After decades of philosophical neglect, attention has emerged as an important topic in the philosophy of mind. At the same time, the cognitive neuroscience of attention both presupposes and gives rise to foundational philosophical issues about the nature of attention and its relationship to cognition, emotion, and consciousness. My research project will contribute to this convergent focus on attention in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.

To my knowledge, my research project will be the first philosophical examination of the significance of recent cognitive neuroscience research on attention training through Buddhist mindfulness meditation, as well as the first philosophical study of the relevance of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophical theories of attention for contemporary philosophy of mind.

My working assumptions are (i) that attention actively structures experience; (ii) that the ability to guide and control attention is essential to being a cognitive agent with a subjective perspective on the world; (iii) that voluntary mental attention is a trainable skill; (iv) that mindfulness meditation methods train attention in precisely describable and measurable ways; and (iv) that mindfulness is a mode of skillful embodied cognition that depends directly not just on the brain but also on the rest of the body and the physical, social, and cultural environment.

My research project has five specific objectives: (1) to develop an account of voluntary mental attention as a flexible and trainable skill; (2) to clarify the conceptual and phenomenological relations between attention, consciousness, and agency;  (3) to demonstrate that voluntary mental attention should not be reductively identified with neural processes inside the head, but instead should be understood as a mode of skillful activity of the whole embodied and environmentally embedded agent; (4) to criticize the cognitive neuroscience of mindfulness meditation practices for neglecting the embodied and embedded nature of these practices; and (5) to propose an alternative embodied cognition approach to the cognitive science of mindfulness.

My methodological approach (developed extensively in my earlier work) is to use conceptual and phenomenological analyses of subjective experience to assess cognitive science investigations of human cognition, while using cognitive science models and findings to enrich philosophical analyses. A key new advance (which builds on my earlier work in cross-cultural philosophy of mind) will be to enlarge the domain of phenomenological philosophy of mind to include Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. A further advance will be to show the significance of this cross-cultural approach for the cognitive neuroscience of attention and mindfulness training methods.

This project will serve as an exemplar for cross-cultural philosophy of mind. It will demonstrate the significance of cross-cultural philosophy of mind for foundational issues in cognitive science. It will also be the first philosophical examination of the significance of mindfulness meditation training for understanding the nature of attention and its relation to agency and consciousness.

Monday March 4, 2013, at 4pm.

My position statement:

The scientific method gives us no direct and independent access to consciousness itself–no direct access, because third-person observations are always of the behavioral and physiological expressions of consciousness, not consciousness itself; and no independent access because the scientific method itself presupposes consciousness, so we must unavoidably use consciousness to study consciousness. Full recognition of this situation demands that the neuroscience of consciousness include an ineliminable phenomenological component. Some of the phenomenological resources for such a “neurophenomenology” of consciousness can be found in Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist contemplative methods of training the mind.