Fall 2009 Consciousness: The Web Course, and Advanced Seminar: An Introduction to Mind and Brain

Both taught by Dr. Bernard J. Baars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baars

Both courses will run November 14, 2009 – FEBRUARY 7, 2010
With a Winter Break from December 20 to January 4.
(special discount to people who mention www.Conscious-Robots.com: 20%)
Syllabus and Registration Forms: www.consciousness.arizona.edu
Tel 520-621-9317. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 COURSE DESCRIPTION  and SYLLABUS – Consciousness: The Webcourse
   
             We can explore our own consciousness from our own, First Person perspective; share our experiences with others, the Second Person perspective; and look at conscious beings from the outside  --- the Third Person or "public" point of view.
 
  These three basic perspectives organize our course.   
  
    Our First-Person Labs will take our private perspective, using Consciousness Diaries and experiential demonstrations. You are enthusiastically encouraged to keep a Consciousness Diary, to write down or audio-record your first-person experiences to explore.   We wil often ask you to refer to your diary in our Discussions. If you want to write a topnotch diary you can’t wait very long --- your conscious experiences fade very quickly. So you should write them down immediately, or even better, audio-record them just as soon as you can. Your PC or Mac provide audio-recording software (with Quicktime or Word programs), or you can use a tape recorder. If you want to record your dreams you should also do so immediately after waking up. If you want to get very sophisticated you can convert audio to text. But a program that allows you to skip back and forth to remind yourself is very useful. Scribbling notes also works!
 
  (We will give you an easy technique to enable you to experiment with your drowsy or “twilight” states, which are very interesting and creative, and still unfortunately neglected.)
  
    The Second Person perspective emerges in our relationships to each other, in
 interpersonal experiences, in exploring ethical questions, and in the brain regions involved in romantic love and parent-child attachment.  
 
    Scientific evidence is often thought of in terms of the Third Person perspective, which we can think of as "public" or "inter-subjective." But notice that with brain imaging methods, we can look at the brain from the outside, and learn a great deal about the way our mind-brains engage in the First and Second Person Perspectives as well! Brain imaging is very interesting (and no, we are not going to invade you privacy!) but human beings have been looking at each and trying to understand each other ever since the first mother looked at the first baby, and vice versa. So this is not some weird thing; it’s just that we have much better “shareable” evidence that today. If you have concerns about privacy and ethics, that is also worth exploring in this course. (It comes up under the Second Person heading…)
 
    Our Lectures will explore new scientific findings about everyday consciousness, and also explore what we know about altered conscious states.   
 
    I believe the three classical viewpoints are very compatible with each
 other, and that they only provide three different sources of information. From that point of view, there are only practical questions --- what's the best way to understand what happens when people fall in love? When they dislike or even hate each other? When we feel guilty or angry or excited?  What do people experience when they are seeing the color red? What is the best way to know what the brain is doing? By being practical we can avoid many unnecessary controversies. 
 
  There are philosophers and scientists who adopt exclusive positions --- mentalism (idealism), physicalism (materialism), or various kinds of dualism. For example, the great contemplative traditions in Asia and the West are usually idealistic --- they often claim that the ultimate reality is mental or subjective. Science is often thought to be physicalistic --- it relies on the notion that publicly shared information is the most trustworthy, because it can be double-checked.
 
   But in practice, ordinary life flips back and forth between the subjective experience that we have a headache and the public act of taking an aspirin (a physical object) for our subjective headache. Nobody has much trouble with that in practice. 
 
   Because this course is not devoted to philosophy --- which would take months or years to study in detail --- we will mainly take a "dual-source" point of view. That is, we will assume that our own, subjective, ego point of view is one useful source of information; and that our shared, intersubjective, public, sociocentric viewpoint is also useful. We will find this practical, common-sense way of switching between different points of view to be very useful in this course. 
 
   For us, the key question is the believability of each perspective. If you tell me that you see your computer screen in flaming red, I am happy to believe you for the purposes of this course. (If you see everything in a flaming red color, you might want to wear some sun glasses.) 
    We will not settle the philosophical question “what is consciousness?”  but we will gain a better understanding of our growing understanding of consciousness in modern science, as well as in the great wisdom traditions.    
   
         We will do our best to make Consciousness: The WebCourse2009-2010 fun and exciting for you, as well as thought-provoking.   

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