VIDEO GAME PLAY AND CONSCIOUSNESS DEVELOPMENT: A TRANSPERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of consciousness to higher states is thought to be a natural process by some contemporary psychologists with a transpersonal orientation. Such ''higher'' states of consciousness can be enhanced with the right cultural amplifier. The most often examined amplifiers are the effects of prayer and meditation. But tools, from early attempts at record keeping with knots in ropes through today's computer mediated communications, also affect cognition and thus ultimately consciousness. In this article the hallmark of electronically mediated interactive environments is examined in terms of its implications for the development of consciousness. That tool is video game play. The connection between various forms of electronically mediated communi- cation, especially video games, and higher states of consciousness (HSC) will be explored in this paper. In this article HSC is viewed globally as the experience, perception, and appreciation of a reality beyond what is commonly attained but which emerges as a result of developmental processes. It is proposed that lengthy exposure to video games, as the most commonly accessed electronically mediated communication endeavoring to create a virtual reality (VR) 1 , may be a cultural amplifier for experiences of HSC. Before this is taken up, we must ask: How do we go from the simple definitions of consciousness available in introductory psychology texts such as ''awareness of external and internal stimuli'' (Matlin, 1995, p. 134), and their focus on the role of attention, to the notion of higher stages of consciousness, which may or may not be mystical? That is, the development of HSC may be marked by the emergence of experiences that transcend the ordinary in what appears to be an almost magical or ''mystical'' sense but they may also develop in subtle ways, but ways that enrich one's life and are clearly healthy and functional (Alexander, Boyer, & Alexander, 1987). 2
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".