“The Grand Illusion of Consciousness”

November 14, 2009

Once again I’d like to bring to the attention of the reader a lecture by the infamous Dr Susan Blackmore about consciousness being nothing more than just an illusion. I won’t say anymore, as I feel the title adequately describes the point being made.

A bit about Sue Blackmore:

Dr. Susan Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey (1980). Her research interests include memes, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and meditation. She practices Zen and campaigns for drug legalization.

Sue Blackmore no longer works on the paranormal.

She writes for several magazines and newspapers, blogs for the Guardian newspaper and Psychology Today, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, about fifty book contributions, and many book reviews. Her books include Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (autobiography, 1996), and Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997)…

For more information on Sue Blackmore, please visit her website, which you can do by clicking here.

9 Responses to ““The Grand Illusion of Consciousness””

  1. [...] is real about ‘us’, what makes ‘us’… And after we finished discussing The Grand Delusion Of Self, he decided that it was his body that defined [...]

  2. Thanks for the time and effort you put into your blog and detailed information you offer! I will bookmark your blog now. Thumbs up!

  3. [...] the natural patterns of mind that we are all subject to, no matter how different we perceive ourselves to be. And, in many ways, I am very glad to find others making bigger waves in getting this idea [...]

  4. [...] in the material world. What Buddhism is predominantly concerned with is how the human mind – something so intangible and vague in essence – perceives and relates to everyday phenomena. In fact, it is concerned with a [...]

  5. [...] an array of chemicals which have cascaded into a pattern of “Life” like animation, with a delusion of “self” which is encumbered with such heavy, single minded modes of understanding, that we all seem to be [...]

  6. [...] men and women, let alone other sentient beings… The main reason being is that the “delusion of consciousness” would be way too deeply ingrained in our very essence for the majority to give up in an [...]

  7. psychicjim said

    This illusion is important to understand. You are onto something here.

  8. [...] of thought, that the ‘self’ we all cling to so ardently is nothing more than a sort of grand illusion conjured up by our biochemically ‘conscious’ bodies… Please do excuse the length [...]

  9. [...] a notion which we all seem to cling to so ardently in life, is really nothing more than a sort of grand illusion of consciousness conjured up by the biochemically ‘aware’ molecular systems of our bodies, which – if [...]

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