Jonathan Shear is Affiliated Associate Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he has taught since 1987. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley, and was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow there, and a Fulbright Scholar in philosophy of science at the London School of Economics. Since the early 1960’s his work has focused on the use of meditation practices and related scientific research to expand our knowledge of human consciousness. He has published and lectured widely in North America, Europe and Asia, and was the founding Managing Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He is author of The Inner Dimension: Philosophy and the Experience of Consciousness, coeditor of The View from Within: First-Person Methodologies, coeditor of Models of the Self, and editor of Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem.
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Jonathan Shear Quotes
In the view of modern science, the universe is fundamentally physical and existed and evolved for billions of years without any consciousness in it at all. Consciousness, on this now commonplace view, is a very recent addition, a byproduct of the complex chemical processes that gave rise to sophisticated biological systems. The question thus arises of how consciousness ever came to be.
