Abstract

The author offers a personal reflection on the first issue as well as following issues of "Journal of Consciousness Studies". The first issue included a short paper by John Beloff on the subject of conscious machines. Beloff claimed that materialist scientists and philosophers refuse to accept the reality of the paranormal, not for lack of evidence but because it upsets the physicalist applecart. The main concern was to achieve dialogue about the many controversies in the field of consciousness studies. The underlying problem was to find a way of including psi papers in the journal without appearing to accept uncritically the claims for paranormal or anomalous phenomena that such submissions regularly contained. The second and third issue of the journal carried a two-part paper titled 'Consciousness as an Engineering Issue' by Donald Michie. JCS is a multidisciplinary journal, with readers in neurobiology, physics, psychology, philosophy, and other fields, to give the readers more familiarity with both the findings of parapsychology and skeptical arguments about conscious machines.