Changes

Two of the foremost models of consciousness in this vein have been proposed by Charles Tart, now a professor of psychology, emeritus, at the University of California at Davis, and Stanislav Grof, former psychiatrist at the Maryland Psychiatric Institute. Tart, a parapsychologist, psychedelic researcher, and personality theorist, in a series of pioneering works in the 1960s and 1970s proposed that the framework of traditional science was sufficient only for an understanding of the rational waking state. Newer forms of science were required that were internally consistent with and exclusive to the state of consciousness in which they were applied. Tart's call for the development of state-specific sciences was accompanied by the assertion that scientists needed to have experienced the particular conditions they were studying as a necessary prerequisite for objectivity. Grof undertook a variety of different investigations of altered states of consciousness, including the recovery of birth memories, the study of transformative religious visions, and shamanic states of healing, especially in non-Western cultures.

Two of the foremost models of consciousness in this vein have been proposed by Charles Tart, now a professor of psychology, emeritus, at the University of California at Davis, and Stanislav Grof, former psychiatrist at the Maryland Psychiatric Institute. Tart, a parapsychologist, psychedelic researcher, and personality theorist, in a series of pioneering works in the 1960s and 1970s proposed that the framework of traditional science was sufficient only for an understanding of the rational waking state. Newer forms of science were required that were internally consistent with and exclusive to the state of consciousness in which they were applied. Tart's call for the development of state-specific sciences was accompanied by the assertion that scientists needed to have experienced the particular conditions they were studying as a necessary prerequisite for objectivity. Grof undertook a variety of different investigations of altered states of consciousness, including the recovery of birth memories, the study of transformative religious visions, and shamanic states of healing, especially in non-Western cultures.

==CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE, NEUROPHILOSOPHY, AND NEUROTHEOLOGY==

==Contemporary Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy, & Neurotheology==

Neurotheology refers specifically to modern attempts to study religious experience using the techniques and theories of the neurosciences, which include neuroimaging of meditative and contemplative states of consciousness. Neurotheology in this sense is an extension of the more recent term neurophilosophy, in which cognitive scientists, such as Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, and Robert Searl, have dominated the discussion about the philosophical implications of the biology of consciousness. Here again, however, is the paradox that the neuroscience revolution is generating humanistic implications that demand a return to the kind of philosophical discussions long banned from the discourse of reductionistic science. The problem is that the new breed of scientific philosophers are all trained in cognitive behaviorism and Aristotelian and Kantian thought, the very epistemologies that the scientific revolution in consciousness is fast transcending, and if these so-called neurophilosophers know any philosophy at all, it is the analytic philosophers from Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell through Ludwig Wittgenstein to Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Figel, and Willard van Orman Quine, whose overemphasis on the logical ordering of sense data alone may become the approach in science most vulnerable to extinction.

Neurotheology refers specifically to modern attempts to study religious experience using the techniques and theories of the neurosciences, which include neuroimaging of meditative and contemplative states of consciousness. Neurotheology in this sense is an extension of the more recent term neurophilosophy, in which cognitive scientists, such as Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, and Robert Searl, have dominated the discussion about the philosophical implications of the biology of consciousness. Here again, however, is the paradox that the neuroscience revolution is generating humanistic implications that demand a return to the kind of philosophical discussions long banned from the discourse of reductionistic science. The problem is that the new breed of scientific philosophers are all trained in cognitive behaviorism and Aristotelian and Kantian thought, the very epistemologies that the scientific revolution in consciousness is fast transcending, and if these so-called neurophilosophers know any philosophy at all, it is the analytic philosophers from Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell through Ludwig Wittgenstein to Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Figel, and Willard van Orman Quine, whose overemphasis on the logical ordering of sense data alone may become the approach in science most vulnerable to extinction.