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NY Times Sunday Book Review
Reviews Waking, Dreaming, Being. →
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“Expanding Mind” interviews me at Progressive Radio Network
about my book, Waking, Dreaming, Being. →
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How does thinking feel?
In a new article, Kieran Fox, Kalina Christoff, Jessica Andrews-Hanna, and I argue that data recently published in an article by Timothy Wilson and colleagues in Science do not show, contrary to the authors’ interpretation, that being left alone with one’s own thoughts is aversive. →
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Video of my lecture, “Dreamless Sleep and Consciousness”
From the International Symposium for Contemplative Studies, Boston, October 31, 2014. →
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“Dying: What Happens When We Die?”
Chapter 9 of my new book, Waking, Dreaming, Being, is now available to download to Kindle at Amazon: Dying: What Happens When We Die? Update: It is also available at the iTunes store. →
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Buddhism, Pheno-menology, and Cognitive Science: Assessing the Dialogue
Here is a description of the graduate seminar I will be teaching at the UC Berkeley Center for Buddhist Studies during Spring 2014: Buddhist Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Cognitive Science: Assessing the Dialogue. This seminar will be devoted to recent work in cross-cultural philosophy that links Buddhist philosophy with cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and phenomenology.… →
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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… →
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Short Article in EDGE/Winter 2013
EDGE — the University of Toronto Research and Innovation magazine — has published a short piece about me in their Winter 2013 issue on “Brain Explorers.” →
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The Wandering Mind
Upcoming meeting in Zurich, with Jonathan Schooler, hosted by Thomas Metzinger. March 25, 2013. My lecture is titled, “Attending to Mindfulness.” →
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Mind and Life Summer Research Institute 2013
Mind and Life Summer Research Institute 2013. Applications open Jan. 18. →
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.
