Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness airs on PBS (was FINAL POST on an expired blog)
PBS Independent Lens aired, on Monday April 25, 2022, the German film 'Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness', directed and written by Eric Black and Frauke Sandig. The film (from Umbrella) runs 102 minutes originally but was pared to 90 minutes by PBS.
The film presents the work of six different researchers on the nature of consciousness or awareness. These include physiological brain research neuroscience (and microtubules), eastern or Tibetan medication (there is a lot of footage of Tibetan and other Bhuddist monks), and use of psychedelic substances. Sensory deprivation (like the 1980 movie Altered States) gets mentioned.
'There is the general impression that awareness is a property of all living things, even plants. I remember how, when I had the house, wild grape vines found my cable TV wires along the brick wall of the bedroom and could have stopped the service.
I also remember hearing other people describe the effects of marijuana, way back when I was in the Army, of intensifying the sensory response to normally insignificant objects, such as follicles of body hair.
What is more interesting is the notion of individual v. group consciousness, as with an organism like the slime mold (literally intelligence without brains). Other animals show distributed consciousness. Consider the octopus. 'Brain' processing occurs even in the pods or suckers of the arms which make local decisions on how to get food. When a human has a muscle twitch on a leg or arm and senses a desire to look at it, is that an example of local consciousness? Is local consciousness involved in diseases like ALS?
Interesting also is this video from 'Be Smart': 'Can Life Really Be Explained by Physics?' 24 min, April 8. 2024). The video describes life as producing local order (even agency the ability to make choices of activity that have effect on others) at the expense of expelling some entropy (which is the unpredictable effect on others ultimately the political or social conflict over individualism v. collectivism in my view).
I am reminded that recent Harvard computer science graduate John Fish says his area of concentration was 'Mind, Brain, and Behavior'. Especially the latter.
Note: This is the final post for this blog, which is sunsetting. Visitor read access to the blog will turn off some time on Wednesday, May 4, 2022.
(That refers to the old blog billsmediacommentary dot com which ceased availability on May 4, 2022.)
(Previously posted: Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 10 AM EDT by John W. Boushka)