Notes on the course I'm taking

It's the UC Berkeley OCW (OpenCourseWare) Psych/Cognitive Science class in Consciousness
taught by prof. Kihlstrom.

-wikipedia entry on consciousness
-I am not the ghost without a soul (?),
leave your body and soul at the door(Oingo Boingo lyric)
-mind-body problem
"age, if you don't mind, it doesn't matter"
maybe the placebo affect measures the hidden power of sugar :-)
-Descartes' impasse: we perceive duality.
explained: we are not (entirely) separate from other, vibes, zatoichi the blind swordsman, energy, 6th sense, matrix, "god", spirit/soul/mind, telepathy, instinct, funny feeling, spider sense tingling, inspiration (a breathing term), reading other's mind, collective (un)conscious, pluck ideas "out of thin air," thin-k, god's spirit moved over the deep, deep thoughts, breezy ideas, light and dark, hot and cold: hot emotion, michael jordan on fire, cold intellect, topgun iceman, genesis- in the air tonight, weather or not, letters and bleeding, spells and spelling. Creativity and frank zappa and his mothers of invention, ideas strike like lightning, our breath connects us, butterfly effect, shush, says silence of the lambs, spiritual transformation, dark fledgling killers and seeing the light, enlightenment, thawts, eyedeas, open and closed mines, moth/other/mother/om. Dreams make some of us think our minds travel outside our bodies. Row, row, row your boat...stream (of consciousness).

-definitions...neural correlates... different for coma vs. pvs vs. sleep vs. spinal injury

questions
what are the weirdest things that have displayed any form of consciousness?
-plants react to led zeppelin?
-yogurt?
-water? ('what the bleep do we know' movie)
related to movement? absolute zero? atoms? smaller even? any matter? energy? plasma?

my definition (a thought)
-a state of on/off (binary) (like alive or dead)
-light switch example- consciousness is generally considered light, or on. But it could be the reverse, or off. ("kill the lights", taken literally) or (Jesus- I am the light, I am the life...therefore, light is alive).
-the shrimp that swim toward the light are conscious of where the light is coming from, no?
(could a genetic manipulation be made that reversed that?)
-reverse vision (how could you tell?)
-a folding chair conscious of being open or shut?
-"subconscious" "unconscious" (less "conscious" divisions of consciousness)
-hungry or full might be felt by a one-celled organism, without a brain, for example.

I think consciousness, for humans, is a more complex web of binary relationships.
(a consequence of being alive and having a body -including a brain)

-awake-all senses on,
-aware-having words for things, prior experience/familiarity, sports, life or death, fight or flight
(categories, heightened sensitivity)
-experiencing- dreams, 5 senses, awake or asleep (or in between), stasis- reactive to stimulus

(experiencing, awake, aware, and transcendent might be 4 ascending levels of consciousness)

abnormal psychology
someone that doesn't feel pain, has no arms or legs, deaf dumb and blind, can't see or hear or talk, an extreme strange possibility, sleeping...conscious? Locked-in syndrome and dark musical terror lyrics of having eyes and lips sewn together...using einstein's theoretical "thought experiments" to test the limits of our definitions of consciousness (and ethical considerations).

drugs and alternate forms of consciousness
-body's own drugs or introduced foreign substances, lsd, euphoria, synesthesia, visions...
human potential
-strange paradigms...jesus, believing everything to be true: believe every own thought, ideas of others, "levels", numbers and calculations and numerology and finger tapping, music and mathematical relationships... believing yourself to be "possessed", abulia, not in control of your own actions. Possessed by God or Devil. A part of something greater. "spirituality" . Servant of God, doing whatever "feels right", intuition.

-remote viewing, see through other's eyes, navigating a global visual matrix? telling lots of lies, well (power of belief, magic). natural abilities and acquired powers. frames of mind, shifting perspectives, "snap" into something/someone else, role playing, soul rotation, acting, memorization and rehearsal and costume, all the world's a stage, "my"self/identity, psychic spies, telepaths, programming..

-critical thinking, the opposite is always true, weighing all possibilities, skepticism, scientific method, probabilities of truth as basis for tentative belief, always gathering evidence, rigid and hardcore and mental, always thinking, always questioning, cynicism and everything you know is wrong and they're out to get you or control you, karma sevenfold by an unqualified hypocritical judge, stupid people everywhere, it's all bullshit, maybe even love is evil or disempowering or something, the truth hurts, bitterness, sour, sweet heart, biting wit, getting drunk, life is hell, life's a bitch then you die, reality bites, vampires (i.m.a. perv's) bite, people suck, same shit different day, goin' to hell in a bucket, f-u. fuck off. etc. etc.

-trying on for size the Being-Identity of God. Now I'm BIG. Woohoo. I love myself. I'm love. I love everybody, and so everybody should love me. Ain't love grand?

btw, zombies, if they existed, would be conscious. They see, and have the sense of balance, and are motivated to acquire sweet, delicious, nutritive BRAINS. Yum. Or are you talking about the actual zombies that those scary voodoo folks in the caribbean are reputed to make every now and then? yikes. I don't know what those are, and don't want to. Nightmarish? Therefore, conscious.