Ryan Stagg: Hello and welcome back to day three of the Reality Summit presented by Shambala Mountain Center, where we're exploring the nature of self. I'm very excited today to be joined by Dr. Evan Thompson to be exploring, especially topics from his book Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and . Evan, thank you so much for taking the time.

Evan Thompson: Thank you for inviting me to talk with you.

Ryan Stagg: Of course. I thought we could start by defining self, which seems like a monumental task. I think sometimes when we're talking about self, we just mean a subtle feeling or a sense of ourselves or our body, sometimes we mean our entire lives, so there's a really wide range, and maybe we can start by grounding that. What is self?

Evan Thompson: Yes. Well, that is a big question and, in a way, there is no one answer, I would say, to it. I think a useful way of approaching that question is to take the concept or term self and think of it through the lens of experience. If we do that, then we could say, well, what are the different kinds of self-experience or the different ways that we experience being or having a self? The different forms that we can point to are, you might say, a here and now feeling of bodily-being, a feeling of being alive, of being in the world, of moving and proceeding on the basis of our bodily life.

Then, another sense of self would be the sense of self we have that really has to do with how we think about ourselves. For example, we project ourselves mentally into the past, so we have recollected images or you could say mental representations of self as past or self as future where we project ourselves forward into time. That sense of self, psychologists and philosophers often talk about that as an autobiographical sense of self because it usually goes along with some sense of a narrative or a storyline along with an image constructed from memory that has an effect to it, a feeling tone that very much comes from the body here and now because memory is always re-created in the present. But sense of self is really a sense of self as having some kind of temporal extension and some kind of enduring existence through time from the past into the present.

Those two different modes or senses of self-experience interplay with each other dynamically from moment to moment in very rich and complex ways. So I would say there's no one definition of self, but a useful way to think about self is in terms of those ways that we experience being or having a self.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. You also talked about self as an enacted process, whereas I think self feels like a very solid thing, so maybe you can tease apart this different in conception of self as enacted versus a self as thing.

Evan Thompson: Yeah. Already in what I said just a moment ago, I would say implicit there's the idea of thinking of the self as a process rather than a thing. An analogy that I use in my writing is that the self is like a dance, so a dance isn't a thing, it's a process, and it has to be enacted. The dance is no different from the dancing, and so I would say that there is a constant process by which we enact or create or construct this experience of self that we have both in terms of the here and now bodily form of it, which happens to be perception and action, bodily perception and action, and then the mental enactment of the sense of self on the basis of memory, on the basis of what psychologists call mental time travel and autobiographical memory.

The key idea there is that that self feeling that we have, we could put it that way, is constantly being enacted and is, in a way, constantly being performed or brought forth through a whole host of different processes, some of which are very basic having to do with how the body regulates itself as a living organism, some of which have to do with more distinctively mental cognitive and very much social relations and social capacities that we have as social creatures, because our sense of our self is very much ... The way that we mentally represent ourself and enacted in memory is very much based our being in self other relations where we're able, as it were, to mentally step outside of ourselves and view ourselves from the outside, which we do in memory. That comes about developmentally through understanding ourselves as objects of attention of others. So there's a socially performative and enacted sense of self as well.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. I just was in a meditation retreat for 10 days and I was really looking closely at my discursive thinking, which can be very immersive, but it seems with our discursive thinking there's always a supposition of another or a supposition of an object that you're referring to, and it's very tricky but often this discursive thing where you're trying to convince somebody else in our heads, either in the past or in the future. But even there, there's this little shadow of otherness that it almost seems like it's necessary for discursive thinking from what I can tell, but I wonder if you can say something about-

Evan Thompson: I think that's right. This is an experience, certainly that I've had in meditation that sounds similar to what you were just describing and I imagine many other people have had as well, you become aware at a certain point that there's this inner speech or inner talking going on, but then the question is, well, who is the speaker and who's being addressed? In the very nature of it as speaking, there is an implicit addressee and there's a feeling of some kind of speaker, but as we know, especially in a meditative context, the sense of the speaker is built into the speaking, you could say, and that if you try to find out speaker you, in a way, come up empty-handed. You just find more processes of speaking and listening, but you don't find a speaker behind the speaking that would be the solid author of it.

I think this becomes, experientially, very evident in meditation, but I think what we know from development psychology is that this is very much part of the

architecture of the human mind. The developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, who was a Russian psychologist writing in the '40s and '50s and one of the founding figures of social development psychology, he basically had this idea that these so-called higher cognitive processes, where in some sense you're aware of your own inner thought stream. Developmentally, what happens is that that is a internalized outside speech. It's not as if we first have this inner- narrative and then we connect to others outside of us, rather, we grow up in a social cultural milieu where language becomes internalized into the mind so the outer speech becomes the inner speech, so we have a constructed inner linguistic subject.

He basically said all higher cognitive processes happen twice. First there is the outer form in social interaction and then developmentally that becomes internalized so that we can actually monitor our own thought processes through an internalized outer attention and an internalized outer speech. So I think in meditation, that architecture, if you want to call it that, really becomes experientially quite salient and we can almost, in a way, see that it's not as if there's a solid pre-existing first-person self that somehow is the conductor of the orchestra, it's rather that there's this internalized symphony being played. That's actually part of what I mean by enaction, is that that is a way that we enact this sense of a narrative or autobiographical self.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. This sort of subtle and tricky so I want to make sure I have this right, so it's by encountering another or discerning another more through our sense perceptions that ... I forget his name, but he's arguing that that's the source of how we differentiate the self in other internally so that we have these metacognitive processes?

Evan Thompson: That's right.

Ryan Stagg: It seemed to be the basis of the construction of self, that we need another to construct it.

Evan Thompson: That's right, that's right. The basic idea is that as an infant develop, it develops various kinds of capacities of attention, including sustained attention, the ability to keep attention on something, and in the course of development, say, the infant, through following the eye gaze of a caregiver, comes to be able to participate in what psychologists call joint or shared attention. So the infant is looking at a toy, the mother is looking at a toy, they're looking at each other's eyes, they both understand that they're attending to the same thing, so they're sharing attention to an object. Developmentally, we know that at a certain point the infant comes to be able to, you could say, experience or understand itself as the object of shared attention so that when it is following the eyes of the caregiver and the caregiver or parent is looking at the infant, the infant understands that it's the object of attention of the other. That understanding of that shared attention and understanding of being an object of attention for another is required developmentally for things like shame, empathy, putting

yourself in someone else's shoes. Developmentally, it emerges around the time when infants can recognize a mere image is an image of themselves.

So, the understanding of yourself as one being in a larger world shared with other beings and that they have a view on you from the outside, that, I think, is really crucial to forming this inner-narrative about yourself that then we see popping up very saliently, say, in meditation.

Ryan Stagg: It would seem then that self is a learned behavior or that we're determining signals and then learning a certain behavior of who we are, which is what-

Evan Thompson: I think that's right. Learning can mean a lot of different things in terms of cognitive theory, but I think we could say there learning, there's cultural scaffolding of this, there's maturational processes in terms of biological development of the brain that requires the social and linguistic cultural scaffolding, so it's a form of dependent origination in . Our experience of what we think of as our unique human self and human memory is dependently originated in self other linguistic cultural relations and it also depends on our having the particular kinds of brains that we have that been shaped by social, biological forms of life in evolutionary history.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. It seems like a good segue into talking about the different ways that you look at self in different states of consciousness. You move through these different states of consciousness and then self seems to be enacted in different ways in each one of those states of consciousness, and in some it's so clear. In a dream, clearly you're creating the others with your own mind and it seems a little less certain in the waking state, but maybe you can track through those different states of consciousness and say how self is enacted in each.

Evan Thompson: Yeah. We have this basic distinction that I work with between awareness, changing contents of awareness and then ways that we identify with certain things as self and mark off other things as not self, and that basic structure carries through the sleep-wake cycle but takes different forms. So in the waking state, we have this field of waking awareness with the changing contents that have to do with our changing perceptions and the way our attention typically jumps around, and the ground floor of that is when we are caught up in some task where we're driving, we're skiing, we're dancing, we're typing on a keyboard, so all of that is sensorimotor engagement with the environment so the sense of self or identification is very much body based.

But then we also know that we mind wander and when we mind wander we can get caught up in images of self from past or that we project into the future, so there, of course, the image is all, if you will, internally generated but it immediately presents as self in memory. Even if you see yourself from the outside in a memory, because memories you could relive from within in a first- person perspective where you could see yourself from the outside in the memory, and we know that in psychology we can bias the memory depending on the kinds of questions we ask you. So if I ask how did you feel at the party?

That's going to tend to elicit a first-person memory. If I ask you what were you wearing, that's going to tend to elicit the seeing yourself from above. "I was wearing a striped shirt." That structure of first-person versus third person that's a mental image, we see that also in dreaming.

[00:15:07] So when we go from the wake state into dreaming, what happens in terms of the fullness of the sleep-wake cycle is we start to fall asleep and, that's what sleep scientists call the hypnagogic phase, which just means leading into sleep, and there we often experience the screen like play of images or funny sounds that seem outside but also seem inside, we're not quite sure, or thoughts that seem kind of peculiar but strangely significant. So, there I talk about there's actually a way that we're absorbed in the contents in a way that breaks down a bit this self other structure. But then we fall into sleep and reemerge into a dream, and in the dream we have the same structure that we see in memory. We have something that in one sense, the dream is entirely a content of one's own awareness, but it's structured in the sense of an immersive dream, it's structured in terms of what's me in the dream and what's not me in the dream, and that might be experienced from a first-person or from a third-person perspective.

Then, all of that shifts again in a very vivid lucid dream, because in a lucid dream there's a whole spectrum of possibilities for lucidity, but in a very, very vivid lucid dream or full sense of lucidity, you can have the experience of being in the dream in whatever form of embodiment you have, knowing that it's a dream so that other characters are, as it were, your dream characters, and an awareness of yourself sleeping in the bed and access to memories of previous lucid dreams. So the whole kind of complexification of what is self gets much more intricate.

Then, in cases of, say, dreamless sleep, which really isn't one thing, the term dreamless sleep would have to be refined because there's different forms that it could take, but if we just talk about it a little bit more generally, dreamless sleep is where those kinds of thoughts and images are really attenuated and really subside, nevertheless, there may be a rolling, feeling of just being, just a feeling of sentience, especially in certain meditative contexts where people really practice trying to carry a certain kind of, you could call it or lucidity, through the sleep-wake cycle. Certainly, traditions of yoga in India and Tibet talk about dreamless sleep as this state in which there is more fundamental just sense of awareness itself. Interestingly, some traditions will use the word self to describe, so an in Advaita Vedanta and Brahmanical traditions, the general tendency is to say that that's actually closer in a way to the fundamental nature of self. Whereas a Buddhist philosophical framework with the idea of nonself, it tends to be identified more in terms of a basic nature of awareness, you could say, at least in certain Buddhist traditions. They have different ways of talking about it conceptually and philosophically, but there, that structure of self-other, really becomes much more reduced because there's just this awareness in the sense of a feeling of sentience or feeling of being, you might even say.

That's an interesting topic in sleep science today that has not really been very explored. There have been a few sleep scientists who are interested in trying to take these ideas and investigate them in the context of the sleep lab, but there's not a lot of work that's been done on that.

Ryan Stagg: This dreamless sleep state, it doesn't sound particularly familiar. I'm almost realizing, it seems almost impossible to remember because it would be, as you’re describing there before, the first person or third person projecting something, but in that state with such little sense of self it seems like it'd be very difficult to even remember, so how do you know that it exists?

Evan Thompson: Yeah. That's one of the very interesting and difficult, you could say, conceptual and methodological problems is that it's a feeling of sentience that doesn't really get taken up by the cognitive workings of memory, especially in the sense of autobiographical storyline narrative memory.

One way to approach this from a scientific perspective is through what are called serial timed awakenings, which is what is the gold standard in sleep science now, which is the idea that you wake people up repeatedly through the night in different phases of sleep. So if you're working with very experienced practitioners of various kinds of sleep meditation, one hypothesis would be that the kinds of reports that they might give immediately upon awakening from certain deep phases of sleep would have information that would be different from individuals who haven't been really trained in that way. That from a sleep science, neuroscience perspective that might actually tell us something about, for example, brain rhythms and sleep.

In the Indian philosophical context, and this is really not so much in but more in yoga and Vedanta, the ideas that there is a memory that carries over into the waking state but it's not really an autobiographical memory. It's the idea that there's a bear sentience against that has a feeling of, you could say, peacefulness or tranquility to it, and as you wake up there's a lingering trace or taste of that and immediately the waking ego appropriates it and says, "Oh, I was asleep and I was sleeping well." But I there is a waking ego appropriation of the content that really is, in a way, ego-less in the sense that it's not being cognitively taken up by that waking ego structure.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. You listed these three aspects of consciousness which are awareness, the contents of awareness and then the self-referentiality which emerges with those, and I'm wondering about how they may come apart in this dreamless state, is an experience just awareness or is it just that the contents of awareness maybe isn't so abstract that you're not sure?

Evan Thompson: That's a good question.

Ryan Stagg: Then, even awakening, see, does the self-referentiality come out of this? Can you just experience this coemergence of awareness and contents of awareness without that self-referentiality?

Evan Thompson: Yeah. Maybe we should take the waking state first, and it's the dreamless sleep one raises particular questions that are specific to it, that are, in a way more collocated, but in the waking state if we distinguish between awareness contents, awareness and self-identification ... You could frame it in a way as a hypothesis, so one hypothesis would be that in certain kinds of states of awareness, the self-identification, which we know already can be flexible and changeable, especially in cases of mental illness, if we think of it in that way, but one hypothesis would be that self-identification or, let's put it this way, that the self other structure with a grasping on to things or version away from them, which require some sense of self-identification as this anchor point, that that can become highly reduced or attenuated through certain meditative practices.

Meditative practices that try to cultivate a state of open awareness that doesn't selectively favor any particular content and doesn't disfavor or try inhibit any particular content, but simply remains in a posture of undistractedness with regard to whatever arises, without, you could say, either grasping onto it or trying to push it away. Biologically, we'd say that's approach-avoid behaviors. The idea is something is in your field and you like it, it's good for you, it's attractive, even if it's just a mental tendency, you go towards it. Or, you perceive it as being unpleasant or as threatening, as harmful, even if it's just mentally there's a turning away from it. Some meditative practices work with just maintaining a resting in awareness without trying to engage or get caught up in that approach-avoid structuring that structures basically everything that we typically do.

[00:24:50] So the hypothesis would be then that in those form of practices that self- identification or certain kinds of self-identification, especially the autobiographical narrative type of self-identification and even the self- identification that somehow favors the body in terms of what it experiences as pleasant versus unpleasant, that can become highly reduced. I would say there's actually evidence to support this. The evidence that I'm thinking of comes from studies of pain, actually, and various pain perception in very experienced meditators, so they're studies of pain where they contrast experienced practitioners of vipassana, of and of Tibetan Mahamudra, and the findings are that when one is practicing this kind of open awareness rather than a selective single point of concentration that the self-reported unpleasantness of the pain is greatly reduced and that this correlates with less activation of brain areas or brain systems that we know have to do with the, if you like, not the sensory intensity of the pain stimulus but the cognitive appraisal of it as pleasant or as unpleasant or threatening or harmful and that also have to do with how we evaluate the pain in a meaning narrative way that has to do with our sense of self through time.

So in these meditative states and, of course this is relevant for people interested in forms of meditation for pain therapy, individuals report for stimuli that are very intense heat stimuli, they report less aversiveness even though they're accurately discriminating the intensity of the stimulus. In some cases, this is in the Zen practitioners, the sensory areas of the brain that are tracking the sensory intensity of the stimulus are actually increased compared to non- meditators. So there's this paradoxical, in a way, finding that the sensory registration of the stimulus is enhanced in a way, but the areas of the brain have to do with the aversiveness towards it, which of course has to do with self, those are reduced and the self-reported unpleasantness is also reduced. There, I would say, there's a very concrete clinical neuroscience case where through these kinds of, let's just call them open awareness practices, certain kinds of self-identification become much more reduced, but awareness and the contents of awareness is very much present.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. As you were describing it, it was reminding me a lot of the five aggregates, which are a Buddhist conception of self, of how you breakdown the understanding of self, that there is some form, there's a positive or negative feeling towards that thing, which arises as a perception of what that thing is and there's a volitional activity of what to do with that and in consciousness is ... So maybe the process of insight or vipassana to move on into awareness of those activities of what is going on and then in that there's maybe a reduction of this is ... Maybe the missing part is, this is considered to be suffering in Buddhism that this activity has some valence of unpleasantness or something.

Evan Thompson: That's right. Well, there is the sutta, and I'm forgetting the name of the sutta right now, but it's about the two arrows, and so one is the arrow that you're shot with and so of course you have the physical pain because it's in the nature of the body to experience a feeling like that as unpleasant, but then there's all the mental pain that comes from the cognitive elaboration, the meaning if you will, that's cognitively superimposed onto the physical pain. The idea is that that kind of pain is, in a way, optional. That is to say, it's not optional in the sense that, of course, we typically experience it and we have problems not getting caught up in it, but in some sense, it's ultimately optional because through a practice of, you could say through a practice of mindfulness, we can learn to deal with that kind of mental narrativizing of the pain. That's really what makes it into suffering in the particularly Buddhist sense because Buddhist suffering is really mental suffering. Of course, if we have a body we're going to experience certain things as physically unpleasant, I mean the Buddha, according to the traditional story, died of dysentery and was in pain, but he presumably was, not in the catastrophizing mental suffering that goes along with physical pain.

In terms of the aggregates, the idea would be form as the physical body so that means that with sensory contact, certain kinds of feelings are going to happen, they're inevitable and they're going to be valanced as pleasant or unpleasant, but really the fourth aggregate of mental formations or volitional tendencies, that's where we can actually intervene and make feeling not about craving an

aversion. Concretely, in these paint studies cases, that's, from a Buddhist perspective, a way of theoretically explaining what's going on. That's not how the neuroscientists would explain it, but that would be a Buddhist framework for explaining that that's relatable to the Buddhist framework for sure.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. Maybe we can jump back into this deep-end of dreamless sleep and whether awareness and the contents of awareness are coming apart here or if the contents of awareness are just extremely vague or abstract.

Evan Thompson: I think that's open question, I think it partly depends how we're using the word content. One of the things that's said about that awareness in both Buddhists but especially also in yoga Vedanta traditions is that it's awareness that doesn't have a subject-object structure or it certainly doesn't have the kind of subject- object structure that's present in the waking state and in dreaming where there's this self-other perceive or perceived or the term in Buddhism that comes from , the Buddhist philosopher, that's used for this is the grasp or grasped structure. That's highly attenuated in dreamless sleep, the sense of a subject different from an object. It's in a way, a, you might say, object-less form of awareness.

[00:31:49] Now, does that mean it's content-less? Well, in part, that depends on how we're using the term content. It's said not to have the kinds of contents that our dream contents, discursive thought contents, perceptual contents ... From a scientific perspective, or you could say, also a contemporary Western perspective, we might want to say, well, if there's any phenomenal or experiential character to it, then there's a sense in which it can be said to have phenomenal content. It has the character of a feeling of being, you might say, or a feeling of presence. So if we're using content in that way, then we could say, well, there's still content, it's not a completely content-less or void state. In fact, in neuroscience, this is a standard line that you will see neuroscientists saying, they will say consciousness is that which disappears in dreamless sleep. They're thinking of dreamless sleep as just it's a blackout state.

That would be, if that view were right, that would be a content-less state. It's a state of oblivion, a state of blackout. It would be, in the Indian language, a cessation. But a number of us think that that's a very crude description and that there are, on scientific grounds, reasons to think there are phases of dreamless sleep where there is a sense of sentience or awareness. In that sense, it wouldn't be a blackout content-less state, it would have some kind of content full of character to it, but it wouldn't be this usual subject-object sense of content.

There's semantic issues there and conceptual issues so I haven't given you a straightforward answer. That's why it's a complicated issue. It's actually complicated in terms of the Indian debates, if we look at the classical Indian debates about dreamless sleep. There, we see questions about this, and then if we approach it through the neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, sleep science

perspective, we get conceptual issues that pop up there, so I'd say that's an open question.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. This next question is really fun for me, I think largely in the West have had this happy marriage, and in some ways mindfulness seems to be the child of that marriage, of the mindfulness movement, but I also see this really deep division in the heart of it, and one seems to be primarily a materialist view in science that material and physicality is the basis of consciousness and then Buddhism, it's pretty well held in the, more in the Tibetan especially over later Indian forms of Buddhism, that consciousness is more the basis for the material in some way or that consciousness comes first. I've just seen a little bit of those disagreements, but you hold those two together in, I think, a really interesting way where you assert that consciousness is dependent on the physical substrate of the brain and neural activity, but at the same time consciousness is primary, so I wonder if you can make some sense of that.

Evan Thompson: Yeah, okay. There, I think, there's different ways of approaching that question and we have to, in a way, be rigorous with each approach to the extent that they don't cohere with each other then we have to uphold the tension, you might say live with the tension, live with the uncertainty you might say.

You could say from a philosophical perspective that consciousness is something that we can't step outside of that, that it sets a horizon for everything we do, including in science because science depends on observation and measurement, and observation and measurement and making theories and testing results all depends on there being consciousness in the form of the community of conscious beings that make up the scientific community. There's no way to step outside of consciousness, get outside of it, see it from a sideways view as it were up against something else that wouldn't be within consciousness of you of the brain or of you in matter in itself, something like that. We already know that idea of matter and itself breaks down in the case of quantum physics anyway that we can't really disentangle the role of the observer from what it is that we're manipulating and what it is that we're measuring.

So in the case of consciousness, this is a large philosophical point, consciousness is in a way a horizon, and we can open up the horizon and get new views, but we never step outside of it and see it from some other place. That makes consciousness, in a way, special because it means that the science of consciousness has to really keep the mindfulness of that unique situation that we're in. When I talk about the primacy of consciousness in a way that's mainly what I'm thinking of is a, you could say, a phenomenological primacy or an epistemological primacy. Now, some people want to then say, well, that implies that it also has an ontological primacy that everything is consciousness. Strictly speaking, that doesn't logically follow. I mean, it could be the case that consciousness has ontological primacy, but it doesn't follow from it having this phenomenological or epistemological primacy that it's the ground of everything else. In my view, that's a further speculative step that doesn't really follow.

[00:38:26] That's approaching it from a very wide out philosophical perspective. If we then go a little bit more local and we say, well, what evidence do we have about how consciousness, let's say, belongs to the natural world? Then, I would say that the evidence that we have today, of course this could change, but the evidence that we have today does, I think, suggest or indicate that consciousness is contingent upon embodiment. That would mean that we don't have scientific evidence for consciousness continuing in the absence of embodiment in ways that some classical Indian and Tibet views would require.

Now, it's a question of evidence so I'm not saying that it isn't the case. Science doesn't make negative statements in that way, it's a question of what the best interpretation of the evidence that we have is and so I would say ... I go through a lot of this in the book with a lot of different phenomena, and I would say that's what the evidence suggests. That's second part. Thirdly, there is at the same time, and contemporary Western philosophers of mind are very much concerned with this, there is nonetheless a very deep, you could say, philosophical scientific puzzle about how consciousness belongs to the natural world.

That is to say, we can establish correlations between certain types of consciousness and brain activity, but we're in no position scientifically to be able to explain the consciousness in terms of the brain activity. We can relate the two correlationaly, we can causally manipulate the two so I can stimulate the brain and cause changes in consciousness, I can ask you lying in a scanner to visualize something voluntarily and I can see a change in your brain. Causally, we know that we can intervene at different points, but we don't have a theory that explains consciousness in terms of the brain in a way that we have a theory of phase transitions in water that explains how the changing structures of H2O mean that water is in a liquid state or in a gaseous state or in a solid-state. That means there's a fundamental puzzle or question that we haven't resolved.

[00:41:13] My own view on that is that we're not really likely to be able to make any headway on that problem as long as we keep thinking of consciousness and matter in an oppositional way. I think that probably what is required is that we really have a change in our worldview where we really come to a different understanding of what nature is that doesn't make physical nature conceptually setup as something that excludes consciousness and doesn't setup consciousness conceptually as something that excludes physical nature. We need a unification, but we don't have the concepts for it. We don't have the scientific and philosophical concepts for it. I don't think that that unification would necessarily, being that traditional Indian or Tibetan views of would be justified or grounded, I mean, it's possible that it might, you can't say in advance that it wouldn't, but I don't really see that as likely given the present state of things.

So those are all the different pieces. They don't add up to any one thing other than, I would say, what I think is really crucial is that if we're trying to understand consciousness and investigate it philosophically, scientifically, in

collaboration with contemplative meditative traditions and the that underpin them, that we really have to recognize this kind of epistemological phenomenological primacy of consciousness. That we can't step outside of it and that we have to then learn how to work within it in the right way, in a productive way. In a way, that's what I try to illustrate by the way that write, say Waking, Dreaming, Being is by weaving back and forth between these different perspectives, the phenomenological, the neuroscientific, the contemplative, and so on.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. The way I'm understanding is that maybe you're proposing a shift from looking at lineal origination, that consciousness emerges from matters so if there's just a causal line that's happening in a contemporary order ... The Buddhist teaching on codependent origination, it's out of our normal frame of thinking that two things can be ... It's a different view, it's almost a different dimension of thinking, and I'm understanding that's what you're proposing we start to consider.

Evan Thompson: Yeah, I suppose in some ways I'm inspired by one of the things the Buddha is presented as saying in some of the suttas, Pali suttas, where he presents the teaching of the links of dependent origination. There are different versions of dependent origination that are given in the earliest texts that we have and as Buddhism develops they certainly get interpreted in different ways, but one of the things he says in some places is that we can translate psycho-physicality or namarupa is the , so name and form or psycho-physicality depends on consciousness and consciousness depends on psycho-physicality. So there's a mutual dependence. It's interesting because he's going through the links of dependent origination, and some of the links are one-way dependents, and this one actually turns out in these suttas to have a two-way dependence. There's a mutual dependence between the two.

One way to interpret that is wherever there is psycho-physicality, wherever there is, you could say, sentient embodiment, there is consciousness and wherever there is consciousness there is sentient embodiment. No matter how far back you look, you never can pry these two apart. This is the network, you might say, the interdependent network within which consciousness shows up. I express that in the book by saying that wherever we find consciousness, we find embodiment and we never find embodiment apart from this field of consciousness that we're always in, and that sets the horizon for everything that we do. So see that as a very useful, I'd say, non-reductive way of trying to investigate consciousness philosophically and scientifically is using that idea.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah, I think for me, not from a scientific or philosophical point of view, but I like the view because it seems to include some sense of wonder in a sense of possibilities where often I feel like this is strictly materialistic viewed, it seems to be trying to steal away a little bit of what it means to be human. The other one seems to be a little ... The notion that consciousness is the ground a little disconnected from Earth, and they both seem to take something away so it really holds a lot of possibility for me.

Evan Thompson: I'm glad you say that. I mean, I think materialism where that means that's we can understand reality in terms of physical materiality and consciousness is somehow a product of that. I don't think that works for deep philosophical reasons, but the idea that consciousness is a special disembodied mental continuum in the way that was very natural to think in India and in Tibet ... I mean, I don't think that works either but we have all sorts of reason scientifically and philosophically to think that particular version, which isn't the only Buddhist version by any means by the way but that particular version won't work.

Ryan Stagg: That second version, it takes away a little bit of the wonder of having a body and of having a brain ... As I did the Science and Meditation Summit last year, I started to hear something people talking about the brain and the trillions of cells and these kind of things, it's completely mind blowing in and of itself as wells, so I wonder on both sides there could be-

Evan Thompson: Definitely, definitely. No, the brain and I would say the world of nature at all scales is astounding and marvelous and amazingly complex, definitely.

I think the Buddhist idea of dependent origination really, in a way, is a form of deep insight into that because it's basically ... Mo matter how far out you go, how far down you go, wherever you look, you find interdependent mutually conditioning processes.

Ryan Stagg: Yeah. That seems like a really good spot for us to wrap up this conversation. I know I thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope everyone out there watching got a lot out of this. I encourage you to learn more about Dr. Evan Thompson, his biography is down below and there's some links to learn more about his work. Thank you so much again for taking this time.

Evan Thompson: Thank you very much. Great to be here.