# FTI: Rethinking The Nature of Consciousness: The Neurophysics Of Normal Wakefulness & Altered States
For centuries, we as a species have struggled to wrap our heads around the ontological nature and mechanistic means of consciousness — presuming, as mainstream Western science tends to assume, that consciousness is produced by the brain and is therefore confined to this substrate. Three issues have emerged as particularly stubborn challenges from this perspective: (1) the “Hard Problem” (i.e., the explanatory gap that seems to exist in accounting for the basis of subjective experience in the context of physical matter); (2) the “Binding Problem” (i.e., the issue of how separate features somehow combine to form a unified perceptual experience); and (3) the Problem of “Anomalous Experiences” (i.e., a peculiar array of subjectively reported conscious experiences and phenomena that seem to challenge normative beliefs about what is possible, based upon their apparent inability to be explained by the prevailing paradigm). Although the latter issue receives far less attention in mainstream discussion of consciousness, it may in fact be the key factor to resolving all three problems, signaling the existence of ontological misassumptions that have tended to be applied in the search for answers about consciousness without awareness of these misconceptions. By suspending the presupposition that consciousness simply must begin and end with neuronal activity in the brain and considering that it may be a more fundamental aspect of the cosmos with both local and nonlocal properties, we do find — as Thomas Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — that these anomalies may lead us toward a paradigm-shifting breakthrough. This presentation addresses all three of these problems simultaneously by building upon the work of experts based in many different disciplines — with a type of glial cell known as astrocytes playing a highly underrated mechanistic role. Taken altogether, it offers specific mechanisms based in physics and neurophysiology that may address three of the toughest challenges associated with consciousness all at once.
Format: Lecture and discussion
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