The Mystery

We're getting closer to incorporating consciousness as an integral part of the scientific picture of the 'physical world'. Not only celebrated physicists of the 20th century such as Max Plank, John Wheeler, David Bohm, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger argued that consciousness is a fundamental property of our Universe but the new pleiad of scientists such as John Hagelin, Sir Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, Guilio Tononi, Christof Koch, Donald Hoffman, Robert Lanza embarked on their quest to put consciousness on the new solid scientific footing and dimensionality. Naturalism with its Newtonian mechanics and classical interpretation of reality is valid only within its domain of applicability, namely human perceptual reality, whereas quantum theory paints a drastically different picture. As Max Plank once said: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve....

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge — to ourselves and others. Having a theory of mind allows us to understand that others have unique beliefs and desires that are different from our own, enabling us to engage in daily social interaction as we interpret the mental states and infer the behaviors of those around us (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). After its first identification in 1978, a large body of research in this field has accumulated, studying the developmental pathway, neural basis, and deficits of the theory of mind. We aren’t born immediately knowing that others have unique beliefs and desires that are unique from our own. It turns out that there are several developmental precursors (or skills) that infants need to develop their theory of mind later on (Westby & Robinson, 2014). These skills include the ability to comprehend the concept of attention, understand the intentions of others, and the ability...

Hobson writes that the 'hard problem' can be seen as a residue of Cartesian dualism, which considers brain and mind to be qualitatively distinct entities. As such it is indeed 'hard', if not impossible, to explain how consciousness could arise from brains. Yet there is no similar difficulty seen in the literature when it comes to integrating consciousness components such as perception, memory and emotion. Hence, Hobson argues, consciousness may thus be no more and no less than the simultaneous combination of all of these components. The key move in accepting and advancing this idea is to specify dual aspect monism as the concept best adapted to a new view of the brain-mind has a unified system with two components, one objective (the brain) and one subjective (the mind). Hobson's theory of the brain in waking, sleeping, and dreaming contends that both the brain and the mind are physical and therefore subject to the same basic rules and regulations as other materials....

While acknowledging that this still does not resolve the 'hard problem' (of consciousness), in that it fails to specify exactly how and why the activated waking and REM sleeping brain becomes conscious, Hobson suggests that one answer is that the 'hard problem' is ill-posed in that it makes a dualistic distinction between brain and mind. An alternative theory is that brain and mind are two physical aspects of a unified system, the brain-mind. According to Hobson, dream interpretation has, until recently, relied on theories of symbolic transformations of mental content and the formal approach described here does not disprove previous schemata. It does, however, supply a more neutral cognitive alternative or constitute a new solution to an age-old problem. In Hobson's view, the content of dream consciousness is the integration of recent experience with prior information. That prior information consists of sensorimotor, emotional, and motivational components — many of ...

Dream consciousness is defined by the theorist of dreaming science J. Allan Hobson, M.D. as the memory of subjective awareness during sleep. According to Dr. Hobson, its importance for cognitive science derives from two perspectives. One is the brain basis for consciousness itself and the other is the interpretation of dreams. Knowing the brain basis of consciousness reduces the so-called 'hard problem' in a significant way while the provision of an alternative to psychodynamic dream interpretation frees that subject from the controversy in which it has been immersed for more than a century. These twin advances in the science of dreaming are elaborated in Hobson's books and articles from 1977 up to the present. The 'hard problem' is defined as the difficulty in specifying how subjective awareness could arise from brain activity. Dream consciousness occurs when the brain is activated during sleep; during REM sleep, that activation is as intense as it is in waking. At...

We explore the relationship between dreams and emotions within the human brain. Human emotions play an important role in dreams, something that has long provided clues to what dreams mean--at least with regard to their general significance. This involvement of emotions helps to explain how towering emotions can get aroused in dreams, something that accounts for all manner of nightmares, including recurring nightmares and night-time PTSD flashbacks. Within this context, it seems likely that dreams can be beneficial, not only by providing what amounts to therapy for certain sleep disorders following trauma, but also by providing the equivalent of therapy in less stressful situations. The book Dreamworld explains much of the mystery about dreams. In the process, it provides a sound, appealing, and easily readable account of how the brain works, something useful for everyone interested in the brain and mind. At a more advanced level, in later chapters Dreamworld breaks new ground in the dr...

The function of REM sleep dreaming is still unknown. We situate our approach to understanding dream phenomenology and dream function within that part of evolutionary theory known as Costly Signaling Theory (CST). We contend that many of the signals produced by the dreaming brain can be and should be construed as 'costly signals'--emotions or mental simulations that produce daytime behavioral dispositions that are costly to the dreamer. For example, often the dreamer will appear in the dream as handicapped in some way (i.e., no clothes, no ID, no money, is under attack, being chased etc.). The dreamer, during waking life, is then influenced by the carry-over effect of the unpleasant dream content. The informational and affective content of the dream creates a mental set in the dreamer that operates during the daytime to facilitate the signaling of a 'handicapped' Self. The subtle signaling effect might be via display of the intense emotions or physical demeanor that had ...