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Tribute and Book Review
Toward Repurposing Mind
The Metaspheric Perspective
I want to pay tribute here to my friend and fellow researcher James (Jim) Guy who has written an insightful and important book about Mind and its potential for rebranding. The book, written from a first-person or phenomenological perspective, and entitled Toward Repurposing Mind: The Metaspheric Perspective, draws on the works of important phenomenologists such as Charles S. Peirce, G. Spencer-Brown and Arthur M. Young to build a synergistic model of Mind, and invites us to explore the prime directive of Mind for ourselves.
Jim has been kind enough to incorporate into his model of Mind key sections of a paper I first presented at The Science of Consciousness conference, held in Tucson, Arizona in April, 2018. In that paper, entitled The General Architecture of Languages Holds Key to Consciousness, I described how toddlers—and by analogy early representatives of modern Man—attain consciousness by activation of a shared language organ that developmentally transforms toddlers (and likewise transformed our ancestors) from undifferentiated psychological beings into differentiated, conscious ones.
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As Jim explained to me, it was my piece of the puzzle relating consciousness to “Acquiring Language” presented in my paper that enabled him to complete or finally elaborate the stages of “Acquiring Mind” in Part Two of his book. For Jim, it all seemed to fall in place that day at the conference where he introduced himself to me after my presentation, and we talked over lunch about our shared insights about Mind and consciousness. Since our initial meeting at the TSC conference in Tucson, Arizona, Jim and I have supported each others efforts to get the word out about the internal structure of mind, a topic which has confounded mainstream science for millennia. To that end, we recently co-produced a short promotional booklet entitled “Genesis of Meaning, Mind and Consciousness” for distribution to attendees at various conferences and workshops on this topic.
Below is an excerpt from my review of Jim’s book, that appeared in Genesis of Meaning, Mind and Consciousness:
Toward Repurposing Mind is a book for our precarious, yet portentous times. It is a call to action at an inflection point in the history of our species and present civilization; a call upon all of us to adopt a phenomenological approach to questions of awareness, consciousness and Mind from a first-person perspective, and to reflect on the nature of our own Mind to understand its source. Why so? Because an understanding of Mind offers up an explanation and remedy for the self-first attitude that is the hallmark of the way we human beings live today, and the regard (or casual disregard) we have for Others and for the environment. To this conundrum, it offers up a possible remedy, namely that Mind, insofar as it creates the illusion that we are somehow separate from nature must be subordinated to an understanding that the “I” and the “Other” are both expressions of the original “One”, and that our individual and collective fate is tied in with this deeper existential truth.
I am deeply indebted to Jim for the recognition and generous space he has accorded to my paper in his book. And honored too to be included in his visionary publication that sheds an important new perspective on how Mind impacts our world and our social intercourse.
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