© Prisca Bauer, MD, Ph.D. Below is a short account of the 5-day workshop on contemplative phenomenology (May 13-17, 2019), organised by Mind & Life Europe's Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology (ICP). Day 1: Getting to Know Each Other and the Epoché What happens when forty-two people from different walks of life (including a documentary maker) spend a week together in an idyllic French farmhouse? It sounds like a reality TV show, but luckily it is not. What we all have in common is an interest in meditation and/or philosophy and we have put our lives on hold for a week ...
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Tag: Contemplative Studies
From Enactive to Enlightened AI
© Elena Antonova, Ph.D. (Association Member, Mind & Life Europe) The Embodied Mind, a book co-authored by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleonor Rosch, directly engaged with the field of Artifical Intelligence (AI) and robotics by critiquing a cognitive representationalist model of the mind and presenting an embodied and enactive approach as an alternative. It led to the emergence of the new kind of AI robotics, with the embodied enactive robots learning from the experiences of their interaction with the environment and/or humans, rather than being fully programmed at ‘birth’ by their creator. So I asked myself: how can contemplative ...
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Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology (ICP)
We interviewed Michel Bitbol, Mind & Life Europe Association Member and French researcher in philosophy of science, on the MLE community he is leading with Natalie Depraz and Claire Petitmengin, the Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology (ICP). You have said that "philosophy is a bridge" in the dialogue between science and Buddhism; can you tell us something about this idea? The dialogue between science and Buddhism represents an extraordinary opportunity of renewal for human cultures and wellbeing. But it also poses some risks: there is a risk of confusion, if the differences between the two disciplines are not borne in mind ...
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