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Why the Biggest Unsolved Problem of Neuroscience Can’t Be Solved by Neuroscience Alone
New blog post at Psychology Today. →
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Interview at Wild River Review
Joy Stocke interviews me about my new book, Waking, Dreaming, Being, at Wild River Review. →
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New interview in Tricycle Magazine
“The Embodied Mind,” an interview with me by Linda Heuman, contributing editor at Tricycle. →
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Waking Dreaming Being
Is now listed at Columbia University Press and Amazon. →
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Two new articles
Two new articles are now posted at the Select Articles page: “The Enactive Approach,” written with Ezequiel Di Paolo, forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, and “Own-Body Perception,” written with Alisa Mandrigin, forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, edited by Mohan Matthen. →
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Waking, Dreaming, Being
The entire MS of my new book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: New Light on the Self and Consciousness from Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, is now with Columbia University Press and will be published in the fall 2014. For more information, including the Table of Contents, Prologue, and Introduction, visit my Waking, Dreaming, Being page. →
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Real-time neurofeedback during meditation
New article out in Neuroimage. You can find an advance on-line version at my Select Articles page. →
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Brain in a Vat or Body in a World?
Brainbound versus Enactive Views of Experience. The page proofs for this article are now available. It’s soon to be out in a special issue of Philosophical Topics devoted to embodied cognition. →
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Portuguese Translation of Mind in Life
A Mente Na Vida, The Portuguese translation of Mind in Life, has just been published. →
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SSHRC Insight Grant
I’ve received a 5 year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant for a project called “Attending to Mindfulness.” The grant budget includes funds to support one PhD student for the duration of the project. Here is the Project Summary: After decades of philosophical neglect, attention has emerged as an important topic… →
The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
