Waking, Dreaming, Being
Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, published by Columbia University Press in 2015, extends the enactive framework into the full range of conscious states — from ordinary waking experience through dreaming and deep sleep to the meditative states explored in Buddhist and Hindu contemplative traditions. The book argues that the enactive framework's insistence on the embodied, lived character of consciousness illuminates not only ordinary cognition but also the altered states that have been the subject of contemplative investigation for millennia, and that the integration of contemplative practice with cognitive neuroscience produces a research program in which first-person and third-person methods constrain each other productively.
In the AI Story
The book's central chapters address specific questions about consciousness — the nature of self, the structure of dream experience, the minimal self revealed in deep meditation, the phenomenology of dying — with equal attention to neuroscientific data and contemplative first-person reports. The methodological commitment is neurophenomenological: neither perspective is privileged, and each is used to refine and constrain the other.
The book's relevance to the AI debate is less direct than Mind in Life, but it deepens the enactive framework's claim that consciousness is an embodied, lived process whose variations across states of wakefulness, dreaming, and meditation cannot be captured by computational models. The minimal self that remains in deep meditation — the pure witness consciousness of the Upanishadic tradition — is still an embodied phenomenon, sustained by the living organism's autopoietic activity even when its ordinary discursive structure has been suspended. No computational system has anything analogous.
The book also represents Thompson's most sustained engagement with his contemplative heritage. His engagement with Buddhist philosophy, begun in childhood at the Lindisfarne Association where his father William Irwin Thompson had founded a community of scientific and contemplative inquiry, reaches its most developed form in the book's integration of Western cognitive science with Eastern philosophy of mind.
Origin
Published by Columbia University Press in 2015. The book extends Thompson's earlier work on the enactive approach and draws extensively on Buddhist and Hindu philosophical traditions that Thompson has studied since childhood.
Key Ideas
Consciousness spans states. The enactive framework applies to waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, not only to ordinary cognition.
Contemplative traditions produce data. Disciplined first-person investigation generates findings that constrain neuroscience.
The minimal self is embodied. Even in deep meditation, consciousness is sustained by autopoietic activity.
Dying illuminates living. The book's chapter on death extends the framework into territory computational models cannot address.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Thompson, E. Waking, Dreaming, Being (Columbia University Press, 2015).
- Thompson, E. and Dahl, C. 'Mindfulness and Compassion Training.' In The Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2020).
- Varela, F., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991).