The Embodied Mind, revised edition: Cognitive Science and Human Experience

The Embodied Mind

Cognitive Science and Human Experience

revised edition

Francisco J. Varela

Evan Thompson

Eleanor Rosch

new foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn

new introductions by Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 1991, 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Varela, Francisco J., 1946–2001, author. | Thompson, Evan, author. | Rosch, Eleanor, author.

Title: The embodied mind : cognitive science and human experience / Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch ; foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Description: Revised Edition. | Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016016506 | ISBN 9780262529365 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262335485

Subjects: LCSH: Cognition. | Cognitive science. | Experiential learning. | Buddhist meditations.

Classification: LCC BF311 .V26 2016 | DDC 153–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016506

ePub Version 1.0

d_r0

Those who believe in substantiality are like cows;

those who believe in emptiness are worse.

Saraha (ca. ninth century CE)

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Foreword to the Revised Edition

Introduction to the Revised Edition

Introduction to the Revised Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I The Departing Ground

1 A Fundamental Circularity: In the Mind of the Reflective Scientist

2 What Do We Mean Human Experience?

II Varieties of Cognitivism

3 Symbols: The Cognitivist Hypothesis

4 The I of the Storm

III Varieties of Emergence

5 Emergent Properties and Connectionism

6 Selfless Minds

IV Steps to a Middle Way

7 The Cartesian Anxiety

8 Enaction: Embodied Cognition

9 Evolutionary Path Making and Natural Drift

V Worlds without Ground

10 The Middle Way

11 Laying Down a Path in Walking

Appendix A: Meditation Terminology

Appendix B: Categories of Experiential Events Used in Mindfulness/Awareness

Appendix C: Works on Buddhism and Mindfulness/Awareness

References

Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 A conceptual chart of the cognitive sciences today in the form of a polar map, with the contributing disciplines in the angular dimensions and different approaches in the radial axis.

Figure 1.2 Interdependence or mutual specification of structure and behavior/experience.

Figure 1.3 Interdependency of scientific description and our own cognitive structure.

Figure 1.4 Interdependency of reflection and the background of biological, social, and cultural beliefs and practices.

Figure 1.5 Interdependency of the background and embodiment.

Figure 4.1 The momentariness of experience.

Figure 4.3 The grasping toward an ego-self as occurring within a given moment of experience.

Figure 4.2 Postulation of a transcendental self as a ground for the momentariness of experience.

Figure 4.4 Experimental setup to investigate the natural parsing of perceptual events. See text for description. From Varela et al., Perceptual framing and cortical alpha rhythm.

Figure 4.5 Results of experiments revealing temporal parsing of perceptual events around 100–150 msec. See text for more details.

Figure 4.6 (a) Montage of 15 electrodes over a subject’s head to extract event related potentials when confronted with a simple visuo-motor task. (b) One example of such ERP from the parietal derivation, showing a sequence of electrical events over 0.5 seconds, and differing between the two tasks only in the later 300–500 msec portion. (c) The overall electrical pattern moves and changes over this temporal frame like a shadow of thought. Here solid lines indicate strong correlation with the electrode encircled in the move task. High correlation in the no-move task displays a different pattern (not shown). From Gevins et al., Shadows of thought.

Figure 5.1 Constructing a simple cellular automaton.

Figure 5.2 Emergent cooperative patterns (or attractors) in cellular automata.

Figure 5.3 Connections in the visual pathway of mammals at the thalamic level.

Figure 5.4 The ART model for visual processing through attentional-orienting subsystems. See text for more details. From Carpenter and Grossberg, A massively parallel architecture for a self-organizing neural pattern recognition machine.

Figure 6.1 Codependent arising as the Wheel of Life.

Figure 8.1 Cellular automata Bittorio in a random soup of 1s and 0s.

Figure 8.2 Bittorio’s life history showing changes in this history depending on the perturbations it encounters.

Figure 8.3 A Bittorio of rule 10010000, choosing only odd sequences of perturbations.

Figure 8.4 A Bittorio responsive to a sequence of double perturbations.

Figure 8.5 Parallel streams in the visual pathway. From DeYoe and Van Essen, Concurrent processing streams in monkey visual cortex.

Figure 8.6 Tetrachromatic vs. trichromatic mechanisms are illustrated here on the basis of the different retinal pigments present in various animals. From Neumeyer, Das Farbensehen des Goldfisches.

Figure 9.1 Segmentation in the embryo of the fruit fly Drosophila.

Figure 9.2 Behavior-based decomposition. From Brooks, Achieving artificial intelligence through building robots.

Figure 9.3 Finite state machines are wired together into layers of control. Each layer is built on top of existing layers. Lower levels never rely on the existence of higher-level layers. From Brooks, Intelligence without representation.

Foreword to the Revised Edition

Jon Kabat-Zinn

In the annals recording the remarkable and improbable confluence of dharma, philosophy, and science in this era, if such are ever written, The Embodied Mind will be found to have played a seminal and historic role.

I was elated and, in many ways, awed when I first discovered it shortly after it was published by the MIT Press in 1991. Not that I understood it all, or even most of it, since I am neither a cognitive scientist nor a philosopher by training. But I nonetheless was able to recognize its breadth and depth, the rigor, edginess, and bravery of its scholarly lines of argument, well beyond the thought lines of academic cognitive science, and sensed that its publication by the MIT Press was a landmark and momentous signature of something new and profound emerging at the interface of science and dharma.

What I did understand of the book at the time (which over the years I wound up reading, consulting, and highlighting on multiple occasions), I found very much in alignment with my own thinking from early on in my scientific career as a molecular biologist pondering questions such as what makes life life and how consciousness arises from cells. It was also germane to my work, beginning in 1979, offering relatively intensive training in mindfulness meditation and mindful hatha yoga to medical patients with a wide range of diagnoses and chronic conditions and documenting what ensued in their lives and health from such an engagement. In those early days, I found myself at times somewhat tongue-in-cheek referring to this approach—that we later came to call MBSR, for mindfulness-based stress reduction—as Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism, since mindfulness had been explicitly and authoritatively characterized as the heart of Buddhist meditation.¹ MBSR was meant from the start to be a clinical program orthogonal to conventional narratives of health and well-being, a laboratory for a more experiential and participatory medicine, a vehicle for self-education, healing, and transformation rather than a new therapy. It was conceived as a public health intervention and as a skillful means for demonstrating the liberative potential of mindfulness practice in regard to conventional views of self and the world and their attendant, often imprisoning narratives, which we all experience to one degree or another. Without that underlying, if mostly implicit element, MBSR would not have been either mindfulness-based nor a vehicle for dharma and, therefore, to my mind, of little value from the perspective of healing, transformation, or liberation.²

I remember feeling confirmed and uplifted by the centrality the authors accorded to mindfulness and mindful awareness in their wholly radical yet compelling, rigorous, and challenging attempts to bring together the fields of cognitive science, phenomenology, and dharma to examine the larger connections between mind, body, and experience. This feeling was amplified by the fact that the analysis and arguments were coming from not one but three authors, who seemed to be speaking with one voice from an unusually deep collaboration, and who were obviously also speaking from their own direct, first-person³ experience of mindfulness meditation practice, in addition to being serious scientist-researchers, philosophers, and scholars with grounding in the worlds of cognitive science and phenomenology, as well as in the contemplative and philosophical traditions within Buddhism. So it felt that they were themselves embodying in their collaboration what they were putting forth, a new way of, in their words, laying down a path in walking. This impression is only strengthened now by the correctives the authors have added in their introductions to this edition to clarify a deeper understanding of mindfulness grounded in lived experience and, in particular, in relationality itself and in what they term enaction. These correctives are really evolving refinements indicative of ongoing learning and growing, and are based on continuing investigation, reflection, inquiry, dialogue among colleagues, and actual embodied and enacted cultivation/practice of mindfulness. They are themselves vital signs of health, if you will, indicators of the vitality of the evolutionary arc of thinking and praxis at the cutting edge where cognitive science and the meditative disciplines converge and radically challenge each other’s models and understanding. Stasis at this interface would be tantamount to attachment to and self-identification with unexamined assumptions and particular views, habits of mind that are themselves root causes of so much ignorance and suffering according to the wisdom traditions that articulated so precisely and rigorously many of the lines of inquiry pursued by the authors in the original text. So such correctives are very welcome signs of a natural generativity, learning, and humility at play here—just what one hopes for in science, in meditative practice, and in life.

At the time of the first edition and for many years afterwards, the MIT Press was headed up by the late Frank Urbanowski, a practitioner and student of Buddhist meditation himself, and a friend. Frank knew exactly what he was doing by publishing The Embodied Mind. It became the first and among the most profound and transformative of a whole family of books on cognitive science and the mind that he acquired. It was a cardinal example of what Frank termed focused disciplinary specialization, a strategy that continues to be a signature feature of the MIT Press’s publishing approach to this day and that is responsible in many ways for its ongoing success. The reissuing of The Embodied Mind now, in this new edition, after almost twenty-five years, with new introductions by the surviving authors and with the original text unchanged, is evidence that the book’s analyses, arguments, and impact have only grown in importance and relevance over the intervening decades. Indeed, the world has become so much more receptive to mindfulness that this book’s republication heralds a new era in our deep collective investigation, appreciation, and possible understanding of some up-to-now fairly intractable domains: the nature of thought and emotion, the nature of what we call mind and its non-separation from body, and the nature of what we call self and its non-separation from others and from the surrounding embracing world out of which life and mind emerge.⁴ And let’s include as well the nature of sentience and of experience itself, what the authors now refer to as first-person experience, so much less biased and invalidating a term than its forerunner, subjective experience. Their expounding on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived body alone is a major and ongoing contribution to this inquiry.⁵

I started graduate school at MIT in molecular biology in 1964, wanting naively and romantically to investigate the fundamental nature of life and how it relates to self and to mind. I worked on bacteria, bacteriophage, and colicins, hoping that the experience would serve as a good foundation (it did) for ultimately investigating the human mind from both the outside (the third-person perspective) and the inside (the first-person perspective). Bacteria, of course, are single-celled organisms, with an inside that is alive and a cell membrane keeping the inside intact, the outside out, and facilitating a dynamical exchange of energy and matter that keeps the inside conditions just right for life to perpetuate itself. Bacteriophage (viruses that infect bacteria with their DNA or RNA) and colicins (proteins that kill certain bacterial cells from the outside, and that are encoded by plasmids within the DNA of the source bacterium) are not alive, but they both use the life of the cell to replicate more of themselves, using different strategies. Fundamental molecular and dynamical distinctions between inside and outside, life and non-life, lie at the heart of one of Francisco Varela’s many interests and contributions, namely the phenomenon of autopoiesis that, together with Humberto Maturana, he posited as the original emergence of rudimentary cognition in life. Evan Thompson wrote a whole book on the subject, tellingly entitled Mind in Life.⁶ But the subject implicitly and explicitly anchors a great deal of The Embodied Mind and its revolutionary orientation toward embodiment and knowing—what the authors put forth, following the terminology of the Buddha, as a middle way.

One might say that we are moving toward an intimate yet universal, non-reductionist, non-dual understanding of the phenomenal world and our place in it. This book was and is a major stepping-stone along that trajectory. Such an understanding cannot ignore the unique particulars of diverse cultures, viewpoints, meditative traditions, and their ethical underpinnings and aspirations, to say nothing of the unexplained but reliably documented mysteries that Eleanor Rosch points to in her introduction. As she says, the book is about something real (X): in essence, another mode of knowing not based on an observer and observed (X). What could be more real, more challenging, and more potentially liberating, transformative, and healing than that? She also cogently points out a range of critical issues that need precise clarification and understanding when it comes to determining what people are actually practicing or being taught to practice (very different things in all likelihood) within various curricula claiming to be mindfulness-based, as well as in programs based on other consciousness disciplines. The complexities abound. This is both extremely healthy and, at the same time, a conundrum for scientific investigation, demanding new levels of precision both in the descriptions of what is being taught and in first person accounts of what is being attempted and experienced, moment by moment.⁷ Francisco Varela would have had a field day with the vast opportunities presented to us in this unique era of the confluence of cognitive science, phenomenology, and dharma that he contributed hugely to bringing about. But his vision, his insights, and his voice are enduring and timeless, intimately permeating this volume and residing in the hearts and perspectives of his coauthors, as well as in his friends and former students and colleagues around the world.

May this new edition touch the minds and hearts and imagination of many, far and wide, in many different disciplines, and contribute to the profound transformation of human awareness (X) that was its original aspiration and remains so, appropriately amplified, to this day. That profound transformation and the accompanying learning to inhabit the spaciousness and boundlessness of awareness itself as the core of our embodied being, and then taking wise action for the benefit of others and ourselves from that vantage point when called for, is more sorely needed now on this planet than ever before.

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

October, 2015

Notes

1 Thera Nyanaponika, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (New York: Samuel Wiser, 1962).

2 J. Kabat-Zinn, Some reflections on the origins of MBSR, skillful means, and the trouble with maps, in Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on Its Meaning, Origins, and Applications, ed. J. Mark G. Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 281–306.

3 See Francisco J. Varela and Jonathan Shear, eds., The View from Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 1999).

4 See, for example, David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1996).

5 See S. Kay Tombs, The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1992).

6 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2007).

7 K. A. Garrison, D. Scheinost, P. D. Worhunsky, et al., Real-time fMRI links subjective experience with brain activity during focused attention, NeuroImage 81 (2013): 110–118.

Introduction to the Revised Edition

Evan Thompson

Almost thirty years ago, in the summer of 1986 in Paris, Francisco Varela and I began writing what would eventually become this book. I was a first-year Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Toronto and Varela had just moved to the Ecole Polytechnique and the Institut des Neurosciences. We had met about ten years earlier in the summer of 1977 when he came to a conference at the Lindisfarne Association, an educational institute and contemplative community founded by my father, William Irwin Thompson. My father and Gregory Bateson, who was Lindisfarne’s scholar in residence that summer, led the conference, called Mind and Nature.¹ Varela in turn was a Lindisfarne scholar in residence in 1978. Living together at Lindisfarne in Southampton, New York, and Manhattan, he became a member of our family—a combination of uncle and older brother to me, as well as my intellectual mentor. That relationship was the context in which we worked together on The Embodied Mind in Paris from 1986 to 1989.

Varela had moved to Paris from Chile by way of the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt (where he had collaborated with neuroscientist Wolf Singer for a year)² in order to set up his laboratory investigating the neurophysiology of vision. I had graduated from Amherst College, where I majored in Asian Studies and studied Buddhist philosophy. I planned to write my philosophy dissertation in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. My first published paper—a revision of my undergraduate thesis on Martin Heidegger and the Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji—had just been published in the journal Philosophy East and West.³ Varela had read the paper (I still have the typewritten letter he sent me from the Max Planck Institute with his comments on an early draft) and he encouraged me to apply to a German philosophy foundation for research support. A grant from the foundation—the Stiftung Zur Förderung der Philosophie—supported my stay in Paris in the summer of 1986. That summer Varela also suggested that I write my dissertation on theories of perception, using color vision, and specifically the investigation of color vision in different animal species, as my focus. Comparative color vision was the main focus of Varela’s experimental work at the time, so I learned color vision science and wrote my dissertation in his lab while we worked together on this book.⁴

Eleanor Rosch joined us in 1989. I had moved to Berkeley, where I was a visiting postdoctoral scholar in philosophy, and where Rosch was a professor of psychology. Varela and Rosch had also been friends for many years. The three of us finished the book in 1989–1990.

By the end of our first summer working together in 1989, Varela and I had a first draft of the core chapters and a working title—Worlds Without Ground, which became the title of part V—suggested by my father. (We changed the title to The Embodied Mind in 1990.) The title came from one of our guiding ideas, the philosophical idea of groundlessness. In Buddhist philosophy, groundlessness means that phenomena lack any inherent and independent being; they are said to be empty of own being. In Western philosophy, groundlessness means that knowledge and meaning lack any absolute foundation. Biology and cognitive science were arriving at the same idea—that human cognition is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a separate mind or self, but instead the bringing forth or enacting of a dependent world of relevance in and through embodied action. Cognition as the enaction of a world means that cognition has no ground or foundation beyond its own history, which amounts to a kind of groundless ground. At the same time, the discovery of groundlessness places us in an existential quandary because we habitually experience things as if they did have an absolute ground, either in what we take to be the outside world or in what we take to be our self. Is this discrepancy between scientific knowledge and lived experience inevitable and insurmountable? Or are cognitive science and human experience somehow reconcilable? Is it possible for cognitive science and human experience to reshape each other in a transformative way beyond our scientific and habitual, experiential reifications of a separate self and an independent world? These questions were the ones that motivated and inspired us when we set out to write this book.

Many things have changed in the intervening years, in ways that make this book more immediately accessible than when it was first published. The embodied cognition approach is now central to cognitive science.⁵ Whereas the dominant model of the brain in early cognitive science was that of a stimulus-driven, sequential processing computer, it is now widely recognized that brain activity is largely self-organizing, nonlinear, rhythmic, parallel, and distributed.⁶ The idea that there is a deep continuity in the principles of self-organization from the simplest living things to more complex cognitive beings—an idea central to Varela’s earlier work with neurobiologist Humberto Maturana⁷—is now a mainstay of theoretical biology and is receiving increasing attention in neuroscience.⁸ Subjective experience and consciousness, once taboo subjects for cognitive science, are now important research topics, especially in cognitive neuroscience.⁹ Phenomenology now plays an active role in the philosophy of mind and experimental cognitive science.¹⁰ Meditation and mindfulness practices are increasingly used in clinical contexts and are a growing subject of investigation in behavioral psychology and cognitive neuroscience.¹¹ And Buddhist philosophy is increasingly recognized as an important interlocutor in contemporary philosophy.¹²

Nevertheless, the motivating questions of this book have only become more pointed. Consider the frequent pronouncements made in the name of neuroscience that the self is nothing but an illusion created by the brain’s workings, that the world we experience is really a neural simulation, or that consciousness is nothing but a brain process. Our personal experience, however, presents things differently. We feel as if there is a real self that is the subject of our consciousness and that is in direct contact with an independent, real world. Although we may dispute the philosophical assumptions on which such neuroscientific pronouncements rest, such disputation by itself does nothing to change our lived experience. Hence the quandary: either accept what science seems to be telling us and deny our experience—thereby forgetting that lived experience is the source of science, and that science can never ultimately step outside it—or hold fast to our experience and deny science—thereby forgetting that experience itself constantly seeks to enlarge its own horizons through scientific investigation. Our present culture is still caught up in the constant oscillation between these two tendencies.

As this book describes, nihilism is the viewpoint that inevitably arises in this predicament. I use the term nihilism in Nietzsche’s sense, which Nishitani Keiji elaborated in relation to modern science and Buddhism in his monumental work Religion and Nothingness (see chapter 11).¹³ The nihilist sees through the illusion of a real, independent self that would grasp a real, independent world, but he cannot find another way to be or live without the illusion. More generally, the nihilist sees that there is no absolute ground of meaning—for example, that meaning cannot be grounded on a transcendent God or a real, inner self—but he cannot find another way to be or live without the desire for such a ground. Eventually the nihilist mistakenly (and incoherently) concludes that even meaning is an illusion and that everything is really meaningless.

Our overriding aim in writing this book was to seek a way out of this impasse by charting a path for the transformation of both everyday human experience and the philosophy and practice of cognitive science.

Our approach was to create a circulation between cognitive science and human experience. Cognitive science tells us that the processes that bring about our experience of the world, including our sense of self, are dynamical, distributed in time and space, and extend across the complex couplings of the brain, the rest of the body, and the environment. Although it may seem as if there is a single, abiding self that functions as the controller of the mind, cognitive science indicates that what we call the mind is a collection of constantly changing, emergent processes that arise within a complex system comprising the brain, the rest of the body, and the physical and social environment, and in which we find no single, abiding, and controlling self. How are we to make sense of these discoveries in relation to our personal experience?

However we may choose to answer this question, we cannot begin to address it without relying on some kind of phenomenology, that is, on some kind of descriptive account of our experience in the everyday world. But where are we to find this phenomenology? One place to look is the Western philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and carried forward by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although we relied on this tradition, especially its insights into groundlessness, we also argued that it had gotten bogged down in abstract, theoretical reflection and had lost touch with its original inspiration to examine lived experience in a rigorous way. (I no longer accept this view of Western phenomenology, as I discuss below.) For this reason, we turned to Buddhist philosophy and psychology, which, we believed, were based on scrupulously attending to experience through mindfulness meditation (but see below). We focused on two, interrelated Buddhist ideas. One idea was that of not-self or no-self—that the sense of an abiding, controlling self is a construct arising from certain deep-seated cognitive and emotional tendencies to impute permanence and singleness to what is impermanent and multiple. The other idea was that of dependent origination—that all phenomena arise dependent on causes and conditions, and therefore all phenomena lack substantial being. We argued that these ideas could help to make sense of our lived experience in the everyday world in relation to the findings of cognitive science, while also correcting the tendency within cognitive science to dismiss our experience outright as an epiphenomenal illusion.

In this way, we juxtaposed three traditions—cognitive science, Western phenomenology, and Buddhism—and we used Buddhist philosophy and psychology to enrich phenomenology in ways that could also advance cognitive science. To use a term of art from hermeneutical philosophy, our aim was to fuse the horizons of cognitive science, phenomenology, and Buddhism in a new and larger understanding.¹⁴ On the one hand, we aimed to enlarge the horizon of cognitive science to include lived, human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience—specifically, the possibility of our not being held hostage to the reification of an abiding self, but without our falling into the nihilistic denial of the everyday self, a nihilism to which cognitive science remains especially prone. On the other hand, we aimed to enlarge the horizon of human experience to include the insights into cognition, the body, and the self from cognitive science. Buddhist philosophy and the phenomenological importance of mindfulness meditation, together with the newly emerging embodied cognition approach in cognitive science, were the new critical resources we brought to this effort. In summary, our aim was to forge a mutually enlightening and transformative relationship between cognitive science and human experience via a pragmatic and open-ended phenomenology of embodiment.

Three decades later, I see this vision and effort to create a new kind of relationship between cognitive science and human experience as the book’s original and lasting contribution. It makes the book about something real, to borrow the opening words of Eleanor Rosch’s introduction, while also making the book not fit easily into any of the usual academic disciplines (X). It is also responsible, I believe, for the book’s lasting influence in the study of embodied cognition—not just in cognitive science, but also in the arts and the humanities, as well as in somatics and the bodywork disciplines.

At the same time, when I reread the book now I cannot help but see it as limited by several shortcomings, ones that have become increasingly apparent to me over the years and that we need to leave behind in order to advance the vision and project of this book. Specifically, I no longer accept three of the rhetorical and argumentative strategies on which we relied.

The first strategy is our portrayal of Western phenomenology, in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, as a failed or broken down philosophical project (see chapter 2). On the contrary, Western phenomenology remains a vital and important movement of continuing relevance to philosophy and cognitive science, as well as to practical disciplines of human transformation. My book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind argues this point at length and includes an appendix specifically devoted to correcting and explaining the reasons for our mischaracterization of Husserl in The Embodied Mind.¹⁵ Other philosophers, notably Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, have shown the importance of phenomenology for cognitive science.¹⁶ Many important phenomenological works have appeared in the last two decades, making phenomenology a rich and active area of contemporary thought.¹⁷ These works include not just phenomenological philosophy, but also phenomenology as a way of doing qualitative research in tandem with cognitive science.¹⁸ Varela, in the last years of his life before he died in 2001, contributed to this revitalization of phenomenology, specifically in his contributions to the naturalizing phenomenology movement, his helping to found the new journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and especially in his scientific research program of neurophenomenology, which uses Western phenomenology as well as mindfulness practices in the investigation of the large-scale brain dynamics related to conscious experience.¹⁹ Neurophenomenology provides the framework for my most recent book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, which revisits many of the ideas and topics of The Embodied Mind.²⁰

The second strategy is our depiction of Buddhist philosophy, specifically the Indian Buddhist Abhidharma school and the writings of the Madhyamaka (middle way) philosopher Nāgārjuna, as based on meditation or as deriving from meditative experience. I now see this idea as being simplistic and inaccurate. As Buddhist scholars have discussed, the formation and evolution of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy were shaped by many factors, such as doctrinal constraints, scholasticism, and the pressing need to respond to non-Buddhist philosophers.²¹ For these reasons (among others), we cannot suppose that Indo-Tibetan philosophical ideas were derived directly from meditation. Indeed, it is equally possible that theoretical ideas, such as the momentariness of mental processes (see chapters 4–6), shaped certain kinds of meditative experience. The extent to which Buddhist philosophical ideas either shaped or were shaped by meditative experience remains an open and interesting question in the field of Buddhist studies.

In any case, classical Indian Buddhist philosophy was certainly not based on the kind of Buddhist modernist style of meditation that we call mindfulness/awareness. Buddhist modernism is a contemporary, transnational form of Buddhism that cuts across Asian and Western cultural and geographical contexts.²² One of its central elements is a style of mindfulness meditation practice that derives largely from the modern Theravada Buddhist meditation revival that occurred in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²³ The mindfulness meditation methods promoted by this movement influenced modern Asian Buddhist reformers and teachers, especially in the West, as well as Western teachers who studied in Asia and returned to teach in the West. Virtually all of the contemporary meditation instruction texts we list in appendix C and on which we relied in describing mindfulness meditation can be described as Buddhist modernist works. My point in calling attention to this fact is not at all to suggest that Buddhist modernism is somehow a less authentic form of Buddhism; on the contrary, such appeals to authenticity are unsustainable, for Buddhism is and always has been a constantly evolving tradition. Rather, it is to alert the reader to the fact that our assumption that Buddhist philosophy derives from meditation is a typically Buddhist modernist claim and one that does not do justice to the complex historical and interpretative issues that arise in trying to relate mindfulness meditation practices (especially in their Buddhist modernist form) to the Abhidharma and Madhyamaka philosophies.

As a philosopher, I also feel duty bound to declare that Buddhist philosophy is every bit as abstract, theoretical, and technical as Western philosophy, so the idea that Buddhist philosophy is somehow closer to direct experience and thereby more immediately phenomenological—as we state at certain points in the text—is misguided. Moreover, being able to be abstract, theoretical, and technical is a strength of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and also of the Indian and Tibetan philosophical traditions overall, not a weakness.²⁴

The third strategy is our tendency sometimes to depict mindful awareness or mindfulness as a special kind of inner observation of a mental stream whose phenomenal character is supposed to be somehow independent of such observation. This tendency is evident when we argue that mindful awareness reveals consciousness to really be discontinuous and gappy (rather than just appearing to be so in certain contexts and under certain conditions) (see chapter 4). Hubert Dreyfus, in his review of The Embodied Mind, rightly objected to this conception of phenomenology as inward observation.²⁵ As he pointed out, such an effort of inward observation alters experience, so no valid claim can be made on the basis of such observation about how experience is apart from such observation. Moreover, reading the results of such inward observation back into world-immersed, embodied experience would inevitably distort such experience. Besides wishing to acknowledge Dreyfus’s criticism,²⁶ I mention it here because the Buddhism–cognitive science encounter continues to be influenced by the idea of Buddhist mindfulness practice as offering a special kind of introspection that can serve the purposes of the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. In my view, however, although mindfulness practices can facilitate a unique kind of acute awareness of what phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty call the phenomenal field of lived experience,²⁷ this kind of awareness is not inward observation in any introspectionist sense of inward—for example, it is not the inward perception of basic mental elements, whether these be sensations, after the fashion of Western introspectionist psychology, or momentary and elementary mental events, after the fashion of Abhidharma.

The Embodied Mind also contains another, better conception of mindfulness meditation. According to this conception, mindfulness practices should be understood as skillful ways of enacting certain kinds of embodied states and behaviors in the world, not as inner observation of an observer-independent mental stream. This conception connects to the central, original idea of the book, namely, the view of cognition that we call enaction or the enactive approach (mentioned at the outset of this introduction).

In formulating the enactive approach, we drew on multiple sources: the theory of living organisms as self-producing or autopoietic systems that bring forth their own cognitive domains; newly emerging work on embodied cognition (how sensorimotor interactions with the world shape cognition); Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body; and the Buddhist philosophical idea of dependent origination, and specifically that cognition and the experienced world co-arise in mutual dependence. The basic idea of the enactive approach is that the living body is a self-producing and self-maintaining system that enacts or brings forth relevance, and that cognitive processes belong to the relational domain of the living body coupled to its environment.²⁸ One implication of this idea is that cognition requires the exercising of capacities for skillful action and that even abstract cognitive processes are grounded on the body’s sensorimotor systems, including the brain systems that, as we would say today, emulate sensorimotor processes in an offline way. Today, this idea of cognition as based on modal sensorimotor processes is central to the approach called grounded cognition, where grounded means based on body states, situated action, and modal perception-action systems.²⁹

From the enactive perspective, mindfulness practices should be viewed as forms of skillful know-how for enacting certain situated mind–body states and behaviors, not as a form of inner observation of a private mental realm. Notice that this contrast—between understanding mindfulness meditation as a kind of enactive cognition versus as a kind of inner mental observation—is a conceptual and phenomenological one. Notice also that each conception has implications for cognitive science. On the one hand, thinking of mindfulness meditation as inner observation of a private mental realm feeds the internalist tendency in cognitive neuroscience to model mindfulness as a kind of mental activity instantiated in neural networks inside the head and visible through brain imaging tools such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This approach runs the risk of confusing the biological conditions for mindfulness with mindfulness itself, which, as classically described, consists of the integrated exercise of a whole host of cognitive and bodily skills in situated and ethically directed action.³⁰ On the other hand, thinking of meditation as the enactment of situated mind–body