Text Resources Thread

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/

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:

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

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

[Laird]

Scientists Taught People to Change Their Own Brainwaves to Feel Less Pain

By Ellyn Lapointe for Gizmodo on June 2, 2025.

A research team led by psychologists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia developed PainWaive—a training system that teaches users to regulate abnormal brain activity that underlies nerve pain—as a potential in-home, non-invasive alternative to opioids. The results, published in The Journal of Pain in April, showed that three out of four participants saw significant reductions in pain five weeks after the last treatment.

I haven't (yet?) read the published paper, so hopefully this article is reporting it accurately.

Cross-referencing with a bunch of other pain treatment-related threads in this Conscious Science forum that I found via a search for "pain" in their title:

'Mindful breathing' might help cancer patients ease pain, anxiety
Running From the Pain
100 million Americans have chronic pain. Very few use one of the best tools...
Can You Reshape Your Brain's Response To Pain?

A New Model of Reality Luciano Pederzoli

Abstract
In the hope of steering research along new pathways, this article proposes a new theoretical model that explains phenomena supported by the classical understanding of reality as well as those that seemingly violate it, including those that are labelled “paranormal” phenomena.
This new model draws upon four spatial dimensions instead of the usual three, plus a bidirectional temporal dimension (where the traditional arrow points towards the future, and another one towards the past). Furthermore, it suggests the presence of at least three “non-physical” levels of the human mind linked to three “bodies”, one of which is the Physical Body.
This model seeks to demonstrate that any phenomena – even those currently poorly understood – can be logically explained.

[Laird]

Newspaper Accounts of Mental Math Marvels
July 23, 2026
Mark Mahin
Head Truth blog

The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to calculate too quickly and too accurately for a noisy address-free brain to ever do,  the stronger is the case that human thinking is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  Let us look at some newspaper clips that document such cases. 

Among the problems given him to solve were such as this: How many cubical eighths of an inch are there in a quadrangular mass 23145789 yards long 5642732 yards wide and 54966
yards thick an appalling calculation which he performed
mentally. Once he set himself to doubling a farthing 140 times and
on another occasion he made him self in his own phrase drunk
with reckoning by calculating how many hairs an inch long and
how many grains of eight different sorts of cereals there were in a mass of 200000000000 cubic miles having previously counted the hairs and grains in a single inch to get his point of departure. What was most curious about Buxton perhaps was his capacity for carrying on these calculations while conversing or listening "

In another newspaper account we are told this about Buxton:

"He had a remarkable memory, and while In the midst of a problem he could desist and resume the operation again where he had left off, even if it were n year after. A remarkable thing about the man was that he would allow two persons to propose different problems at the same time, and he would answer each without the least confusion. He could also talk freely while working out his problems."