Evan Thompson
Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is an internationally recognized authority on cognitive science, phenomenology, philosophy of biology, and cross-cultural philosophy of mind.
Co-authoring The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991) with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch, and authoring Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007), Thompson helped establish the “enactive” paradigm. Under enactivism, cognition and consciousness are active relational processes brought forth through the self-producing (autopoietic) and autonomous sensorimotor engagement of a living organism with its environment.
Thompson’s “life-mind continuity thesis” asserts that the organizational principles of mind are continuous with the organizational principles of living systems, presenting an insurmountable ontological barrier to disembodied computational functionalism.
Known for. The Embodied Mind (1991, with Varela and Rosch), Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2007), Waking, Dreaming, Being (2014), Enactivism
Coverage on this site
Research Papers and Preprints
Keynotes and Event Talks
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Evan Thompson is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.