When Does Consciousness Matter? Lessons From the Minimally Conscious State

Placing pure experience of Eastern tradition into the neurophysiology of Western tradition

“…Application of OA methodology to the analysis of EEG registered from patients who are in unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) or in the minimally conscious state (MCS), clearly showed that the whole brain nested OA is either completely disrupted as in the case of UWS or partially preserved as in MCS (Fingelkurts et al 2012a), thus allowing to differentiate patients with fluctuating consciousness from those who are unconscious. Furthermore, it could reliably predict the clinical outcome (recovery of consciousness) of UWS patients in the period of 6 months (Fingelkurts et al 2013b) or even 6 years (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts 2017) after brain injury, thus pointing to the ability of OA methodology to reveal the actual physical potentiality for consciousness (Vukov 2018). This latter feature is essentially important for the ethical debate analyzed in Specker Sullivan paper (Specker Sullivan 2018).…”

“…This is so because for such an UWS patient the prospective potentiality for consciousness is medically possible, given enough time, the proper care, and rehabilitation intervention. After all, any patient who eventually regains consciousness must have had the actual physical potentiality for consciousness all along from the most beginning-that is a general feature of potentiality (Vukov 2018).…”