Psience Quest

Please post links to text files (journal papers, Web articles, etc.) here.

I posted a few things from Holy Books website on Skeptiko, but was over there recently and saw many more new things that intrigued me . . . there's quite a treasure trove of material here:

Holy Books

All books are available for free as PDFs.

Here's a Scientific American article by Christof Koch on the "neuronal correlates of consciousness":
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...ciousness/

(2018-05-23, 07:48 AM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]Here's a Scientific American article by Christof Koch on the "neuronal correlates of consciousness":
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...ciousness/

The article seems to reflect a very careless and casual approach to the subject.

One the one hand, it seems to claim that the focus is on correlations. But it drifts, with no immediate explanation or argument, into using the language of causation:

Quote:What is it about a highly excitable piece of brain matter that gives rise to consciousness?

Quote:All available evidence implicates neocortical tissue in generating feelings.

(my bold text).


One is left with the conclusion that what is being investigated is how to justify a prior belief system. The history of self-justification is a varied one, not limited to science. It tends to throw doubt on the supposed detached status of the proposed narrative.

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - here's a blog article from Scientific American by Tam Hunt entitled "How to Make the Study of Consciousness Scientifically Tractable":
"The science of consciousness has enjoyed a renaissance in the last couple of decades and the study of our own minds—consciousness/subjectivity—has finally become a respectable pursuit. It’s still tricky, however, to determine what kinds of data and what kinds of experiments we should consider legitimate in the study of consciousness."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...tractable/

He also links to his previous article, "Where’s My Consciousness-ometer?", subtitled "Whether an entity is conscious may soon be a testable question":
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...ss-ometer/

What happened to Occult qualities in the scientific revolution?  You will need to sign in to read it all.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/231676