Philosophical Speculations

And, as I understand it, your last statement - that our ordinary conscious experience condenses almost exactly into the nervous system - is exactly what Steiner tells us not to do! Not to equate TFW (ordinary conscious experience) to the nervous system and activity! Would you please clarify these ...

We know, for example, that cognitive neuroscience is founded on the exploration of ' neural correlates of consciousness '. That would be meaningless if the neural processes observable within the focal plane had little to do with our supersensible life of perception, representation, memory, ideation ...

I agree, Steiner’s highest-level goal was to help his followers shift their perspective and transform their soul. Nevertheless, because this transformation - when it occurs - is typically a life-long process, and because meanwhile the universities inexorably cram into the students’ head mat ...

Thanks for your input, Ashvin. Yes, exactly as you say (bolded). I wrote above: Steiner considers that nervous activity proper (the correlate of ideation/representation) " cannot possibly be an object of physiologically empirical observation ". What you point to here is part of what I intended to ...

Exerting volition, the life of the psyche overreaches the domain of the organism and combines its action with a happening in the outer world. — The study of the whole matter has been greatly confused by the separation of the nerves into sensory and motor. Securely anchored as this distinction a ...

Yes I've developed some leeway, but I can't activate it other than in purposeful meditative prayerful intent. I guess age is also a factor. When I was younger I could find myself more casually 'in the clouds'. Feeling the gesture of the rushing mind is not a concept, but a real experience, though ...

Thanks for sharing this experiment, Federica. I do find it helpful to feel how the sequential verbal mental flow can be condensed more imaginatively. I noticed another way of anchoring this intuition is by experimenting with the semi-conscious state in the process of waking up from sleep. Before we ...

The Dasher metaphor is superior, because it points at the first-person living flow in the making. It goes in the same direction of thinking, so to say, from meaning to perception. However, I've found this fast reading experiment useful to get a feel for the gesture of relaxing the unpacking reflex ...

Great part, Ashvin, thanks! Stated in this way, I believe this can make the novice reader dizzy: Modern science also recognizes this polarity and conceives of the intuitive pushing pole as invisible ‘forces of nature’ or the ‘unconscious’. Modern philosophers likewise conceive of it as ‘things thems ...

“Whereas the tactician knows what to do when there is something to do, it requires the strategist to know what to do when there is nothing to do.” - Gerald Abrahams The Temporal Depth of our Intuitive Navigation Previously, we tried to get a better feel for our thinking (imaginative rehearsal) pr ...