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 …
It’s my pleasure to introduce this symposium on Bernard Molyneux’s paper “The Logic of Mind-Body Identification” (in the current issue of Ergo), with commentaries by Liz Irvine (Cardiff), István Aranyosi (Bilkent), and Jonathan Simon (NYU). Molyneux’s paper introduces a new strategy for explaining why proposed identities between the mental and …
As we move from wakefulness into sleep onset and through the different stages of sleep, there are concerted changes in brain activity, the way we process external stimuli from the environment, and in the contents and structure of conscious experience. At the same time, the exact relationship between these changes …
We all dream every night, and most of us feel reasonably certain that we know what it is like to dream. But how well do we really know the phenomenology of dreaming? Can we really be certain that in describing our dreams, we are not merely projecting implicit, pretheoretical assumptions …
We spend roughly one third of our lives asleep, and research tells us that a considerable portion of this time is spent dreaming. Yet, most of us rarely remember our dreams, and even when we do, we would be hard-pressed to describe more than a single dream per night. This …
