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In the face of new evidence, physicists are starting to view the cosmos not as made up of disparate layers, but as a quantum whole linked by entanglement

Researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, indicating that some brain activity, like consciousness, operates on a quantum level.

The nature of consciousness and the measurement problem in quantum physics remain two of the greatest mysteries in science. Is it possible they are connected?

A radical new book argues that a bee may have a mind of its own, awareness of the world, basic emotions and intelligence. It is a bold and brave claim – but is it true?

A new paper argues the condition now known as “dissociative identity disorder” might help us understand the fundamental nature of reality

This film is an excerpt from a new course that I am developing about the Mawangdui medical texts, a library of manuscripts discovered in China that date back...

The long read: Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots

Scientists in the UK have even identified four cases of "chronic déjà vu."

It looks like scientists and philosophers might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be

The reductive materialism of science cannot explain life: to reach knowledge, we need to live anew in a creative universe

Posted in r/RationalPsychonaut by u/RJPatrick • 70 points and 26 comments

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

Posted in r/philosophy by u/phileconomicus • 467 points and 653 comments

Author Summary Integrated information theory (IIT) approaches the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate by first identifying the fundamental properties of experience itself: existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. IIT then postulates that the physical substrate of consciousness must satisfy these very properties. We develop a detailed mathematical framework in which composition, information, integration, and exclusion are defined precisely and made operational. This allows us to establish to what extent simple systems of mechanisms, such as logic gates or neuron-like elements, can form complexes that can account for the fundamental properties of consciousness. Based on this principled approach, we show that IIT can explain many known facts about consciousness and the brain, leads to specific predictions, and allows us to infer, at least in principle, both the quantity and quality of consciousness for systems whose causal structure is known. For example, we show that some simple systems can be minimally conscious, some complicated systems can be unconscious, and two different systems can be functionally equivalent, yet one is conscious and the other one is not.

University of Southampton scientists found that nearly 40 per cent cardiac arrest survivors had some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

Most of us recognized ourselves in the mirror this morning.  The person looking back at us has a familiar name, a family, a job.  He (or she) carries around a long menu of likes and dislikes, along with a personal history from the moment we emerged from the womb. It would amaze the vast majority […]

Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Henry Stapp, PhD Pick at random any TV show about the universe, and the visuals will be dominated by a black void sprinkled with billions of galaxies. Such images give the impression of a vast emptiness foreign to human existence. Our bodies would perish within minutes of stepping into outer space; our […]

By Deepak Chopra MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD., Subhash Kak, PhD., Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD., and Neil Theise, MD A radically new view of reality is gaining ground, and its basic idea is thrilling: We live in a conscious universe. In the first two posts of this series we explained why this seemingly outlandish proposition is […]