WORK
Waking, Dreaming, Being
Thompson's 2015 Columbia University Press book — the extension of the enactive framework into the domains of sleep, dreaming, meditation, and death, grounded in sustained engagement with Buddhist and Hindu philosophical traditions.
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 You On AI Field Guide
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