Evan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy” (Columbia UP, 2014)
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and many other areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His new book, Waking, Dreaming, Being, Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy, is just out from Columbia University Press.
The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousness is undertaken within various Indian religious traditions in which subtle states of consciousness and transitions between such states can be revealed through meditation. In Waking Dreaming Being, Thompson draws on both neuroscience and these meditative traditions to illuminate consciousness and the nature of the self while avoiding both neuro-reductionist and spiritualist agendas. He develops a view of our sense of self as an emergent process of eye-making that is constructed in relation to our environment and the body on which it depends.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Evan Thompson. Are you there? I am there. Hello. Hi. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Thank you very much.
I'm very excited to be talking about your new book, Waking Dreaming Being, which is a fascinating and very synthetic and sympathetically, I'd say, critical look at both neuroscience and meditative practices of Buddhism as regards to the phenomenon of consciousness and the self. And this book, in certain ways, from understanding your own background, you know, combines a bunch of interests that you've had, from what I can tell, at least not just professionally, but also personally from, you know, from your upbringing. So maybe you could, to start us off, you could tell us a little bit about your upbringing and your immersion in both, I guess, Buddhist practices, as well as the cognitive and neuroscientific training that you've had and philosophical training that you've had on top of that.
Yes. So my upbringing, well, I was raised in somewhat of an unusual circumstances, I suppose. I was raised in a community in the 1970s that was also an alternative educational institute that my father, William Irwin Thompson, who's a writer, that he founded. He was a university professor in humanities at York University in the early 1970s and he wasn't really satisfied with – how the universities at that time were approaching learning. And so he quit a full tenured professorship to start an alternative institute that brought together scientists and philosophers and artists and and political activists, and you could say spiritual contemplative teachers from a variety of different traditions, both Western and Asian.
And in true 1970s style, it was run as a community or as a commune, you could say. So that was the context in which I grew up. So I was exposed very early to a lot of different kinds of ideas intellectually and and religiously and spiritually and in a context where all of them were very much up for, I suppose you could say, debate and critical engagement with each other. It was also a context in which the community practiced meditation together from different contemplative backgrounds. So I was raised in a context where meditation was valued and I learned different kinds of meditation when I was very young. It was in that setting that I was first exposed to Buddhist philosophical ideas and Indian philosophical ideas more generally.
And as a result of that, partly, I decided to go – when I went away to college, I went to Amherst College.
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