Part. 2.
Introduction
The amount of theory and research now being devoted to the study of
consciousness is rather amazing, given its history of neglect in the previous
decades.
This sentence establishes a sense of cutting edge progress to the field.
The subject of psuche has been a concern of philosophy since before
Aristotle.
Indeed, Wilber himself has conducted a survey of the field and made his own
deductions and constructed his own theories which may, or may not have been
suggested before by others before him.
The suggestion of neglect implies his own work may be original.
As encouraging as this research is, I believe that certain important items
are still missing from the general discussion of the role and nature of
consciousness. In this essay, I would therefore like to outline what I
believe is a more integral model of consciousness, not to condemn the other
approaches but to suggest ways in which their important contributions can be
further enriched by a consideration of these neglected areas.
The neglected Items and areas of importance themselves are not indicated and
a sense of incompletion generated. This sets up a desire for resolution which
may not have existed otherwise.
This is a follow-up to a previous essay ("An Integral Theory of
Consciousness," Wilber, 1997b). [1] Since this is also a summary of evidence
and arguments developed elsewhere, I will rarely quote other authorities in
this presentation; works of mine that I reference in this article do so
extensively, and interested readers can follow up with those references. (I
realize that failing to include the original references in this
article--several thousand of them--is reader unfriendly, but the added length
would be prohibitive. I have compromised and added a few representative
references in each of the fields.)
The sense of incompletion is partly resolved by a revelation, which was not
stated in the Abstract, that the current essay is a, 'Follow up.'
Use of the term, 'Follow up' implies that which has been followed to be of
main importance in relation to the scope of the current essay.
The sense of incompletion is further resolved by the first indication of the
Wilber corpus to which the reader is invited to explore under the suggestion
that it is within the corpus itself that academic rectitude is to be
confirmed.
Much of today's research into consciousness focuses on those aspects that
have some sort of obvious anchoring in the physical brain, including the
fields of neurophysiology, biological psychiatry, and neuroscience. While
there seems to be an uneasy consensus that consciousness (or the mind) cannot
be fully reduced to physical systems (or the brain), there is as yet no
widespread agreement as to their exact relation ("the hard problem").
It is tautological to state obvious physicality to be the subject of physical
sciences.
It would also be tautological, should one wish to do so, to state obvious
mentality to be the subject of mental sciences.
However, there are no mental sciences about which to make tautological
statements because science is inherently objective and the mental regarded
therefore as subjective.
This article begins by attempting to provide a compendium of those aspects
from the "mind" side of the equation that need to be brought to the
integrative table. Integral Psychology (Wilber, 2000b) compared and
contrasted over one hundred developmental psychologists--West and East,
ancient and modern--and from this comparison a "mater template" was created
of the full range of human consciousness, using each system to fill in any
gaps left by the others. This master template, although a simple heuristic
device and not a reading of the "way things are," suggests a "full-spectrum
catalog" of the types and modes of consciousness available to men and women.
This catalog might therefore prove useful as we seek a "brain-mind" theory
that does justice to both sides of the equation--the brain and the
mind--because what follows can reasonably be expected to cover much of the
"mind" aspects that should be included, along with the "brain" aspects
derived from neuroscience, in order to arrive at any sort of sturdy and
comprehensive model of consciousness. After outlining this "full-spectrum"
catalog of mind, I will suggest my own model for fitting mind with brain,
culture, and social systems. In other words, I will summarize one version of
a more comprehensive or integral theory of consciousness, which combines the
full-spectrum mind catalog (or master template) with current neuroscience,
brain research, and cultural and social factors, all of which seem to play a
crucial role in consciousness.
Heavy repetition of the abstract material in the introduction.
Density of new terms increases.
The terms culture and social are introduced without any exploration of their
connection with Mind and Brain, Psychology or Physical science.
The essay begins to abandon academic closure and begins to read rather less
like an essay and more like a product description.
Part. 3. follows.
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