Rafael Pintos-López

The title of this book is quite clear. It is about Zen Buddhism, but explained for a Western readership. Zen is famously obscure in terms of logic, or any kind of intellectual explanation. This book attempts just that. It explains how Zen operates. It does it with words, but it does not purport to replace Zen meditation practice. It is like an introductory brochure to a practice that may be life changing.

This book proposes that human consciousness is Cartesian dualistic, two-layered affair, that the layers are integrated but discrete, and provides the explanation that human individuals, as part of an altricial species, acquire cognition through an ongoing education and socialisation process that lasts several years. The book also proposes that time does not exist without high consciousness, that it was not a discovery of cognition, but an invention thar provided an answer to causality, long-term memory and imagination. Language and culture have a huge impact on individual and collective consciousness.

The Emergence of Human Consciousness questions the current physicalist approach in neuroscience. According to the author, human consciousness includes two layers: a basic, biological one; and a social one. Any evolutionist approach to human consciousness is doomed to reach a ceiling, as it cannot account for the social layer. The emergence of human consciousness is a metaevolutionary process that takes place every day a child is socialised and taught.

The idea behind the book was that a new approach was needed to solve Chalmers' 'hard problem' of consciousness. The book does not provide a total solution to the problem, but it suggests a new approach that will probably help philosophy, neuroscience and quantum physics in their endeavours. Among other things, the book suggests that human consciousness is a two-tiered system, whereby basic consciousness is shared with all other mammalians, but high consciousness is only human, transmitted culturally, as we are an altricial species and our young require parental and communal education to develop full human consciousness. That, of course, includes language, imagination, adventurousness and time, among other things. The other consequence of this approach is that time becomes just a human device. Time can be measured and is normally used as a variable in scientific research. The book suggests that time should not be included in research as a variable, as it is only a tool, like a number. The only variable that could replace time is change. No other animal species has a sense of time. Only humans have notions such as present, past and future. Time is a human device to help us understand the evolution of our memory and our imagination.

ste es un volumen de cuentos cortos. Algunos de ellos van seguidos de pensamientos, reflexiones e informaci n. Aunque no son autobiogr ficos, los cuentos est n basados en la experiencia personal del autor. Son las historias de un argentino expatriado.

The Myth of Adam & Eve and the endurance of Christianity in the West - A matter of interpretationThis book suggests that: 1) in the Hebrew myth, Adam and Eve were a couple of hominins, pretty much like any of the human ancestors we have discovered lately; 2) the Hebrews had a much more sophisticated, realistic and intuitive idea of evolution than what is believed nowadays, and that explains many points in the Bible that had no explanation until now; in fact, what is stated here is that they were proto-Darwinian; the innovation of the Greek concept of spirit (psyche) introduced by St Paul when he interpreted the Book of Genesis resulted in a new self-perception of the individual (esse est percipi) that changed forever the course of history, because when he misinterpreted or misrepresented the Tanach, he spiritualised and separated humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom. Western cosmovision and advancement grew from that new vision.