A 3-part Webinar Series
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Feb 10, 2019 PST
In contrast with a common misconception, neuroscience has never provided any evidence that consciousness is inside the brain. Consequently, it is important to consider a different view – the Spread Mind – according to which, conscious experience is literally one and the same as the world. If consciousness is the external world, what will change in our everyday experience? Can we experience the identity between us and the world? If we look inside ourselves, we get in the world. This view allows us to move from introspection to extraspection, finding ourselves outside our body.
Take-Home Activity: A series of practices to shift the center of our being from the body to the external world. A series of questions (radical introspectionism) will dissolve our prejudice about our ideas being inside our head. Radical introspection looks outward.
Duration: 90 mins
Duration: 1 hours, 30 minutes
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Feb 17, 2019 PST
Everything is relative but this does not mean that what is relative is not real. Reality is relative. In our case relative is relative to our body. While consciousness is neither inside our body nor inside our brain, the body has a fundamental role in shaping the world that is ourselves. In fact, the body is the gate that brings a world into existence. How does this world unfold in space and time? What is it made of? What are its physical limits? Of course, these questions will also allow us to understand the spatiotemporal extension of ourselves. Can we be older and bigger than our body? How can we connect our existence to the ultimate reality?
Take-Home activity. Recognize the relative nature of all physical phenomena. Finding the relation between the objects in our life and our body. Revealing the constitutive relationship between our body and the universe.
Duration: 90 mins
Duration: 1 hours, 30 minutes
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Feb 24, 2019 9:30am - 11:00am PST
What about cases of nonstandard conscious experience? What are dreams and hallucinations made of? Are we more than we usually believe? Moving from well-known cases of illusions (the café wall-illusions, Kitaoka’s color illusions, afterimages) we will learn that perception is never mistaken. We may have mistaken beliefs about what we perceive, but we cannot perceive something that is not real. We will then extend this key insight to dreams and hallucination. Why do we dream and what do they mean? Are dreams real? We will reveal the (un)reality of the unreal.
Homework: Testing actual cases of illusions. Checking one’s consciousness in specific situations: before sleeping, after sleeping. Comparing mental images and current perception. Trying to create impossible mental imagery.
Duration: 90 mins
Duration: 1 hours, 30 minutes
Riccardo Manzotti has a PhD in Robotics and degrees in Philosophy of Mind and Computer Science. He teaches Psychology of Perception atIULM University, Milan (Italy), and has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT. He has specialized in AI, artificial vision, perception and, most of all, the issue of consciousness. After working in the field of artificial vision, he focused his research on the nature ofphenomenal experience, how it emerges from physical processes and how it is related to objected perceived. He is now defending and developing a theory of the mind called The Spread Mind theory (www.thespreadmind.com) which suggests an identity between one’s consciousness of and object and the external object one is conscious of. This theory runs afoul the widespread and popular notion that consciousness is inside the brain. In contrast, he claims that our experience is one and the same with the surrounding world. www.consciousness.it
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