This chapter offers a clear and careful exploration of what it is to have an intentional state and the relationship of intentionality to subjective experience. Here, the chapter proposes that intrinsic intentionality depends on a system understanding that the symbols it processes have the semantic content that they have. Semantic self-understanding varies in degree, but is hypothesized to be...
This chapter aims to discuss the function of consciousness within a broad framework of cognitive science and phenomenology, and to relate these two approaches to each other. This chapter's treatment of the role of consciousness, while sharing the computational approach, is quite different. It proposes a tentative taxononomy, partly of the typical phenomenology and content of consciousness. The...
This chapter explains that recourse to the brain is a possible solution to the old problem of whether it is conceivable that a person could know another person's private phenomenal experience. It gives the provocative suggestion that mind language is reducible to brain language and that the representation of a brain state will permit the reconstruction of phenomenal experience. This chapter...
This chapter reviews traditional evidence and describes the difficulties of interpeting the results before arguing for a skills-based approach to understanding meditation. The chapter separates out what it states are the three principal skills involved in meditation practice and urges that we focus on these rather than on the generic notion of meditation. Using this strategy the chapter shows...
This chapter argues that efforts to ascertain the effects of meditation on well-being and health are usefully viewed as falling within the larger domain of psychotherapy research. This perspective on meditation studies offers two main advantages. Firstly, methodological advances in psychotherapy research carry enormous potential for the improvement of meditation research. Secondly, it opens up...