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focus on February 2024
Human beings have the characteristic of perceiving reality as existing out there, as if it had intrinsic existence. This is simply how it appears to our consciousness. To realize that it is not so requires meticulous philosophical analysis.
Consciousness and Inner Reality
Speaking of consciousness, existing models can be classified into two main categories: those that recognize to the Consciousness an intrinsic existence independent, at least in part, from its physical substratum and those who instead consider the Consciousness entirely reducible to the electro-chemical-physical processes that take place in the brain.
Relationships and Society
At times, the paths of individuals cross unbeknownst to the protagonists themselves, and their ideas converge across time and space. Such is the case of the remarkable, unfulfilled, and even unexplored 18th-century connection between Ippolito Desideri, an Italian Jesuit missionary, and David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher.
focus on February 2024
Do appearances conceal reality from our eyes? Or does our preconceived idea of what is real prevent us from seeing the reality of appearance? I would like to draw attention to two aspects. The first is to emphasize the importance of phenomenology, which aims to study the appearing, highlighting how our belief in the reality of external objects is generated from it. The second reason is because it seems to me that the way Western metaphysics and science have seen the difference between reality and appearance is exactly opposite to that of Buddhism.
focus on February 2024
Consciousness is the greatest and unresolved problem since the origins of philosophy: everything we see, do, encode, decide, and even science itself, are products of the mind and inhabit the world of consciousness. The entire worldview, culture, and science depend on consciousness and the mind-reality interface.
focus on February 2024
Understanding reality is at the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist path.
By dichotomy, I mean conceiving the impermanent as permanent, suffering as happiness, the impure as pure, and the non-self as having a self.
focus on February 2024
Buddha indicated that the mind is the chief as regards all our emotions and actions, and if it is driven by ignorance, it leads to all miseries. He taught the twelve links of dependent origination, pertaining to the evolution of three kinds of miseries in samsaric existence, all stemming from ignorance. The counter force for this ignorance is what the Buddha identified as wisdom, to remove the veil of ignorance which blinds the vison of reality.
Attention is one of the higher-order cognitive processes. In the brain, it enables the selection of privileged neural signals by enhancing their intensity through neural feedback, thereby decreasing the relative intensity of competing neural signals. For example, attention allows a writer to focus on the topic at hand while neighbors are loudly arguing; their thoughts are highlighted (akin to the metaphor of a spotlight, albeit controversial today), at the expense of the neighbors' conversations.
FOCUS ON JANUARY 2024
I know within myself that I exist. This is a common experience to every human being. But how do I know? I know because I feel so within me. Thus, the feeling is the carrier of the meaning (I exist), and the capacity to have feelings and understand their meaning is the essential property that “explains” how we know.
FOCUS ON JANUARY 2024
The job of the mind is cognition, and clearly Buddhism asserts subtler levels of cognition not posited by neuroscience. Our potential – the enlightenment of buddhahood – it’s the very nature of our mind.
The trine model of the human brain first introduced by MacLean — seeing the human brain as evolved in three main waves, the first of which has created a reptilian complex at the core, the second a paleo-mammal limbic system and lastly the recent structures of the neo-cortex — is now considered anatomically obsolete and Damasio's work has clearly shown the most "primitive" structures to be vital to superior cognition. How much of this layered conception, made of levels, ancient and recent, primitive or cognitively superior, with interactions flowing in both senses (top-down or bottom-up), still survives in the debate?
FOCUS ON JANUARY 2024
Understanding the components that comprise a moment of our subjective experience enables us to deconstruct the moment. Such deconstruction methods also help us to understand what others are experiencing and to interact with them in a compassionate way.
FOCUS ON JANUARY 2024
Slow breathing techniques seem to enhance autonomic, cerebral, emotional, and behavioral flexibility, leading to a range of benefits for the individual who practices them.
Bernard Stiegler's philosophical reflection on attention (2010; 2014) illustrates how attention is more than just concentration or vigilance. Attention also concerns desire, waiting, active participation, interest.
Relationships and Society
In an uncertain and complex world, human beings have a natural inclination to construct narratives: stories that weave together the most different threads of their experiences into a coherent puzzle of meaning.
In this series of articles we discuss some of the key reflections of Bernard Stiegler's analysis on the link between digital technologies and the destruction of attention; on its consequences for individual and collective life.
The debate confronting the two paradigms partly relates to how we define that which is shared or universal. Even within its constructivist perspective, Barrett accepts the existence of universals. Indeed, his model envisages affects that are constantly fluctuating in valence (positive or negative).
The field of affective neuroscience has recently witnessed a vigorous debate between two different approaches to understanding emotions. The first, Basic Emotion Theories, also referred to by various names such as the mechanisms underlying them (emotion circuits, somatic markersand so on), or their supposed nature (nativism vs essentialism)
Now that the Buddhist traditions confront themselves with cognitive neuroscience and other natural sciences, trying to build up or expand an edifice for studying the mind and conscious experience, it seems vital to stand for the legitimacy and self-sufficiency of Buddhist traditional thought, maintaining critical distance from the prestige (and thus privilege) the scientific apparatus holds in modern western society.
From the XIX century on, Buddhism has been called to confront challenges and opportunities collateral to the religious and cultural structure that characterized it in the pre-modern period.
Charles Hampden-Turner's classic Mapping the Mind (1982) includes sixty mapping models of the human being, of his psyche. His map categories range from historical to religious, to psychoanalytic, existentialist, psychosocial, creative, linguistic-symbolic, cybernetic, structural and “paradigmatic” perspectives. From Taoism, St. Augustine, Blake, Darwin, Marx, Weber and Freud, up to Lacan, Bateson, Chomsky and Varela. For the time, Hampden-Turner's text is extremely sophisticated, rich, and accessible; today his approach desperately needs an update.