The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

The story is told of a physicist who is invited by a dairy farmers’ association to tell them how to get more milk from cows. The physicist begins: ‘First we start with a spherical cow.’ That is told as a joke! Yet far more strange is what cognitivism has done to what is supposed to be the study of human thought and human life. This chapter is about concepts, the central building blocks of cognitivist theory. I will first show how (...) cognitivism necessarily cannot give an adequate treatment of concepts and will then, more importantly , outline the foundations for a new nonrepresentational view of concepts which should place the study of concepts on a real basis. (shrink)

Biofunctionalism appears to be a pioneering effort to formulate a portrait of the body&endash;mind which acknowledges intuitions we have about human functioning that go beyond the analytic approach of the cognitive sciences but that can yet remain within the worldview and methods of the analytic portrait. The intuitions are : wholeness, interdependent causality, present temporality, effortless action, realness, panoramic knowing, and value. Such themes are most fully developed in the meditative and contemplative traditions of the world. Biofunctionalism is evaluated both (...) in terms of how well it instantiates those themes and in terms of its ability to generate explanations and predictions within the scientific context. (shrink)

Within The Varieties of Religious Experience lies the germ of a truly radical idea. It is that religious experience has something important and basic to contribute to the science of psychology. Yet now, a hundred years after the publication of James's monumental work, the mainstream academic fields of psychology are no closer to considering, let alone implementing, this idea than they were in James's day. Why? Surely one aspect of this is the way in which the categories and imagery of (...) our society envisage an otherworldly religion and a naturalistic psychology which are on different planes of existence and cannot communicate with one other. I believe that the Eastern meditation traditions can bridge this divide and that had William James been as familiar with Eastern religions as he was with Christianity, he would have had a great deal more specifically to say about what religion had to offer science. The purpose of this paper is to look again at James's material through the lens of Eastern, particularly Buddhist, thought and meditation. Ideally this will serve not only to provide a new perspective on James's classic work but to show a new direction in which the study of religious experience can impact research in psychology and in the emerging cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Using as a framework the logical treatment of causality in the Buddhist Madhyamika, a theory of the psychology of event coherence and causal connectedness is developed, and suggestive experimental evidence is offered. The basic claim is that events are perceived as coherent and causally bound to the extent that the outcome is seen to be already contained in the ground of the event in some form and the connecting link between them is seen as the appropriate means for changing the (...) outcome-in-the-ground to the outcome-as-perceived. There are four types of such connections: the identity of the object in the ground and outcome is seen as the same ; a property is seen to be transferred from ground to outcome ; for animate beings, a cognitive representation and a state of the world are seen to match - either the representation-as-outcome coming to match the world-as-ground or the world-as-outcome coming to match the representation-as-ground ; the `essence' of a category is seen to manifest itself . The standard critique of such coherence explanations is that they are tautological. We demonstrate that `nontautological' scientific accounts become convincing coherent explanations only to he extent that the outcome is re-introduced into the ground. Explanations which are noncausal altogether, such as probability or chance, are shown to be psychologically unstable. This critique suggests some new perspectives on causal thinking both in the cognitive sciences and the folk theories of daily life. (shrink)