The View from Within: First-person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness (Consciousness Studies) [Paperback]

This is an important collection addressing what is arguably the greatest challenge now facing a science of consciousness. Such a science must connect third-person data about brain and behavior with first-person data about conscious experience. But how do we gather the first-person data, and how can we represent it? This book explores sophisticated ideas from a variety of traditions. I hope it sets the agenda for a renewed investigation of first-person methodologies and formalisms in the next few years.

Since William James, there has been remarkably little attention in the sciences of the mind to the detailed investigation of conscious experience at the personal level. THE VIEW FROM WITHIN advances such investigation along several fronts, with articles on introspection, phenomenology, and meditative psychology. Especially valuable is the editors' introduction, which provides a useful guide to the methodology of first-person accounts, and the articles that build bridges to cognitive science, psychiatry, and the scientific study of meditation techniques. Invited commentaries by leading investigators of consciousness, together with authors' replies, make for a provocative presentation that will be discussed for some time to come.

The View from Within is a brilliant presentation of the need to include first-person accounts in a science of consciousness. The editors sensibly maintain that a judicious balance of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives is not only desirable but unavoidable in any satisfactory study of consciousness. But their integrative approach is not merely a theoretical call for such; they provide instances of precisely how such a comprehensive approach can be pragmatically executed. As such, this book marks a major milestone in the science of consciousness, and it will surely become one of the standard references in the field.

The publication is very timely indeed. It is a splendid initiative.

The study of conscious experience itself has not kept pace with the dramatic advances in PET, fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies. If anything, the standard approaches to examining the 'view from within' involve little more than cataloguing its readily accessible components. Thus the study of lived subjective experience is still at the level of Aristotelian science, leading to a widespread scepticism over the possibility of a truly scientific study of conscious experience. Drawing on a wide range of approaches - from phenomenology to meditation - THE VIEW FROM WITHIN examines the possibility of a disciplined approach to the study of subjective states. The focus is on the practical issues involved. The book includes chapters on introspection, intuition, therapy, psychiatry, phenomenology and contemplative studies along with 100 pages of peer commentary. The contributors include James Austin, Bernard Baars, Andrew Bailey, Guy Claxton, Natalie Depraz, David Galin, Shaun Gallagher, E.T. Gendlin, Carl Ginsburg, William Haney, Rachel Henley, Piet Hut, William Lyons, Bruce Mangan, Edward Marbach, Jean Naudin et al., Gregory Nixon, Ian Owen, Claire Petitmengin-Peugeot, John Pickering, Jean-Franois Richard, Jonathan Schooler, Geoffrey Schwartz, Mark Sullivan, Max Velmans, Pierre Vermersch and B. Allan Wallace.