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32Response to Commentators on Waking, Dreaming, BeingPhilosophy East and West 66 (3): 982-1000. 2016.Let me begin by thanking my commentators for taking the time to read my book and to write such constructive commentaries. I would also like to thank Christian Coseru for organizing and chairing the panel at the International Society for Buddhist Philosophy at the 2015 meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, at which three of the commentaries were originally presented together with my response. Finally, I am grateful to Philosophy East and West for publishing th…Read more
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188Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2007.The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that th…Read more
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77Neurophenomenology and contemplative experienceIn Philip Clayton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Science and Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 226-235. 2006.Accession Number: ATLA0001712130; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 226-235.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 234-235.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay
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39Neurophenomenology and the Spontaneity of ConsciousnessCanadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (sup1): 133-162. 2003.Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. My reading of the situation is that our inability to come up with an intelligible conception of the relation between mind and body is a sign of the inadequacy of our present concepts, and that some development is needed. Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain.
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65Francisco J. Varela (1946–2001)Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (8): 368. 2001.It is with great sadness that I record the death of Francisco Varela, who passed away at his home in Paris, on May 28, 2001. With his passing, the science of consciousness has lost one of its most brilliant, original, creative, and compas- sionate thinkers
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102Mountains and valleys: Binocular rivalry and the flow of experienceConsciousness and Cognition 16 (3): 623-641. 2007.Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical, and empirical aspects of this research relevant to studying the flow of experience. We then review an e…Read more
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Neural synchrony and the unity of mind: A neurophenomenological perspectiveIn Axel Cleeremans (ed.), The Unity of Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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23Contemplative neuroscience as an approach to volitional consciousnessIn Nancey Murphy, George Ellis, O. ’Connor F. R. & Timothy (eds.), Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will, Springer Verlag. pp. 187--197. 2009.
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52Seeing beyond the modules toward the subject of perceptionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (3): 386-387. 1999.Pylyshyn's model of visual perception leads to problems in understanding the nature of perceptual experience. The cause of the problems is an underlying lack of clarity about the relation between the operation of the subpersonal vision module and visual perception at the level of the subject or person.
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34Précis of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and PhilosophyPhilosophy East and West 66 (3): 927-933. 2016.The central idea of Waking, Dreaming, Being is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity.1 The self isn’t something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm. It is an experiential process that is subject to constant change. We enact a self in the process of awareness, and this self comes and goes depending on how we are aware.When we’re awake and occupied with some manual task, we enact a bodily self geared to our immediate environment. Yet this bodil…Read more
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65Witnessing from Here: Self-Awareness from a Bodily versus Embodied PerspectiveIn Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self, Oxford University Press. 2011.This article argues against the no-self or nonegological account of bodily self-awareness. It proposes an account of consciousness that challenges Miri Albahari's forceful defence of a nonegological view of consciousness, particularly its sharp distinction between subject and self. It contends that the subject of experience is a bodily subject and not merely an embodied one and argues that in order to be a subject of experience even in the minimal sense of witnessing-from-a-perspective, one must…Read more
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442Look again: Phenomenology and mental imagery (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1-2): 137-170. 2007.This paper (1) sketches a phenomenological analysis of visual mental imagery; (2) applies this analysis to the mental imagery debate in cognitive science; (3) briefly sketches a neurophenomenological approach to mental imagery; and (4) compares the results of this discussion with Dennett’s heterophenomenology
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64Asian perspectives: Indian theories of mindIn Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch & Evan Thompson (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press. pp. 89--114. 2007.
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6Emotion Experience (edited book)Imprint Academic. 2005.Emotion experience has failed to date to gain a central place in the study of consciousness. This special issue of the _Journal of Consciousness Studies_ presents the most recent views on the matter, with discussions of several aspects of emotion experience. Contributors from different disciplines address links between feelings, brain, body and world. What happens in the brain and in the body when we have feelings? How do feelings relate to our understanding of the world? The contributors also a…Read more
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510Empathy and consciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 8 (5-7): 1-32. 2001.This article makes five main points. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, under- stood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality. Empathy is the precondi- tion of the science of consciousness. Human empathy
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38Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and PhilosophyCambridge University Press. 2014.A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of the mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined …Read more
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317Brain in a Vat or Body in a World? Brainbound versus Enactive Views of ExperiencePhilosophical Topics 39 (1): 163-180. 2011.We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world. Thus, what the thought experiment actuall…Read more
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86Reply to commentariesJournal of Consciousness Studies 18 (5-6): 5-6. 2011.Let me express my deep thanks to the contributors for taking the time to read my book, Mind in Life, and for writing their thoughtful commentaries, from which I have learned a great deal. Special thanks are due to Tobias Schlicht, whose hard work and dedication made this volume possible. In what follows, I will respond singly to each con-tributor and do my best to address their main points. My replies to the commentators will be longer or shorter depending on the points they raised
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648Are there neural correlates of consciousness?Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (1): 3-28. 2004.In the past decade, the notion of a neural correlate of consciousness (or NCC) has become a focal point for scientific research on consciousness (Metzinger, 2000a). A growing number of investigators believe that the first step toward a science of consciousness is to discover the neural correlates of consciousness. Indeed, Francis Crick has gone so far as to proclaim that ‘we … need to discover the neural correlates of consciousness.… For this task the primate visual system seems especially attra…Read more
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91Novel ColoursPhilosophical Studies 68 (3): 321-349. 1992.Could there be genuinely novel colours — that is, visual qualities having a hue that bears a resemblance relation to red, green, yellow, and blue, yet is neither reddish, nor greenish, nor yellowish, nor blueish?1 And if there could be such colours, what would it be like to see them? How would the colours look? In his article,"Epiphenomenal Qualia,"2 Frank Jackson presents a philosophical thought experiment that raises these questions . Jackson asks us to imagine a perceiver named Fred who is li…Read more
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33Spontaniczność świadomościAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 1 (1). 2010.It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousnes…Read more
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237Neurodynamics of consciousnessIn P.D. Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch & Evan Thompson (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, Cambridge University Press. pp. 731--774. 2007.cal basis of consciousness. We continue by discussing the relation between spatiotem- One of the outstanding problems in the cog- poral patterns of brain activity and con- nitive sciences is to understand how ongo- sciousness, with particular attention to pro- ing conscious experience is related to the cesses in the gamma frequency band. We workings of the brain and nervous system. then adopt a critical perspective and high-
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527The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human ExperienceMIT Press. 1991.The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.
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75This book is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary project of investigating the true nature of color vision.
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502Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experiencePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4): 407-427. 2005.The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the br…Read more
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66Filling-in is for finding outBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (6): 781-796. 1998.The following points are discussed in response to the commentaries: (1) A taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena should rely on both phenomenological and mechanistic criteria. (2) Certain forms of perceptual completion are caused by topographically organized neural processes the view that there must be a pictorial or spatial neural-perceptual isomorphism at the bridge locus – should be rejected. Although more abstract kinds of isomorphism are central to the neural-perceptual mapping, the pe…Read more
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536Representationalism and the phenomenology of mental imagerySynthese 160 (3): 203--213. 2008.This paper sketches a phenomenological analysis of visual mental imagery and uses it to criticize representationalism and the internalist-versus-externalist framework for understanding consciousness. Contrary to internalist views of mental imagery imagery experience is not the experience of a phenomenal mental picture inspected by the mind’s eye, but rather the mental simulation of perceptual experience. Furthermore, there are experiential differences in perceiving and imagining that are not dif…Read more
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224NeurophenomenologyJournal of Consciousness Studies 10 (9-10): 31-52. 2003._sciousness called ‘neurophenomenology’ (Varela 1996) and illustrates it with a_ _recent pilot study (Lutz et al., 2002). At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology_ _pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the_ _neurophysiology of consciousness (Varela 1995; Thompson and Varela 2001;_ _Varela and Thompson 2003). At a methodological level, the neurophenomeno-_ _logical strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about_ _subjective experience as a heurist…Read more
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