Consciousness, Bei Sein, Parousia, Dao, Dzogcchen: Transparency, Self

The basic telephone has become a taken-for-granted of our everyday life, but when it first appeared its role was far from clear. This entry charts that early history and subsequent development, before outlining some of key social research relating to this technology.

There is nothing so self-evident and pervasive and immediate that nonetheless remains as opaque and illusive as consciousness. Consciousness underpins everything we are and everything we do and everything we know, and yet for all our progress in philosophy and science, we are still no closer to an accepted definition of consciousness. Not only is there no agreement about what consciousness actually means, there is not even agreement about what term to use to describe this condition of being and experiencing that we are referring to (even though we all seem to intuitively understand what we mean when we say consciousness). This work is an attempt at describing what it is we are referring to when to talk about consciousness.

Buddhist Studies Review, 2013

Buddhism teaches that ‘self’ as a substantial, enduring entity is an illusion. But for self to be an illusion there must be something in our experience that is misinterpreted as self. What is this? The notion of an experiential self plays an important role in phenomenological investigations of conscious experience. Does the illusion of self consist in mistaking a purely experiential self for a substantial self? I argue against this and locate the source of the illusion in time-consciousness. It is the essence of consciousness to flow, but the flow of consciousness presupposes an experiential present. The experiential present — an abiding sense of ‘now’ — is the dimension through which experiences are experienced as streaming. It is this, I argue, that is misinterpreted as an enduring self. I support my account by arguing that the synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness can be accounted for in terms of impersonal, temporal experience, and that conceiving of consciousness as ...

Biosemiotics, 2020

In his introductory overview of Peirce's semiotic theory entitled "Peirce Divested for Non-Intimates," semiotic anthropologist Richard Parmentier begins with the quote from Peirce that "truth, as it walks abroad, is always clothed in figures, of which it divests itself for none but its intimates" (MS 634:18-19, 1909; in Parmentier 1987). In a similar fashion, it is not unusual to find that non-intimates to biosemioticsor in this case, to Terrence Deacon's complexly growing and interlocking system of ideasmay sometimes find themselves so confused, put off, or simply overwhelmed at the level of the "clothing of the figures" (e.g., terms like finiousity, semiosis, absential relations, teleogenesis, etc.) that they, too, would feel the need an "intimate" to help reveal to them what, if anything at all of vital importance is lurking underneath all of this puzzling and unusual clothing. Doing that patient explanatory divestment is the task that Jeremy Sherman has set out for himself in writing Neither Ghost nor Machine, an exposition of Terrence Deacon's work in layperson's terms, and it is a task that he accomplishes exceedingly well. A colleague and collaborator of Deacon's for over 20 years, as well as a prolific Psychology Today blogger and columnist in his own right, Sherman is uniquely positioned to translate some of Deacon's most subtle and challenging ideas into an idiom that can be easily understood by a general reader, without dumbing those ideas down to the point of superficiality. Moreover, and as Deacon himself points out in his introduction to the volume, Neither Ghost nor Machine is "more than just a simplified précis of Incomplete Nature" (Deacon's 2011 masterwork that many have struggledand failedto fully grasp the essential arguments of, as Deacon himself admits in the

2019

The rejection of a permanent self as the 'thinker of thoughts ' and the 'senser of sensations' poses a significant challenge for Buddhist philosophy of mind: if there is no permanent agent (kartii), and if actions (karman) are merely transient events within a continuum of causally interconnected states, how is the phenomenal character of conscious experience and the sense of ownership implicit in first-person agency to be explained? At the same time, the rejection of a permanent locus for experience offers an opportunity to explore the problem of personal identity on phenomenological rather than metaphysical grounds: answering the question of why self-awareness comes bound up with a sense of self (whether owned or merely occurrent) can thus be pursued independently of metaphysical concerns about what a self is and what are its fundamental attributes. It also allows for an analysis of the structure of awareness without assuming that such a structure reflects an external relation of ownership between consciousness and the self. Let us note from the outset that there are substantive disagreements among Buddhist philosophers about how the problem of personal identity should be framed, the kind of evidence that is deemed reliable, and the lines of justification that are worth pursuing: it can be (and has been) framed in both epistemological and ontological terms, drawing on both experiential accounts and metaphysical considerations about what there is, and taking the form of both conceptual analysis

Communicare: Journal for Communication Studies in Africa

This article explores intrapersonal and transpersonal communication as the principal derivatives of a subjective, inner reality. These levels relate to different states and levels of consciousness and corresponding levels of selfawareness. Since an exploration of the nature of the self and its possible confluence with states and levels of consciousness necessitates a multidisciplinary approach, theories and constructs in Psychology, the New Physics (Quantum Physics), Mysticism, and Philosophy are integrated with contemporary communication notions of the self and consciousness. Integration and inclusiveness consequently form the bedrock of this article.

Technology and Culture, 2020

The telephone has played a key role in shaping modern life. While most scholars focus on the early use of landline telephones, this article follows the subsequent social history of landline telephones in the late twentieth century as an equally significant phase of innovation, when telephone practices changed radically as a result of transformations in national and household infrastructures. In this article, we identify a new generation of "landline natives" emerging around 1968; for them, the telephone was a natural form of communication and part of their home environments. Our case study of how telephone use became taken for granted serves as a prehistory for scholars studying cellphone and smartphone practices as well as media scholars seeking to understand audience participation in television and radio. Mette Simonsen Abildgaard is now associate professor in the Department of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University in Denmark. Her research centers on the cultural and social history of information and communication technology, particularly telephone and radio. This study builds on her recently completed two-year project on uncovering hidden developments in Danish phone culture. Lee Humphreys is associate professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research explores the social uses and perceived impacts of communication technology, focusing on mobile and social media. She is the author of The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2018). In addition to the Independent Research Fund Denmark, the authors wish to thank Enigma Museum in Copenhagen for generously granting access to its archives. They especially thank all the participants in the interviews for this study. The authors are also immensely grateful to the reviewers and Barbara Hahn for their valuable comments.

Canadian Journal of Communication

A m a t e r i a l i s t i c a p p r o a c h t o c o n s c i o u sn e s s , l o n g i g n o r e d i n m a i n s t r e a m r es e a r c h b u t e m e r g i n g i n c r i t i c a l t h e o r y , may h e l p t o e x p l a i n t h e i d e o l o g i c a l i m p a c t o f m e d i a i n w h i c h d o m i n a n t c u lt u r a l m e a n i n g s a r e s u b j e c t i v e l y i n t e rn a l i z e d. Une approche mat6rialistic , longtemps nCglig6e par les chercheurs, mais pointant parmi les thCoristes, explique mieux et plus complktement llinfluence id6ologique de m6dia sur les individus.

2011

I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception." These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry's collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke, and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood, and the epistemic access to one's own thoughts, desires, or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self.