Let's get real

… Embrace the Unexplained — The Chronicle Review — The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… it matters a great deal whether we are willing to imagine that consciousness might exist in its own right and may well be more than a function of brain matter or local historical and cultural processes. Even the admission of this possibility would be enough to bring the humanities back to consciousness and humanists back to the academic table as central and valued participants. The humanities would no longer be, as my Rice University colleague Timothy Morton puts it, "candy sprinkles" on the cake of scientism. Quite the contrary: Our texts, our narratives, and our methods of interpretation would function as guiding ideals, as pointers to where anyone interested in the nature of mind might go for answers.

After all, consciousness is the fundamental ground of all that we know or ever will know. It is the ground of all of the sciences, all of the arts, all of the social sciences, all of the humanities, indeed all human knowledge and experience. Moreover, as far as we can tell, this presence is sui generis. It is its own thing. We know of nothing else like it in the universe, and anything we might know later we will know only through this same consciousness. Many want to claim the exact opposite, that consciousness is not its own thing, is reducible to warm, wet tissue and brainhood. But no one has come close to showing how that might work. Probably because it doesn’t.

Pre-cognitive dreams, such as the one Twain had, are commoner than you might think. In Man and Time, J. B. Priestley cites several uncommonly interesting ones.