my mind on books

Ontology of Consciousness: Percipient Action (MIT Press) spent a long time as a “forthcoming” book but has finally made its own crucial ontological shift to “published.”

To me, the title doesn’t convey that the book is looking at consciousness from a wide range of disciplinary and cultural perspectives, which I think is needed to throw into perspective the assumptions made by one’s own culture and discipline.

Here is the product description:

The “hard problem” of today’s consciousness studies is subjective experience: understanding why some brain processing is accompanied by an experienced inner life. Recent scientific advances offer insights for understanding the physiological and chemical phenomenology of consciousness. But by leaving aside the internal experiential nature of consciousness in favor of mapping neural activity, such science leaves many questions unanswered. In Ontology of Consciousness, scholars from a range of disciplines–from neurophysiology to parapsychology, from mathematics to anthropology and indigenous non-Western modes of thought–go beyond these limits of current neuroscience research to explore insights offered by other intellectual approaches to consciousness.

These scholars focus their attention on such philosophical approaches to consciousness as Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, North American Indian insights, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization, and the Byzantine Empire. Some draw on artifacts and ethnographic data to make their point. Others translate cultural concepts of consciousness into modern scientific language using models and mathematical mappings. Many consider individual experiences of sentience and existence, as seen in African communalism, Hindi psychology, Zen Buddhism, Indian vibhuti phenomena, existentialism, philosophical realism, and modern psychiatry. Some reveal current views and conundrums in neurobiology to comprehend sentient intellection.

MIT Press’s site includes the Table of Contents plus full text of the Foreword by Robert Thurman, the Preface by Helmut Wautischer, and the Introduction by Stanley Krippner.