I want to pick up a thread from my second post, where I wrote that mindfulness practices should be understood as skillful ways of enacting certain kinds of embodied states and behaviors in the world, not as inner observation of an observer-independent mental stream. This point is especially important today, …
In The Embodied Mind, we presented the idea of cognition as enaction as an alternative to the view of cognition as representation. By “representation” we meant a structure inside the cognitive system that has meaning by virtue of its corresponding to objects, properties, or states of affairs in the outside …
At the end of my first post, I said that when I reread The Embodied Mind now, I can’t help but see it as limited by several shortcomings, ones that have become increasingly apparent over the years and that need to be left behind in order to advance the book’s …
Thanks to John Schwenkler and The Brains Blog for giving me this space to write about the new, revised edition of my book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, co-authored with neuroscientist Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) and psychologist Eleanor Rosch. The MIT Press first published the book in …
Why isn’t a lucid dream just a dream within a dream? Suppose I’m having a flying dream and I think, “I must be dreaming.” I’m in a dream state, so why I am not just dreaming that I’m dreaming? To put the question another way, if there’s a difference between …
In 1890 William James introduced the metaphor of the “stream of consciousness” into Western psychology: “Consciousness… is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, …
Thanks to John Schwenkler and The Brains Blog for giving me this opportunity to tell you about my work. In this first post I’d like to describe the themes and ideas of my most recent book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. In later posts …
