Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. Knowledge is relative to time and place, never absolute across time and space (Patton, 2002) Contents CONTENTS CONTENTS ABSTRACT LIST OF PAPERS

Recently, a welcome trend has emerged - in addition to the traditional studies on contents and states of consciousness, levels of consciousness have become a matter of research. However, there are some conceptual and methodological difficulties with this research - the labels used for empirical measurement of levels are ambiguous and underspecified while the research on neural correlates of con...

Simulation with integrated parameter optimization of a given model structure is a well-established technique today. However, with increasing system complexity and flexibility the number of possible structure variants increases. Therefore the potential benefit of automatic model structure optimization becomes significant. During optimization, the introduced framework supports automatic parameter...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. The problem in context — some of the man-made environmental problems with potentially catastrophic consequences for life on earth 3. How did we get here? Evolution of human attitude to nature and the natural environment 3.1.