•  294
    Pure consciousness: scientific exploration of meditation techniques
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (2-3). 1999.
    This paper will explore the integration of elements of traditional Eastern meditative procedures with modern objective scientific methodologies. In contrast to the introspective methods usually relied on in modern Western treatments of consciousness, the Eastern procedures in question have the possible advantage of being the products of centuries of effort to develop systematic first-person exploratory methodologies. But since these methodologies developed outside of the context of our tradition…Read more
  •  162
    Models of the Self (edited book)
    Thorverton UK: Imprint Academic. 1999.
    A comprehensive reader on the problem of the self as seen from the viewpoints of philosophy, developmental psychology, robotics, cognitive neuroscience,...
  •  19
    Models of the self: Editors' introduction
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 4 (5-6): 5-6. 1997.
    There is a long history of inquiry about human nature and the nature of the self. It stretches from the ancient tradition of Socratic self-knowledge in the context of ethical life to contemporary discussions of brain function in cognitive science. At the beginning of the modern era, Descartes was led to the conclusion that self-knowledge provided the single Archimedean point for all knowledge. His thesis that self is a single, simple, continuing, and unproblematically accessible mental substance…Read more
  •  40
    Going outside the system: Gödel and the “I-it” structure of experience
    with Neil Sims
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 25 (5-6): 179-201. 2018.
    It has often been argued that Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem has major implications for our understanding of the human mind. Gödel himself hoped that the results of his theorem, combined with Turning’s work on computers and phenomenological analysis, would establish that the human mind contains an element totally different from a finite combinatorial mechanism. Decades of attempts to establish this by reasoning about Gödel’s theorem and Turing’s work are now widely taken to be unsuccessful…Read more
  •  113
    Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (edited book)
    MIT Press. 1997.
    In this book philosophers, physicists, psychologists, neurophysiologists, computer scientists, and others address this central topic in the growing discipline..
  •  20
    Editors' rejoinder to the debate
    with F. J. Varela
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (2-3): 2-3. 1999.
    Response to the Commentary on ‘The View from Within’ The numerous commentators to this Special Issue have greatly enhanced its focus and usefulness. We thank them all very sincerely for their efforts. Within the restricted space of this rejoinder we cannot respond in detail to all the issues raised. Instead, we shall concentrate first on some fundamental criticisms.The remaining additions and complementary ideas will only be touched on briefly, merely to see them in perspective. We shall start w…Read more
  • Experiential clarification of the problem of self
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 5 (5-6): 673-686. 1998.
    This paper presents the pure consciousness theory of self, derived from Eastern meditation traditions, and uses it to unravel some of the paradoxes of Western philosophical models of the self. The theory is ontologically neutral and compatible with the widest variety of different ontologies. However the theory does, I think, have significant implications for questions of personal identity, emotional maturity and moral values, but exploring these topics here would take us too far afield. The arti…Read more
  •  33
    The view from within: first-person approaches to the study of consciousness (edited book)
    with Francisco J. Varela
    Imprint Academic. 1999.
    The study of conscious experience per se has not kept pace with the dramatic advances in PET, fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies. If anything, the standard approaches to examining the 'view from within' involve little more than cataloguing its readily accessible components. Thus the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science, leading to a widespread scepticism over the possibility of a truly scientific study of conscious experience. Drawing on a wi…Read more
  •  37
    Mystical Experience, Hermeneutics, and Rationality
    International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (4): 391-401. 1990.
  •  9
    Consciousness, a deeper scientific search (edited book)
    with S. P. Mukherjee
    Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. 2006.
  •  227
  •  36
    The hard problem: Closing the empirical gap
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (1): 54-68. 1996.
    It stands to reason that full understanding of what is involved in the ‘hard problem’ will emerge only on the basis of systematic scientific investigation of the subjective phenomena of consciousness, as well as the objective phenomena of matter. Yet the idea of such a systematic scientific investigation of the subjective phenomena of consciousness has largely been absent from discussions of the ‘hard problem’. This is due, apparently, both to philosophical objections to the possibility of such …Read more
  •  123
    This paper proposes a third meditation-category—automatic self-transcending— to extend the dichotomy of focused attention and open monitoring proposed by Lutz. Automaticself-transcending includes techniques designed to transcend their own activity. This contrasts with focused attention, which keeps attention focused on an object; and open monitoring, which keeps attention involved in the monitoring process. Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental task…Read more
  • Peer commentary and responses 307
    with Francisco Varela
    In J. Shear & Francisco J. Varela (eds.), The View From Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness, Imprint Academic. pp. 6--2. 1999.
  •  15
    "The Inner Dimension" examines the philosophical significance of a remarkable family of experiences central to Eastern philosophical and meditation traditions, and reported by creative geniuses in the West from Plato through Einstein. Empirical research on ordinary people practicing traditional Eastern meditation techniques now indicates that these otherwise rarely encountered experiences actually reflect widely accessible universal potentials of ordinary human awareness. The "Inner Dimension" r…Read more
  •  22
    Editor's response
    Metascience 8 (3): 441-443. 1999.
  •  45
    Reply to Josipovic: Duality and non-duality in meditation research
    with Frederick Travis
    Consciousness and Cognition 19 (4): 1122--1123. 2010.
    We agree with Josipovic that a fundamental differentiating feature of meditation techniques is whether they remain within the dualistic subject–object cognitive structure, or they transcend this structure to reveal an underlying level of non-dual awareness. Further discussion is needed to delineate the basic non-dual experience in meditation, where all phenomenal content is absent, from the more advanced experience of non-duality in daily life, where phenomenal content is obviously present as we…Read more
  •  49
    Experiential clarification of the problem of self
    Journal of Consciousness Studies (5-6): 5-6. 2002.
    This paper presents the pure consciousness theory of self, derived from Eastern meditation traditions, and uses it to unravel some of the paradoxes of Western philosophical models of the self. The theory is ontologically neutral and compatible with the widest variety of different ontologies. However the theory does, I think, have significant implications for questions of personal identity, emotional maturity and moral values, but exploring these topics here would take us too far afield. The arti…Read more
  • The Self and Pure Consciousness
    Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 1972.
  •  71
    Mysticism and scientific naturalism
    Sophia 43 (1): 83-99. 2004.
    How, from a scientific standpoint, should we understand mystical experiences? On the one hand such experiences are obviously capable of being studied scientifically. Nevertheless there is a sense in which such experiences often seem strongly opposed to our ordinary scientific views of reality, for they often seem to point to a domain quite outside that examined by naturalistic empirical science. Indeed, this is often precisely what seems to be ‘mystical’ about them. The present essay takes a har…Read more