Panpsychism’s problem of evil?

Ideological and political education, as its name implies, has distinctive political and ideological character. It is a process in which governors spread the political concepts and ideologies of a particular society to members of society to maintain the ruling orders of the society. China and the United States, though in different polities and national conditions, use ideological and political education as a tool of political socialization. The contents of American ideological and political education are basically embodied in the connotation and denotation of civic education. Therefore, this article equates the ideological and political education in the United States with American civic education. Based on the history and development of the ideological and political education in China and United States, by analyzing their differences in terms of contents, approaches, and students’ subject status, this article focuses on highlighting the difference in cultivating the subjective consciousness of college students between the two modes of education. In addition to possessing the scientific knowledge and technological abilities necessary for the development of China, the talents serving the socialist modernization construction should also be equipped with the qualities of modern citizens. As the important institution for cultivating modern talents，apart from undertaking the responsibility of imparting professional knowledge, universities should also play the role of modern civic education and integrate modern civic education into the ideological and political education of college students. The modern civic education in universities and the cultivation of university students’ subjective consciousness are mutual cause and effect, promoting each other, and developing together. Therefore, in order to promote the construction and perfection of students’ subjective consciousness and the development of modern civic education in universities, by drawing lessons from the relevant experience in cultivating the subject consciousness of college students in the United States, this article puts forward the three approaches of “reforming the educational pattern by respecting students’ subjective value”, “broadening the educational channels by integrating students’ surroundings” and “enhancing the effectiveness of education by mobilizing the subjective initiative of students” to cultivate students to become socialist modernization builders who are not only knowledgeable and competent, but also independent and socially responsible, embracing both individualistic and collectivist values.

The article discusses issues of psychological support and modeling of the process of development of ecological and legal consciousness of the subjects of conservation. Discusses the features of ecological and legal consciousness of the subjects of the environmental activities described development program environmental and legal consciousness of the subjects of conservation. Taking into account the obtained results of experimental and diagnostic work created development program environmental and legal consciousness of the subjects of conservation. It envisages the following areas of work for the development of environmental legal consciousness among professionals and future professionals: psychological education, aimed at increasing interest in environmental education and selfeducation with the aim of developing ecological and legal consciousness; the question of compliance of the level of their own ecological, legal culture requirements of the future profession; psychological education, aimed at training future specialists in the system of knowledge, abilities and skills, ensuring the development of environmental legal consciousness; diagnostics aimed at identifying the individual characteristics of students, their level of readiness for the development of ecology-oriented values; a system of correction and development of measures aimed at overcoming the lack of training of specialists for inclusion in various kinds of environmentally-oriented activities the set of training exercises which were aimed at solving the following tasks: correction, the formation and development of environmental identity in the first place, overcoming the anthropocentric and pragmatic relations to the natural objects; correction goals of interaction of a person with natural objects; learning skills such interaction; the development of perceptual abilities of a person in contact with natural objects; the expansion of the individual environmental space. In the thesis on the basis of scientific and methodological analysis carried out systematic theoretical analysis of the psychological structure of ecological and legal consciousness prosecutors to lawmaking, enforcement in conservation areas, nature management and environmental protection. Defined objective and subjective factors in the development of environmental legal consciousness of prosecutors. Formulated holistic theoretical concept of the psychological structure of ecological and legal consciousness of prosecutors. The role of ecological and legal consciousness of the Prosecutor in ensuring its effectiveness. An algorithm for constructing the prediction efficiency of professional activity of the Prosecutor on the basis of professional psychological profile of employees with high level of ecological and legal consciousness.

This thesis investigates the formation of Taiwanese subject consciousness under the influence of America and the Cold War during the 1960s. Today, subject consciousness has been discussed primarily in the context of Taiwanese colonial history as a national consciousness in resistance to the influence of Chinese culture or Chinese nationalism. But this nationalist view, on one hand, freezes the agency of subject consciousness in intervening in social and historical processes; on the other hand, it also overlooks the influence of the binary Cold War ideology created by the U.S. For this reason, I contend that Taiwanese subject consciousness cannot be properly understood without seeing the domination of the Cold War and that the contextualization of the Japanese colonial memories, the U.S. influence, and Chinese heritage in Taiwanese society is necessary for liberating Taiwanese subject consciousness from the national perspective. In this thesis, I focus on three different texts which were composed during the 1960s and the early 1970s when the social structure in Taiwan began to change. These texts— George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed, Peng Ming-min’s A Taste of Freedom, and Chen Yingzhen’s short stories, “The Country Village Teacher” and “The Last Day to Summer”— discuss Taiwanese subject consciousness and the Taiwan-U.S. relations in the 1960sto probe into the different cultural positions in imaging Taiwan’s history and the role of America. This thesis concentrates on the political ideologies in these texts, by asking how these ideologies are represented, and what imaginations they provoked to justify their claims. By putting these three positions in conversation with each other, I attempt to manifest the tension and complexity that America imposes on the formation of Taiwanese subject consciousness. Also, this thesis attempts to provide a different set of analytic language to understand Taiwanese subject consciousness as created during the Cold War. Through a historically grounded analysis of these texts, while remaining attentive to the “literary qualities” of their political ideologies, the thesis also suggests the possibility that an examination of Taiwanese subject consciousness can serve as a starting point not only for overcoming the division of China and Taiwan as embedded in the Cold War structure but also for understanding America as a Cold War empire that took Asia as its prey.

Toni Morrison focuses on the spiritual world of black women in her masterpiece Sula, portraying Sula, Nell and other black women who suffer from subject identity crisis, reflecting on the problem of female subject consciousness and revealing that women's subject consciousness can be re-established through their own efforts. This paper is intended to explore the characteristics of different female characters in the novel and their own stories from the postmodern feminism perspective argued by Hlne Cixous, taking into account the character traits and life experiences of the main female characters in the novel. Taking Sula, Nell and Eva as examples, the analysis of their stories reveals that all these black women have a strong sense of resistance. The awakening of their own subjective consciousness continues throughout their lives, and this is also consistent with the postmodern feminism argued by Hlne Cixous.

Toni Morrison focuses on the spiritual world of black women in her masterpiece Sula, portraying Sula, Nell and other black women who suffer from subject identity crisis, reflecting on the problem of female subject consciousness and revealing that women's subject consciousness can be re-established through their own efforts. This paper is intended to explore the characteristics of different female characters in the novel and their own stories from the postmodern feminism perspective argued by Hlne Cixous, taking into account the character traits and life experiences of the main female characters in the novel. Taking Sula, Nell and Eva as examples, the analysis of their stories reveals that all these black women have a strong sense of resistance. The awakening of their own subjective consciousness continues throughout their lives, and this is also consistent with the postmodern feminism argued by Hlne Cixous.

Reviewed by: Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology and British Modernism by Caroline Hovanec Rachel Murray Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology and British Modernism. Caroline Hovanec. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 232. $99.99 (cloth); $80.00 (eBook). In his 2012 study Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel asks: “What kind of explanation . . . even one that includes evolutionary theory, could account for the appearance of organisms that are not only physically adapted to the environment but also conscious subjects?”1 For Nagel, who famously wondered what it might be like to be a bat, modern science alone cannot explain the existence of “subjective individual points of view”: there must be other ways of looking at and understanding the evolution of consciousness in humans and animals (Mind and Cosmos, 44).2 In order to develop alternatives to the dominant materialist conception of mind, he concludes, it is necessary to embrace the possibilities of speculation, imagination, and even erroneous thinking. Nagel is looking to the future, but as Caroline Hovanec shows in her new book, the kind of explanation, or rather the “species of thought” he seeks, may already exist in an earlier form (Animal Subjects, 5). Animal Subjects explores the productive intersection of scientific and literary ways of knowing and describing animal consciousness in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. Bringing together the work of four modernists (H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf) with that of contemporary zoological thinkers (including Charles Elton, Henry Eliot Howard, Julian Huxley, and C. Lloyd Morgan) Hovanec identifies a breed of scientific writing on animal subjectivity that looks a lot like modernist fiction, as well as a strain of literary experimentation that bears a striking resemblance to observational science. In doing so, she builds a compelling case for the evolution of a new way of thinking about animals in the modernist period—one that apprehends them as subjects in their own right rather than Cartesian machines, and which recognizes the possibilities as well as the limitations of language in representing nonhuman subjectivity. Hovanec defines her terms clearly from the outset, sidestepping the vexed philosophical question of what constitutes a subject by identifying a shared conception in the writing of this period of “a subject as any being capable of subjective experience” (6). Her introduction traces this more inclusive definition, which encompasses both human and nonhumans, back to Darwin, specifically his account of the mental powers of humans and animals in The Descent of Man (1871), [End Page 673] in which he argues that so-called lower animals display a capacity for emotion, contemplation, and aesthetic appreciation (6–7). The impact of Darwinian thought on modernism’s engagement with animal life has already been well documented, most notably in Margot Norris’s Beasts of the Modern Imagination (1985) and Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2008). Yet as Hovanec rightly points out, while Darwin’s ideas have served to illuminate modernism’s preoccupation with humankind’s animal ancestry, its challenging of anthropocentrism, as well as its displacement of animality onto marginalized human groups, writers’ interest in animal subjectivity in its own right has tended to be overlooked. The four chapters that follow seek to address this oversight, drawing together examples from modernist literature and science writing that seek to observe and describe animal behaviors, and in some cases their subjective experiences, “accurately and fully” (30). Wells’s beast fables are paired with Elton’s early ecological writing to explore the ways in which animal subjects challenged human sovereignty, while Aldous Huxley’s zoological fiction and Howard’s ornithological writing are read in terms of their “respect for animals as conscious subjects whose experience is only partly knowable” (33). Lawrence’s animal poetry and Julian Huxley’s writing on avian sexual selection are considered in terms of their shared investment in empathetic forms of knowing, and Woolf’s experiments with nonhuman subjectivity are brought into conversation with the comparative psychology of Bertrand Russell, J. B. S Haldane, and C. Lloyd Morgan. Although many of these writers were familiar with one another’s work (Elton quotes Wells...

This thesis presents a Phenomenological investigation of the meditative and mystical experiences, lived by 12 Western meditators. Their voices are presented throughout this text. They tell the reader about their understanding of the ultimate reality, which underlies our human existence. The 12 interviewees were called co-researchers as the data gathered over two years was analysed in a collaborative way. While the open-ended and exploratory interviews were being conducted, the researcher completed an heuristic diary, which informed the topic of the final chapter of this thesis. The co-researcher's themes informed the other four discussion chapters of the thesis. The data was analysed using Moustakas' (1990, 1994) Heuristic Phenomenology, which was underpinned by Husserl's (1931/1958) Transcendental Phenomenology. The co-researchers were from various religious traditions: namely Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Islam. There were two Atheist meditators. The co¬researchers were aged between 26 and 64. They had meditated between 18 months and 30 years. The Phenomenological method was adjusted to accommodate the spiritual experiences described by the co-researchers. Essentially, Husserl assumed that there was an internal or external object of consciousness, experienced by an Egoic subject. In everyday experiencing the subject and object of consciousness may seem separate. However, in meditation one transcends everyday consciousness to a mystical state whereby the subject and object of consciousness are one. In this study, the Phenomenological method was expanded to accommodate the unified structures of meditative and mystical experience. This extension to the Phenomenological method is one of the several original contributions advanced in this thesis. One finding of this study was that meditation was not a technique. One can sit cross-legged and simply think. Meditation is a state of consciousness, which is distinct from ordinary states such as waking, sleeping and dreaming. What was common to each meditator in this study was that their meditation involved reaching a state of present moment awareness. The Christians were in the present moment while sitting cross-legged or in a chair. The Buddhists walked while baring attention to the present moment. The Sufi meditated and whirled with the dervishes, immersed in divine energy.

The world around us is becoming more complex and better connected every day. Humans and machines relate among themselves in a network of information and action. Through these relationships human mind and consciousness is changing to accommodate the environmental demands. While humans are becoming technologically augmented, new forms of existing in the world become possible thanks to the electronically connected system. Despite these new developments, human consciousness is yet to be fully understood. Presently, there is no conclusive definition of this phenomenon. In the mean time, the evolution of human consciousness carries on. Thanks to the shifting technology, human existence is increasingly reminiscent of the reality presented in cyberpunk novels. Interestingly, the approach of this literary genre reframes the questions circulating around the subject of consciousness. It is perhaps only through fiction that we are able to contextualize our present position vis-a-vis our technology. This view has far-reaching repercussions in philosophy of mind and technology.

Abstract. In this paper, I examine alternative views of personhood and how they affect our understanding of life and death. Building on David Wiggins's insight that our concept of person tries to hold in a single focus our nature as a biological being, a subject of consciousness, and a locus of moral values, I argue against views that try to reduce persons to one of these aspects at the expense of the others. Thought experiments that have been prominent in the literature on personal identity are criticized on grounds that they sunder persons from the moral and cultural context in which they appear and ignore an essential relational aspect of persons. I argue for a substantive view of persons that understands persons as “constituted by” but not identical to human organisms, and that treats persons as having essential relational properties. Persons are thus beings whose nature is not determined entirely by their biology or psychology but is, in part, a matter of individual, moral, and cultural construction. I argue that such a view provides the best theoretical grounding to answer the more practical, bioethical questions concerning the beginning and end of life.

The concern of biomedical researchers for the well-being of laboratory animals reflects a consensus that animals are conscious subjects. Partisans of the animal rights movement believe that researchers must go beyond the acknowledgment of consciousness and consequent attention to animal well-being. They should recognize just how similar human and animal consciousness are, and then address animal interests and animal rights. Consideration of these issues would challenge all uses, even painless uses, of animals. In any effort to identify the interests and rights of animals, even animal rights philosophers admit that the nature of consciousness and cognition—human and animal—matters. A theory of human consciousness and cognition developed by B.F.J. Lonergan is helpful in understanding and comparing human and animal consciousness. According to Lonergan, elemental wonder makes human consciousness and cognition a dynamic, self-assembling process moving from presentations given in experience through successive levels of understanding, judgment, and responsibility to the affirmation of values. Questioning sweeps humans across a divide between elementary knowing, which is shared with animals, and a type of knowing that is exclusively human. None of the animal behaviors catalogued by animal rights partisans reveals wonder and the drive to understand, affirm and decide. That drive is a single, restless activity generating successive levels of consciousness. If, as animal rights philosophers agree, animals are incapable of responsible behavior, it must also be that their cognitional feats are qualitatively different from those of humans. Absent questioning and the drive to understand, animals never emerge on the level of intelligent and rational, much less responsible, consciousness. Their cognitional achievements appear to fall within the province of elementary knowing, a realm in which they are accomplished associative learners— clever, to be sure, but not capable of the beginnings of full human knowing. Human consciousness and cognition differ enough from animal consciousness and cognition that humans claim rights while animals do not. So it is that even if we use animals in research, having vouched for their humane care, we use humans as experimental subjects only when they give informed consent. We safeguard the welfare of animals; we guarantee the rights of persons.Key WordsEthicsConsciousnessAnimalsBiomedicalResearch

This is a descriptive, follow-up article on the subject of consciousness, within the framework of what has been mentioned about it in academic writings. It attempts to shed light on it as a fundamental characteristic of the nature of beings in the universe. From this, it concludes that consciousness is a fundamental and psychological characteristic of the nature of beings, because they are constantly changing to achieve specific goals and process specific information.

The Moral Status of the Human Embryo Robert P. George and Alfonso Gómez-Lobo The subject matter of Human Cloning and Human Dignity (President's Council 2002) is the production of a human embryo by means of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) or similar technologies. Just as fertilization, if successful, generates a human embryo, cloning produces the same result by combining what is normally combined and activated in fertilization, that is, the full genetic code plus the ovular cytoplasm. Fertilization produces a new and complete, though immature, human organism. The same is true of successful cloning. Cloned embryos therefore ought to be treated as having the same moral status as other human embryos. A human embryo is a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens in the earliest stage of his or her natural development. Unless denied a suitable environment, an embryonic human being will by directing its own integral organic functioning develop himself or herself to the next more mature developmental stage, i.e., the fetal stage. The embryonic, fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages are stages in the development of a determinate and enduring entity—a human [End Page 201] being—who comes into existence as a single cell organism and develops, if all goes well, into adulthood many years later.1 Human embryos possess the epigenetic primordia for self-directed growth into adulthood, with their determinateness and identity fully intact. The adult human being that is now you or me is the same human being who, at an earlier stage of his or her life, was an adolescent, and before that a child, an infant, a fetus, and an embryo. Even in the embryonic stage, you and I were undeniably whole, living members of the species Homo sapiens. We were then, as we are now, distinct and complete (though in the beginning we were, of course, immature) human organisms; we were not mere parts of other organisms. Consider the case of ordinary sexual reproduction. Plainly, the gametes whose union brings into existence the embryo are not whole or distinct organisms. They are functionally (and not merely genetically) identifiable as parts of the male or female (potential) parents. Each has only half the genetic material needed to guide the development of an immature human being toward full maturity. They are destined either to combine with an oocyte or spermatozoon to generate a new and distinct organism, or simply die. Even when fertilization occurs, they do not survive; rather, their genetic material enters into the composition of a new organism. But none of this is true of the human embryo, from the zygote and blastula stages onward. The combining of the chromosomes of the spermatozoon and of the oocyte generates what every authority in human embryology identifies as a new and distinct organism. Whether produced by fertilization or by SCNT or some other cloning technique, the human embryo possesses all of the genetic material needed to inform and organize its growth. Unless deprived of a suitable environment or prevented by accident or disease, the embryo is actively developing itself to full maturity. The direction of its growth is not extrinsically determined, but is in accord with the genetic information within it.2 The human embryo is, then, a whole (though immature) and distinct human organism—a human being. If the embryo were not a complete organism, then what could it be? Unlike the spermatozoa and the oocytes, it is not a part of the mother or of the father. [End Page 202] Nor is it a disordered growth such as a hydatidiform mole or teratoma. (Such entities lack the internal resources to actively develop themselves to the next more mature stage of the life of a human being.) Perhaps someone will say that the early embryo is an intermediate form, something that regularly emerges into a whole (though immature) human organism but is not one yet. But what could cause the emergence of the whole human organism, and cause it with regularity? It is clear that from the zygote stage forward, the major development of this organism is controlled and directed from within, that is, by the organism itself. So, after the embryo comes into being, no...

Psychiatry is in a growth phase in which several psychedelic medicines have entered its arena with great promise. Of these, presently, ketamine is the only medicine that may be legally prescribed. We hypothesize that at subanesthetic doses, ketamine produces a unique spectrum of altered states, ranging from psychoactive to deep ego-dissolving experiences, that are intrinsic to ketamine's therapeutic effects. When these experiences are embedded in a therapeutic relationship-a setting-that fosters an amplification of the recipient's subjective consciousness, personal growth, inner healing, greater clarity, and better relationships may well ensue. While much of the literature on ketamine labels its dissociative effects as 'side effects', alteration of consciousness is a component and unavoidable 'effect' of its therapeutic impact. From its inception in the clinical trials of the 1960s, ketamine was recognized for producing dissociative, psychedelic effects on consciousness in subjects as they emerged from ketamine-induced anesthesia. Unanticipated and unintegrated, these experiences of 'emergence phenomena' were felt to be disturbing. Accordingly, such experiences have been typically labeled as dissociative side effects. However, in a conducive set and settings, these experiences have been demonstrated to be of positive use in psychiatry and psychotherapy, providing a time-out from usual states of mind to facilitate a reshaping of self-experience along with symptomatic relief. In this way, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) offers a new potential in psychiatry and psychotherapy that is powerfully valanced toward recognizing experience, individuality, and imagination. Essential to a successful therapeutic experience and outcome with KAP is close attention to the subjective experience, its expression by the recipient and integration of the ketamine experience as a healing opportunity.

Chinese urban sanitation workers have a higher incidence. The dressing system is relatively incomplete and clothing design still lack some functional protection design. This article takes Guangzhou urban sanitation workers as the investigation objects, from the design point of view, analyzes the functional and identity status of urban sanitation workers’ overalls in Guangzhou, discusses the present situation of the functional design. To investigate the satisfaction with the clothing style structure, fabric, sizes, colours and other details by interviews and questionnaires. Taking the work of the urban sanitation workers as the starting point and the foothold, on the basis of their personal safety, the key play a role of man’s subjective and subject consciousness, with “comfort”, “protection”, “efficient” as the first priority and design final aim, puts forward more about human body comfort and field solving, propose relevant design strategies.

Introduction Gerhold K. Becker The concept of personhood has been a prime focus in contemporary bioethics. Three areas of ethical decision making in particular have been addressed through explorations into the conditions and criteria of personhood: the beginning and the end of human life and the morally relevant boundaries that separate human beings from nonhuman animals. Blending theology with science fiction, the scope of the latter area has been expanded further to include entities ranging from gods, angels, and extraterrestrials all the way down to machines. Although the recognition of personhood traditionally has been based on metaphysical and ontological considerations about sets of (psychological and cognitive) person-making properties, the emphasis is now squarely placed on moral concerns. Simply put, from a moral perspective a person is someone morally considerable who is the subject of moral rights and merits moral protection. The implications of the conferral of person status for moral decision making in medicine, health care, and research are, however, less clear. Problems arise from the fact that the traditional concept of personhood is constituted by three rather different ideas. As David Wiggins has pointed out, the concept of personhood combines in a single focus the ideas of the person as object of science (biological, neurophysiological, and so forth), as subject of consciousness and experience, and as locus of value and moral attributes. It is therefore extremely difficult to neatly separate metaphysical personhood from moral personhood, and vice versa, and to draw morally relevant conclusions without continuously moving back and forth between the different constitutive factors. Thus, moral rights seem to presuppose moral agency, and moral agency is contingent on personal identity, which in turn presupposes some form of physical (including psychological) existence. It is obvious, that differences in the analysis of any one of these constituents of personhood will result in different conceptions of personhood with different implications for ethical decision making. Bioethical disputes about the moral status of human fetuses or of irreversibly comatose patients, as well as of the great apes [End Page 289] and other animals, are notoriously complex because they involve fundamental disagreements about personhood and the most promising strategies for their resolution. Although this has led some to question the usefulness of the concept of personhood for bioethics altogether, others seek remedy through the analysis of moral agency within the context of particular bioethical issues. The essays in this volume clearly reflect the current state of the bioethical debate on personhood and are representative of its major strands. They evolved from discussions at an international symposium on Bioethics and the Concept of Personhood at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University, May 1998, that explored the bioethical implications of the concept of personhood in a historical and cross-cultural perspective. In the opening essay, John Harris gives Locke’s concept of person a new twist by reading his list of criteria of personhood as preconditions of a being’s capability to value his or her own existence. The status of person is contingent upon the possession of the capacity to value one’s own existence; whoever is capable of such valuation is a person (as long such capacity actually exists) and makes moral claims on other persons. On this account, personhood is not co-extensive with human life or the human species, and even transcends other forms of organic life. Harris allows for the possibility that some machines in effect might qualify for person status. Although human life develops gradually and with it the capacity to value existence, Harris rejects both the potentiality argument and gradualism on the grounds that personhood is a “threshold” concept. Accordingly, proximity to the threshold is morally insignificant, and everything depends on actually crossing the threshold. Tom Beauchamp takes issue with what he sees as the dominant trend in contemporary bioethics to derive moral conclusions from metaphysical accounts of personhood. On his reading, metaphysical theories of personhood are abused in normative analysis by employing certain sets of psychological or cognitive properties to identify persons as bearers of moral rights. He argues that by themselves, without the incorporation of independent moral principles, such properties have no moral implications and cannot confer moral standing. Thus, a being may...