This book presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of ...

Philosopher and scientist Thomas Metzinger argues that neuroscience's picture of the "self" as an emergent phenomenon of our biology and the attendant fact that the "self" can be manipulated--and even controlled--raises novel and serious ...

Allan Hobson praises and accuses me. He praises me for being empirically informed. And he accuses me of being a “third-person half-some-one”. Specifically, he encourages me to come out of the closet, share some of my own first-person phenomenological experiences, and stop hiding behind neurophenomenological case studies taken from the existing scientific literature. Which I will do, below. But let us first begin with a matter of conceptual controversy.

conscious content like ``the self in the act of In 1989 the philosopher Colin McGinn asked the knowing'' (see, e.g., chapters 7 and 20 in this following question: ``How can technicolor phe- volume) or high-level phenomenal properties like nomenology arise from soggy gray matter?'' ``coherence'' or ``holism'' (e.g., chapters 8 and 9 (1989: 349). Since then many authors in the ®eld in this volume). But what, precisely, does it mean of consciousness research have quoted this ques- that conscious experience has (...) a ``content''? Is tion over and over, like a slogan that in a nut- this an entity open to empirical research pro- shell conveys a deep and important theoretical grams and interdisciplinary cooperation? And problem. It seems that almost none of them dis- what would it mean to map this content onto covered the subtle trap inherent in this question. physical states ``under a certain description''? In The brain is not gray. The brain is colorless. other words: What kinds of relations a. (shrink)