Adam Atkin

Adam Atkin
Residence	Briarcliff Manor, NY, United States
Nationality	USA

Adam Atkin is an American researcher and author based in Briarcliff Manor, New York, known for his theoretical work on the nature of consciousness. He is the author of Does All Begin with Consciousness? (Some theoretical speculations) (2007) and of the earlier journal article "On consciousness: what is the role of emergence?" (1992), in which he develops a "continuous creation" account of conscious experience.

Biography

Atkin is a United States national and resides in Briarcliff Manor, in Westchester County, New York. He is listed among the scientists compiled in Jean de Climont's Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists, a directory of researchers who advance alternative theories or criticism of generally accepted scientific positions.

Work

Atkin's published work addresses the problem of consciousness from a monist standpoint. In his 1992 paper in Medical Hypotheses, he asked whether consciousness might be understood as "the ongoing active creation of information (of meaning)", arguing that the concept of emergence plays an essentially different role in this hypothesis than in previously proposed theories of consciousness.

He developed this line of thought at book length in Does All Begin with Consciousness? (2007), a collection of essays elaborating a "continuous creation" (CC) metatheory of consciousness. The book discusses the implications of a totally holarchic, open-ended substructure of the world, and proposes that what re-organizes itself in conscious activity is the organism's dynamic, predictive internal model of itself-in-its-world. Atkin points toward observables that are not object-like and toward kinds of change that are non-mechanical, leading to a treatment of consciousness as a kind of meta-change identified with creation itself. He also examines why such a continuous-creation account has generally not seemed self-evident.

Books

• Does All Begin with Consciousness? (Some theoretical speculations), iUniverse, 2007. ISBN 978-0-595-41529-8.

Selected publications

• Atkin, A. (1992). "On consciousness: what is the role of emergence?" Medical Hypotheses, 38(4), 311–314. doi:10.1016/0306-9877(92)90023-6. PMID 1491630.

External links

• "On consciousness: what is the role of emergence?" at PubMed
• Does All Begin with Consciousness? at Open Library