86 papers in the library · 5,894 citations · publishing 1994-2026
The MIT Press eBooks February 3, 2026
In vain we force the living into this or that one of our moulds.All the moulds crack.They are too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them.- Henri-Louis Bergson, 1998 (1911), p. x Binding ForceConsciousness is the inalienable force that binds mind with matter.It can be defined in many ways and expressed in vari ous forms. 1 This book focuses on the form of consciousness...
The MIT Press eBooks February 3, 2026
Our concern in this book has been to understand how the self is constituted in human becoming.We have been looking at the suprapersonal lived space between human bodies as well as at the engagement between human bodies and material objects.I have used some early but diachronic examples of self-bounding and enactive in/dividuation to describe the making of selfconsciousness from a situated...
The MIT Press eBooks February 3, 2026
How Should We Look for the Self?There is a long tradition in philosophy for asking about the nature and metaphysics of the self.David Hume famously observed that "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself . . .I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception."Most would likely agree that the self is not easy to catch in...
The MIT Press eBooks February 3, 2026
Material engagement theory, which forms the conceptual foundation of this book, is rooted in cognitive archaeology and anthropology but relates and draws insights from many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and embodied cognitive sciences.In How Things Shape the Mind, 1 I offer a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies.Here, I pre...
The MIT Press eBooks February 3, 2026
Here is a simple argument about consciousness and self-evidencing: if selfevidencing provides the fundamental explanation of what the brain does, and if brain activity gives rise to consciousness, then self-evidencing also explains how consciousness arises.However, this argument does not imply that self-evidencing immediately explains consciousness.Self-evidencing happens in all self-organizing...
The MIT Press eBooks February 3, 2026
A Selfbound Mode of BecomingAs pointed out in chapter 1, I coin the term selfbound to articulate the mode of becoming constrained by the awareness that experiential occurrences are personal-that is, they are bound to a living body in a self-specifying sense, a sense that matters to the constitution of self-identity.This self-specifying awareness, the product of self-bounding, is a distinctive...
The MIT Press eBooks January 13, 2026 Peter H. Kahn
Some years ago when I was in Japan, I was having dinner with Hiroshi Ishiguro, a leading international roboticist, perhaps most well-known for his android creations.That dinner marked the beginning of what has now become more than a decade of us meeting as friends and as collaborators on research about people's social and moral relationships with robots.For our dinner, Ishiguro had chosen a...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Ema Demšar, Urban Kordeš
Ema Demar: It was a late summer after noon in 2014, and I was about to start my first serious attempt at meditation.I closed my eyes.I inhaled, and exhaled.I opened a nonjudgmental (or so I tried) attention to whatever was there.What did I notice?A colorful kaleidoscope of bodily sensations, brief images, half-finished spoken sentences; a series of hasty shifts in my focus; the feeling of the...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Yochai Ataria
How I Lost All Interest in the Study of Consciousness and SurvivedPrologue: In 2008, when I was still a MA student, I came across an essay by David Chalmers.At the time, I had not heard about either Chal mers or consciousness, and I eagerly rushed to share this mind-blowing revelation with my favorite lecturer, only to hear that this was old news.Still, it felt like a bomb had just been dropped...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Yaron M. Senderowicz
Personal ReflectionsSince my first years as a mature person, the puzzles relating to subjective experience perplexed me.The attempts to describe what subjectivity means and to distinguish it from an objective realm often use the (meta phorical) distinction between an inner sphere and an outer sphere.According to this view, the subjective content of consciousness constitutes an inner sphere that...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Shantena Augusto Sabbadini
But quantum mechanics has nothing to say about the individual result of a measurement.It does not tell us whether in any given instance we will find Schrödinger's cat alive or dead.The outcome in a specific instance is intrinsically unpredictable: it is what Wolfgang Pauli called "an act of creation."This chapter proposes that such acts of creation happen in consciousness.The world unfolds...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Eviatar Shulman
Consciousness has been a key idea in my thinking for a long time; in academia, it became the locus for the investigation and conceptualization of deeper intuitions that I may have cultivated even as a child.I began my studies at the university in the midst of a fiery search for answers to the big questions of life.These did not seem to be addressed by my studies in psy chol ogy, with its...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Or Raphael
Consciousness is mystery.Not a par tic u lar mystery-just mystery.It is a subject of countless scientific debates and theories, widely regarded as one of the greatest unresolved questions in science.In the first, theoretical section of my piece, I draw from my experience with scientific methods and spiritual practices to pre sent the idea that consciousness studies involve multiple...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Georges Dreyfus
ReflectionsI come to the study of consciousness and the self through my training as a Buddhist monk and scholar, who has learned about the mind and the self from Tibetan teachers, the meditations they taught, and the voluminous lit er a ture of this tradition.It was a welcome surprise to realize that the insights that I gained through my studies and practice could be of use in the scientific...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Yuval Noah Harari
In relation to his interest in consciousness, he says, "I believe the question of consciousness is the key to understanding life.The fact that science does not understand consciousness is the greatest lacuna in the scientific worldview.And in the twenty-first century, this lacuna is becoming extremely dangerous.For we are now acquiring the ability to reengineer life.If we indeed learn how to...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Shaun Gallagher
In this chapter I argue that to understand consciousness in relation to social interaction, we need to consider not just brain mechanisms, but also the extensive and enactive pro cesses of bodily engagement in the social environment.In addition, I suggest that the starting point for such an analy sis should not be reflective self-consciousness (see glossary), as if that were simply equivalent...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Idan Segev
Why brain: I was attracted to study the brain because, as a child, I saw around me a lot of emotional suffering.I then thought to myself that, if I could understand the source of such suffering in the brain, I could provide a direct solution to suffering by developing some antisuffering pill or a focal electrical stimulation to relieve the source of pain.Already, during my army service, I...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Kenneth Williford
Our thought or perception is essentially reflexive upon itself; or as it is expressed more happily in Latin, est sui conscia, for I never think without knowing that I think. . . .In addition to this reflection which can be called virtual and which is found in all our perceptions, there is another, more explicit kind by which we examine our perception by another perception, as every one can...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Dominique Lamy, Nitzan Micher
The experimental approach adopted by cognitive psy chol ogy researchers (and to some extent also, by most cognitive neuroscience researchers) when investigating consciousness is to target the transition between unconscious and conscious vision.As a consequence, and somewhat ironically, the study of conscious experience is de facto mostly the study of what conscious experience is not.In this...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Stefan Schmidt
Truths are as fragile as the people who have formulated them.-Andreas Steinhöfel, 2005 Overview Biology, chemistry, and physics are the building blocks of a materialist worldview of consciousness; conversely, consciousness is needed in order to comprehend and investigate these fields.This circularity and the apparent lack of an independent foundation of science are major challenges for...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Oded Maimon, Moshe Klein
ReflectionsWe are working on the theory presented here because of revelations from our direct subjective experience and our capabilities in abstraction.For us, consciousness research confronts the biggest enigma in science today.Many scientific issues are impor tant, but comprehending consciousness will be a significant achievement in our understanding of humanity, the environment, and the...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Stephen Fulder
Exploring Consciousness from the InsideStephen FulderConsciousness arises dependent on sense data and stimulation of the senses.Therefore it is dependent and has no self-existence.-Anguttara Nikaya 41:7 (Bodhi, 2012) Personal ReflectionsI have been interested in spiritual practice and inner exploration for most of my life.I can remember as a child, realizing that, like Mowgli in The Jungle...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Narayanan Srinivasan
measures like accuracy and reaction time and move toward reports about experience that are simple but not necessarily objectively verifiable as accurate.I will discuss studies demonstrating the effect of attention on visual awareness and how meditation practice could influence our perceptual experience.Fi nally, I will discuss the importance of control and prediction and how a hierarchical...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 David Rudrauf
The chapter you are about to read is much about how other minds played a role in shaping my views and theories about consciousness.It only seemed natu ral to me from the outset that the phenomenology of subjective experience should play a pivotal role in a scientific theory of consciousness.But my intuitions found firmer methodological ground in my brief yet meaningful, and retrospectively...
The MIT Press eBooks December 16, 2025 Zohar Maliniak
The conference I attended in Neve Shalom, which addressed the study of consciousness, was especially impor tant to me.It provided me with an opportunity to engage in an enlightening and inspiring meeting with a wide range of individuals and scholars for whom the mystery of human cognition and consciousness is a burning question.This meeting of philosophers, neurobiologists, scholars of culture,...