwardness (for how could any scientific theory honestly negate our strivings and our enjoyments, when we experience these firsthand?), it is other organisms that regain some of it.

Jonas locates this passage to inwardness at the origin of life itself. At its centre lies metabolism, an ongoing turnover of matter and energy which actively builds the conditions for its own continuation. In close parallel to systemic theories developed a couple of decades later (like the theory of autopoiesis), Jonas sees metabolism as the building and perpetuation of a self-distinct physical unity. Organisms never actually coincide with their material constitution. In constant flux, they maintain an organization which assures durability in the face of randomizing events and gives them an identity where form prevails over matter. Such is the revolutionary break that life brings into the universe."
Very good. I think @Pharoah would appreciate as well.

The book is $28 on Amazon.
 
Found in my Word files, notes from the following contribution to consciousness studies, which I posted some parts back in this thread.

Humanamente 24 - Pointing: Where embodied cognition meets the symbolic mind

The issue as a whole is entitled “Pointing: Where embodied cognition meets the symbolic mind.” Following is an extract from the introduction to the issue by the editor of the issue, Massimiliano L. Cappuccio, titled "Pointing: A Gesture That Makes Us Special?" This introductory article is impressive in my view, and I think the theory it expounds can be very useful to us in bridging the gap that continues to vex Consciousness Studies.

Extract:

“. . . the key issues disclosed by pointing lay along the frontiers of the very capability of shared representations and public knowledge, a territory that ranges beyond the jurisdiction of any single disciplinary field. Single scientific disciplines inhabit this territory and flourish on it, but can neither own it nor see its borders. Only a nomadic philosophical approach to science, i.e. an approach that is not at home in any of these disciplines but programmatically wanders through all of them, can help reach the extreme frontiers of this investigation. Indeed, the tools for a genealogical investigation on the capability for shared representation and public knowledge has often been prompted by theoretical approaches (like the phenomenologically and empirically informed philosophies of mind) that aim to trace the cognitive pre-conditions of intersubjectivity back into the biological and social history of our most ancient epistemic practices. In fact, whether the gesture of pointing springs from an innate predisposition or not it is always through a network of acquired habits that its particular uses were shaped in local contexts: through an amazingly convoluted history in which natural propensities and socio-cultural conventions intertwined and redefined one another.

Genealogic philosophy can provide only the drive and some of the words to tell this story, but not the whole story itself. Other disciplines will tell some parts or some versions of it: developmental psychology, comparative neuro-sciences, cognitive anthropology and archaeology of mind, primatology and animal cognition, linguistics, semiotics, and analytical philosophy of mind.

In consideration of this plurality of narratives, integration of conceptual analysis, phenomenological description, and empirical investigation becomes not only useful, but indispensable, also from a strictly philosophical point of view. Integration is not an attempt to supplement or corroborate an old metaphysical agenda with extra-philosophical contents and new methods; integration is itself intrinsically philosophical and productive of a new intellectual awareness, in so far it involves deep excavations into the ground of the primitive notions assumed by our disciplines, including philosophy itself, and the recognition that these notions come from an obscure abyss of pre-comprehension. Not simply because the genealogy of our concepts is always rooted in a tremendously remote past and eventually leads to many fathers, some of whom might turn [out] to be very different from us (and even pre-human) but also because the meaning of our epistemic practices is silently buried within our every day linguistic games, a medium that is transparent to those who participate in these games without examining them philosophically.

Why is pointing so important for a non-metaphysical rediscovery of our originally embodied, intimately social, and historically situated practices of knowledge? This gesture, the indexical gesture par excellence, is crucial for its transitional, liminal value: it represents a defining acquisition in the development of higher-order, typically human, intellectual capabilities (e.g., collective symbolic imagery) and, at the same time, it relies on quasi-automatic cognitive mechanisms for coordinating visual stimulation and motor execution that are relatively basic and very common across animals species (e.g., gaze following, see Shepherd 2010). This ambivalence is clearly shown by the fact that, while it is the prototypical bodily vehicle of joint attention, the appearance of pointing also predicts the emergence of advanced forms of social cognition, more disembodied and reflective in character, possibly linked to altruistic cooperation (Tomasello 2009), abstract categorization, and – indirectly -- sophisticated social experiences, like mutual recognition (in a strong dialectical sense, cf. Ikaheimo 2010) and public validation. Pointing’s key role in the acquisition of new forms of intelligence raises important issues about both the advent of joint attention in phylogenesis and its role in the evolution of the earliest forms of referential, proto-cultural, and linguistic activity: for example, primatologists investigate whether the declarative function of pointing is human-specific or not (again see the contributions of Gontier, Moore, and Sultanescu & Andrews); developmental psychologists ask when the earliest instances of pointing come about, and if they imply some pre-linguistic form of mindreading (Sparaci); in cognitive semiotics, it is hotly debated whether pointing’s evolution may have scaffolded non-natural codes of communication for symbolic referencing (Olney).

Arising from the background of these ongoing debates, but hesitating to find a precise position in them, this special issue of Humanamente advances across three theoretical axes, representing the general questions that our collective work addresses. . . . ."

Humanamente 24 - Pointing: Where embodied cognition meets the symbolic mind

Note: the Introductory paper to this issue of the journal Humanamente is preceded at the link by a Foreword that clarifies the persisting interdisciplinary oppositions in Consciousness Studies.
 
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http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d6d656_a70cf403c4bb4fc2a253fa719d96bb89.pdf

"Attached is a free copy of selected sections from the Dr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation’s (FREE), new book titled “Beyond
UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence”. The Dr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation’s mission is focused on exploring the question: What is the relationship between Consciousness, the nature of our multi-dimensional reality, and contact with Non-Human Intelligence with what we have termed the Contact Modalities (contact via UAPs, NDEs, OBEs, Remote Viewing, Channeling, perceived ghosts/spirits, hallucinogenic experiences, among many others). The FREE organization hypothesizes that all of these Contact Modalities are not separate phenomena but possibly ONE phenomena and that Consciousness is the key to its understanding. Thus, we are not a Ufology organization-- instead, our mission is to change the academic focus in how it addresses the topic of “What is Consciousness”. "
 
http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d6d656_a70cf403c4bb4fc2a253fa719d96bb89.pdf

"Attached is a free copy of selected sections from the Dr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation’s (FREE), new book titled “Beyond
UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence”. The Dr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation’s mission is focused on exploring the question: What is the relationship between Consciousness, the nature of our multi-dimensional reality, and contact with Non-Human Intelligence with what we have termed the Contact Modalities (contact via UAPs, NDEs, OBEs, Remote Viewing, Channeling, perceived ghosts/spirits, hallucinogenic experiences, among many others). The FREE organization hypothesizes that all of these Contact Modalities are not separate phenomena but possibly ONE phenomena and that Consciousness is the key to its understanding. Thus, we are not a Ufology organization-- instead, our mission is to change the academic focus in how it addresses the topic of “What is Consciousness”. "
Thanks for posting that. There's a lot of contentious stuff in there, but it's definitely pertinent to the thread's title. What do you find particularly interesting and relevant to this discussion ( if anything )?
 
http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d6d656_a70cf403c4bb4fc2a253fa719d96bb89.pdf

"Attached is a free copy of selected sections from the Dr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation’s (FREE), new book titled “Beyond
UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence”. The Dr. Edgar Mitchell FREE Foundation’s mission is focused on exploring the question: What is the relationship between Consciousness, the nature of our multi-dimensional reality, and contact with Non-Human Intelligence with what we have termed the Contact Modalities (contact via UAPs, NDEs, OBEs, Remote Viewing, Channeling, perceived ghosts/spirits, hallucinogenic experiences, among many others). The FREE organization hypothesizes that all of these Contact Modalities are not separate phenomena but possibly ONE phenomena and that Consciousness is the key to its understanding. Thus, we are not a Ufology organization-- instead, our mission is to change the academic focus in how it addresses the topic of “What is Consciousness”. "

Thanks for this pdf.

The following link goes to a lecture vid by Dean Radin, to point 43:49, going to about 46:49, where he gives a concise description of the alternative "Consciousness" theory of reality knowledge pyramid compared to the prevalent reductive materialism. Sound quality could have been better.

Interesting that Grant Cameron has embraced this FREE view since he was one of the observers of the "Charlie Redstar" sighting back in the day, 1975.
 
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