On the nature of consciousness : cognitive, phenomenological, and transpersonal perspectives

What is the relation between mystical experience and ordinary consciousness, between the principles of modern physics and the patterns of perception in all moving creatures, between our human self-consciousness and the more primary sentience of protozoa? This book pursues an inquiry into consciousness that ranges from ancient Greece to empirical neuro-psychology to the experiential traditions of introspection and meditation. Harry Hunt begins by reviewing the renewed interest in ordinary consciousness and in altered and transpersonal states of consciousness. He then presents competing views of consciousness in cognition, neurophysiology, and animal psychology, developing a view of perceptual awareness as the core of consciousness potentially shared across species. Hunt next brings together the separate strands of neo-realist approaches to perception and thought, the phenomenology of imagery and synesthesia, and cognitive theories of metaphor. He develops an original cognitive theory of mystical experience that combines Buddhist meditative descriptions of consciousness and Heidegger's sense of Being. In relating both of these to James J. Gibson's views on perception, he avoids the various "new age" supernaturalisms that so often blight the transpersonal literature. Other themes include the relation between consciousness and time; the common perceptual-metaphoric rooting of parallels between consciousness and modern physics; and the communal basis of transpersonal states as reflected in a sociology of mysticism and a reinterpretation of parapsychological research. Harry T. Hunt is professor of psychology at Brock University in Ontario and author of The Multiplicity of Dreams , published by Yale University Press. Contents 5 Preface 11 Acknowledgments 15 Part I. Consciousness in Context: Psychology, Philosophy, Culture 19 1. The Most Fundamental of Empirical Questions or the Most Misguided - What Is Consciousness? 19 2. Cognition and Consciousness 44 Part II. Consciousness, Brain, and Organism: How Much Can Neurophysiology Tell Us about Consciousness? 67 3. Consciousness as Emergent: The Irrelevance of Specific Neurophysiology 67 4. Consciousness as Localized: Neural Zones of Convergence and Consciousness Awareness System(s) 91 5. Animal Consciousness: The Emergence of Primary Sentience in Protozoa and Self-Referential Consciousness in the Higher Primates 111 Part III. The Phenomenology of Consciousness 131 6. William James and the Stream of Consciousness: Metaphor Without, Mirror Within 131 Part IV. The Imagistic Bases of Consciousness: Ordinary and Nonordinary, Contemporary and Ancient 157 7. Synesthesia: The Inner Face of Thought and Meaning 157 8. The Multiplicity of Image: Phenomenology and Some Limitations of Laboratory Research 179 9. Sensus Commuais: A History of the Cross-Modal Theory of Mind 197 Part V. Transpersonal Experience and the Reflexivity of Human Existence 215 10. A Cognitive Psychology of Transpersonal States 215 11. Heidegger, Mahayana Buddhism, and Gibson’s Ambient Array: A Logos of Sentience 238 Part VI. Consciousness and Reality 257 12. Consciousness as Time 257 13. Consciousness as Space: Physics, Consciousness, and the Primacy of Perception 275 Part VII. Concluding Sociological Postscript 295 14. Consciousness as Society 295 Notes 315 References 331 Index 367