(Original Review, 1994-11-17)




Dave Chalmers did a great job of making consciousness popular but his own view was 400 years out of date. Descartes is the real rigorous physicist here - he was after all one of the people who devised physics. What he meant by the soul and God being 'spirit' is that they caused matter to move. Matter for Descartes was just the inert occupancy of a space (extension). So physics consisted of the interaction of spirit and matter. We now call spirit 'force' or 'energy' and Descartes was quite right because thinking is all about electromagnetic fluxes - which in themselves do not occupy space or have mass. His mistake was to think that there had to be one special spirit unit. Leibniz sorted that out in 1714.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

(Original Review, 2012-04-30)




I have recently read books by Dr. Mario Beauregard and Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and I'm inclined to believe that the answer to “The Hard Problem” is not beyond us to comprehend and it would be a shame in terms of our evolution if we were to think it so.

I believe ALL areas of science should be open and up for debate. Now, scientific materialism seems at a loss to explain irrefutable accounts of mind over matter, intuition, willpower, the "placebo effect" in medicine, of near-death experiences on the operating table, and of psychic premonitions of a loved one in crisis.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

(Original Review, 2000-10-15)


I don't agree that it is as big mystery as pointed out elsewhere in another review I’ve read...I think we do know a great deal about consciousness. The problem lays also in our willingness to explore altered states of consciousness. This must be included in any theory...Some examples of books dedicated to this subject of consciousness. I have been reading lately: “Complete works of Freud and Carl Jung”, “The Tibet Book Of The Dead”, “Tao Te Ching”, R. D. Laing’s “The Politics Of experience (Birds Of Paradise)”, “The Tao Of Physics” by Fritjof Capra, Works Of Richard Feynman, Works of Spinoza, “Altered States Of Consciousness” by Charles T. Tart, “The Conscious Mind” by David J. Chalmers, and Anthropological Studies on Shamanism and so on, indicate that the human animal has not progressed much physiologically over the past two or three thousand years. However we have progressed massively technologically...Plenty of food for thought in this area.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.