Saturday 13 November 2021, 4.00pm - 6.00pm

Our ordinary, waking state of consciousness, is typically considered by psychology as normative and the purveyor of the best apprehension of ‘reality’. This has been the case despite its various perceptual and cognitive limitations - partly explainable by evolutionary pressures - and personal and cultural biases. In contrast, various philosophical traditions in both the West and the East, as well as a psychological school of thought traceable to William James and others, have deemed the ordinary state as circumscribed and potentially misleading, and have described alternate states of consciousness that may provide new insights into the nature of mind and its relation to reality.

This presentation will briefly describe some of the constraints of the ordinary state. Next, it will cover research on how spontaneous or purposefully induced (e.g., through hypnosis, or meditation) anomalous experiences and alterations of consciousness relate to enhancement of abilities, including decreased perceptual and cognitive automaticity; enhanced physiological control; recovery from different ailments; and positive changes in emotions, sense of meaning, and relationships with other beings and the environment. The final section will review research evidence for one of the most daring claims about alternate states of consciousness: that they may give access to information not bound by common sense notions of time, space, and selfhood (i. e., psi phenomena).

Please note that this event will begin with a 1 hour recording of Professor Cardeña's keynote at the CEP Annual Conference 2018 on the theme of Exceptional Experiences (paper titled 'Derangement of the Senses or Alternate Epistemological Pathways? Altered Consciousness and Enhanced Functioning'). In the second hour, Professor Cardeña will be present live to answer questions from the audience, as well as provide a brief update on the subject.

Learning Outcomes

Delegates will gain an overview of research on positive outcomes associated with altered states of consciousness, including the relationship between altered states and healing, other physiological processes, enhanced psychological functioning, and parapsychological experiences.

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How to Understand the Causal Interactions between Consciousness and the Brain

Date 29 April 2021 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

In everyday life we take it for granted that we have conscious control of some of our actions and that the part of us that exercises conscious control is the conscious mind. Psychosomatic medicine also assumes that the conscious mind can affect body states, and this is supported by evidence that the use of imagery, hypnosis, biofeedback and other ‘mental interventions’ can be therapeutic in a variety if conditions. However, there is no accepted theory of mind/body interaction and this has had a detrimental effect on the acceptance of mental causation in science, philosophy and in many areas of clinical practice. Biomedical accounts typically translate the effects of mind into the effects of brain functioning, for example, explaining mind/body interactions in terms of the interconnections and reciprocal control of cortical, neuroendocrine, autonomic and immune systems.

While such accounts are instructive, they are implicitly reductionist, and beg the question of how conscious experience could have bodily effects. On the other hand, non-reductionist accounts have to cope with three problems:

1) The physical world appears causally closed, which would seem to leave no room for conscious control.

2) One is not conscious of one’s own body processing, so how could there be conscious control of such processing?

3) Conscious experiences appear to come too late to causally effect the processes to which they most obviously relate.

This talk suggests a dual-aspect, monist solution to these problems in which conscious experiences and associated brain states are thought of as complementary first- and third-person ways of knowing the operations of a fundamentally psychophysical mind.

Learning outcomes

Participants in this webinar will gain an understanding of -

a) the problems of understanding the causal interactions of consciousness and brain,

b) the problems of standard dualist and materialist-reductionist solutions to these problems,

c) a deeper, dual-aspect monist understanding of mind and self that resolves these problems. The use of psychological vs physical interactions in therapeutic situations will also be clarified.

Speaker

Max Velmans, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, has been involved in consciousness studies for over 40 years. His pioneering integrative work on the philosophy, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology of consciousness has led to over 130 publications (see Research Gate and Academia.edu) and over 150 national and international invited lectures on this topic. His widely praised book Understanding Consciousness (2000) was short-listed for the British Psychological Society book award in 2001 and 2002, and is now in its second (2009) edition. Other books include How Could Consciousness Experiences Affect Brains? (2003), the co-edited Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2007, 2017), Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness (2017), and the four-volume collection Consciousness (Critical Concepts in Psychology) (2018). He was a co-founder and, from 2004-2006 , Chair of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section, and was an Indian Council of Philosophical Research National Visiting Professor for 2010-2011.

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