Fwd: Reply on consciousness article

[Francis Heylighen]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Shima Beigi <shima...@gmail.com>

Subject: Reply on consciousness article

Date: 8 March 2023 at 11:55:14 GMT+1

To: cyb...@googlegroups.com, Francis Heylighen <fhey...@vub.ac.be>

Resent-From: <Francis....@vub.be>

Dear Jason and Peter 

Thank you very much for showing interest in our work and sharing your insights. Upon reading the replies, I thought sharing a couple of lines of thoughts to clarify the motivation behind our work and our contribution to the field: 

Whether consciousness is a byproduct of neural activities, emergent phenomena, or a mystical thing, it does not significantly affect its application and utility. However, having a conceptual model that allows change in its quality can significantly impact people's lives.

Our proposed theory is in its developmental phase and will be further refined. We aim to democratise consciousness conversations and propose a way to change one's quality of consciousness. 

In terms of subjective experiences and the role of awareness, I gave the following thought experiment:

If I ask the world the following question: what is water 

I will receive various answers depending on what and how people of the world perceive and define water. In this case, there is a diverse range of subjectivity. 

Now I ask: what is water's chemical formula?

Regardless of differences in people's awareness and subjectivities regarding water, the answer is H2O.

You can further refine or prompt the original question and receive different answers. All these answers, however, converge on the originally initiated prompt: water.

One can imagine a ladder of subjective experiences, all co-existing. Then, the field is formed depending on where the awareness is directed. In a conversation with another colleague, we envisioned something similar to how a beam of light illuminates locally with clear field-like boundaries. 

I attached some hand drawings from my notebook. 

Briefly, our work attempts to make the study of consciousness as operational and accessible as possible, avoid unnecessary philosophisication and intellectualisation and help people to understand their agency and power over the quality of their consciousness. 

 

Thank you for your time, 

Shima 

Kind Regards,

Dr Shima Beigi

BSc, MSc, MSc, PhD. 

Co-Founder & CEO TAI/T SA.

https://tai-therapeutic.com/

Author of Mindful Smart Cities

TED TALK: Everything we need to know about paradigm shifts

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE: 

The information transmitted, including attachments, is intended only for the person(s) or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and destroy any copies of this information.

[Jason Hu]

Dear Shima,

I think the concept of "quality of consciousness" is very important. It links to another favorite concept of mine - cognitive capability, initially used by Elliott Jacques. 

Both the quality of consciousness and the cognitive capability can be eventually measured, in my intuition, I believe we just need to search for a good way to achieve it, similar to your sample of subjective "water" to (objective) H2O. Here I put objective into brackets to mean it is actually a consensus first constructed by the community of chemists and then later accepted by the general public. 

I had suggested in a previous email that we do a CoR zoom session to exchange ideas and viewpoints around this topic. We just need to decide on a date. Which Wednesday or Friday would you prefer (excluding March 17)?

Please let me know ASAP. 

Thanks - Jason 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CYBCOM" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cybcom+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cybcom/D32F8909-6D6B-45A3-8D40-7A9B68358F7C%40vub.ac.be.