Primacy of Consciousness and Enactive Imagination. Review of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy by Evan Thompson
Abstract
Upshot: This interdisciplinary work draws on phenomenology, Indian philosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, cognitive neurosciences and a variety of personal and literary examples of conscious phenomena. Thompson proposes a view of consciousness and self as dynamic embodied processes, co-dependent with the world. According to this view, dreaming is a process of spontaneous imagination and not a delusional hallucination. This work aims at laying the ground for systematic neurophenomenological investigation of first-person experience