Hari-kirtana is an author, mentor, and yoga teacher who shares his knowledge and experience of how the yoga wisdom tradition can guide us toward meaningful and transformative spiritual experiences.
Technology, theology, and consciousness
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Greetings Reader - Explaining how the physical systems inside our bodies give us the ability to distinguish one thing from another, integrate information, and perform basic functions like watching, listening, and speaking are what scientists call "easy problems." Explaining why and how we have subjective experiences, on the other hand, is what David Chalmers, professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, dubbed "the hard problem of consciousness." As Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of God Human Animal Machine, put it, "We can describe a lot of the systems in the brain. We can talk about how vision works or how memory works, but this idea that we have subjective experience, that we have an interior life, is very difficult to describe. You can't observe consciousness in a lab. You can't weigh it or measure it." The fact that accounting for consciousness is a "hard problem" hasn't stopped people from thinking about it. Or talking about it. Or coming up with theories about it. Neuroscientists believe that the mind is the brain, that there is no immaterial (or spiritual) self, that consciousness is a function of the cerebral cortex. Transhumanists are convinced that, in the future, we'll be able to achieve immortality by uploading our minds to a computational substrate where we'll continue to exist after our physical bodies perish. Quantum physicists say that there's something outside of computation that accounts for consciousness and that there is no genuine theory that connects quantum level physical reality to conscious experience. Other researchers think that physical reality doesn't really exist; that there's a good chance we're living in a giant computer simulation created by who-knows-who, perhaps even our own descendants. Still others say that, despite all appearances to the contrary, consciousness itself doesn't really exist. What does the yoga wisdom tradition have to say about consciousness? And what do you think when you think about consciousness? This is the topic we're going to explore in our next COMMUNITY CONVERSATION a free monthly study group Live via Zoom on the 2nd Wednesday of every month @ 12:00 pm Eastern Time NEXT CONVERSATION: Wednesday, April 10, 2024 TECHNOLOGY, THEOLOGY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS All sessions will be recorded and available for replay on my YouTube channel Registration is free – CLICK HERE to get updates and the Zoom link! We'll talk about
If you haven't registered for our free monthly Community Conversations yet, CLICK HERE to get updates and the Zoom link for the live discussion, and the recording link so you can listen to the replay if you can't join us live. If you're already registered, you'll get reminder emails with the Zoom link next week. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the "hard problem" of consciousness. Hoping your consciousness is in a great place, - Hari-k PS: want to do some prep work for our conversation? CLICK HERE to listen to a great interview with author Meghan O'Gieblyn about the shared assumptions of Christian creationists and transhumanist tech leaders, the questionable metaphor of the mind as a computer, and the relationships of humans to the machines we build. |
Hari-kirtana das
Hari-kirtana is an author, mentor, and yoga teacher who shares his knowledge and experience of how the yoga wisdom tradition can guide us toward meaningful and transformative spiritual experiences.
Greetings Reader - I live in Washington, D.C., a company town where the "company" is the federal government, where seeing the President's Press Secretary at a coffee shop constitutes a celebrity sighting, and policy geeks crowd into sports bars to watch Judiciary Committee hearings instead of the Nats, Caps, Wizards, or Mystics. Politics is the number one spectator sport here in our nation's capital. And for those of us who live here, being a spectator is all you get to be. Fewer people live...
Greetings Reader, I'm happy share the news that my new my book, Journey Into the Bhagavad Gita - A Guide to Exploring Timeless Principles of Transcendental Knowledge and Integrating Them Into Your Life, is set for release on May 23, 2024. Here's the cover: When I started on this project, I had no idea how long it would take to finish writing, editing, designing, and publishing this book. To be honest, if I had, I might not have written it. But I didn't and I did and it's done. Whew! Here's an...
Greetings Reader - In a world of 60-second news cycles, wildly competing narratives, and hyperbolic supposition posing as authoritative journalism, distinguishing truth from opinion has become increasingly challenging. Without a compass that can reliably point us in the direction of reasonable belief and away from misguided theories, We can easily get lost in a sea of information - and misinformation - overload. That's where pramāṇa comes in. Pramāṇa, which means “evidence” in Sanskrit, is...