Experience & experiment

Daedalus

Volumn 135, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 67-75

  Connolly, William E ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33746913909     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/daed.2006.135.3.67     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. See Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (with the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters), trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992).
2. I address that question in "Spinoza and Us," Political Theory 29 (4) (August 2001): 583-595.
3. Donald Davidson, "Donald Davidson," in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 231.
4. See in biology, for example, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
5. and Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); in paleontology,
6. Stephen Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); in neuroscience,
7. Walter J. Freeman, "Consciousness, Intentionality and Causality," in Freeman and Rafael Núñez, eds., Reclaiming Cognition (Bowling Green, Ky.: Imprint Academic Press, 1999);
8. and in chemistry, the thinker who inspired several of the above studies, Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty, trans. Odile Jacob (New York: The Free Press, 1996).
9. For one account see Alondra Oubre, "EEG Neurofeedback for Treating Psychiatric Disorders," Psychiatric Times, February 2002, at http://www.neurofeedback-institute.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl.
10. Stuart Hampshire, "Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom," in Freedom of Mind and Other Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 203-204.
11. The five themes are presented in that essay and its companion piece, Stuart Hampshire, "A Kind of Materialism," in Freedom of Mind and Other Essays, 1971ibid., 210-231.
12. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990);
13. and Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1970).
14. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 266.
15. Ilya Prigogine, Is Future Given ? (River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2003), 65.
16. Here, and in The End of Certainty, Prigogine criticizes the concepts of law and causality in classical science, including some recent interpretations of science. Prigogine and Deleuze are connected by at least two streams: the debt each owes to the work of Henri Bergson on time as alteration, and the debt of Prigogine's collaborator, Isabelle Stengers, to the work of Deleuze. For the latter, see Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
17. In his posthumously published book, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005),
18. Hampshire seems to take another step toward the position I am attributing to Deleuze. The book consists of his classic 1951 book on Spinoza, the essay on freedom listed above, and a previously unpublished essay, "Spinoza and Spinozism." In the latter, Hampshire expresses a debt to Antonio Damasio, whose book Looking for Spinoza (New York: Harcourt, 2003)
19. is the first close engagement by a neuroscientist with the work of Spinoza. I explore this stimulating study in "The Radical Enlightenment: Faith, Power, Theory," Theory & Event 7 (3) (2004).
20. V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1968).
21. He says, "Brain connections are extremely labile and dynamic. Perceptions emerge as a result of reverberations of signals between different levels of the sensory hierarchy, indeed even across different senses." V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, 1968 Ibid., 56.
22. A similar approach appears in Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tonino, A Universe of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 2000). They theorize patterns of entry and reentry in the body/brain network, finding consciousness to be the cumulative result of them.
23. I discuss this dimension of Prigogine's thought in chapter 3 of Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Chapter 4 of that book lists numerous 'techniques of the self that can be applied to body/brain processes.
24. Francisco J. Varela, ed., Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997), 106-107.
25. The instruments are limited in what they detect. "If you look at a person's EEG, you cannot tell if he or she is full of compassion or completely oblivious." Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama, 1997 Ibid., 104.
26. This book provides a model of how the interplay between experience and experiment can work. As a researcher says, "In statistical analyses, we found that there is more body movement in lucid dreams, and more sound. Body balance seems to be very important. All this leads us to ask whether there are psychological, cognitive predispositions to lucid dreaming. It turns out that there are, notably in the realm of spatial skills such as body balance." If you look at a person's EEG, you cannot tell if he or she is full of compassion or completely oblivious, Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama, 1997Ibid., 105.
27. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 65, 62.
28. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999 Ibid., 65.
29. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999 Ibid., 301-302.
30. Robert Heath, The Hidden Power of Advertising (Henley-on-Thames: Admap Publications, 2001), 67.
31. I examine a contemporary instance in "The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine," Political Theory 33 (6) (December 2005): 869-886.
32. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
33. His classic Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1989), should be read in conjunction with that text.