Can Science Illuminate the "Self" with Abre Fournier

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Sr. Ilia Delio speaks with Abre G. Fournier, PhD—a science-based philosopher of consciousness whose work bridges contemporary cognitive science with Asian contemplative traditions and practices of mind transformation.

Abre shares the personal journey that shaped her research: years of intensive contemplative practice, an encounter with what she describes as “awakened awareness,” and a profound, lasting shift in the sense of self that led her to investigate how transformation actually works in lived experience. 

Together, Ilia and Abre explore enduring questions at the heart of consciousness studies: what we experience as the self, how mind and consciousness differ, and what contemporary science can (and cannot yet) reveal about these mysteries. Abre draws from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and embodied and extended mind research to reframe selfhood as relational, interactive, and dynamically formed rather than fixed and isolated.

ABOUT ABRE FOURNIER

“Can we as human beings really understand what it would mean to have a conscious experience without a sense of self?” 

Abre G. Fournier, PhD, is a science-based philosopher of consciousness with a focus on mind transformation, bridging the advancements of contemporary cognitive sciences with teachings and practices from Asian philosophies centered on states of awakened awareness. Her work synthesizes insights from evolutionary biology, dynamical systems, embodied cognition, and advanced intelligence to articulate the rise of a new dimension of planetary mind. Her international work in facilitating consciousness evolution offers vital insights for philosophers and scientists investigating the complexities and transformation of human consciousness, as well as for professionals and practitioners engaged in transformative practices. She has also been active in the arts and higher education, with academic and executive roles at the State University of New York (SUNY). Her work as a practicing artist in films and new-media collaborations with musicians and composers has been shown in art museums and galleries, film festivals, and live concerts in the US and abroad. Originally from France, Abre lives in the New York metropolitan area.

Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. This week, Ilia speaks with Abre Fornier, a science-based philosopher of consciousness. Together, they explore her groundbreaking work at the intersection of cognitive science, mind, self, and consciousness. Abre shares her personal journey, including how a longing to understand higher states of consciousness led her into Buddhism, philosophy, and scientific inquiry. The conversation culminates in some enduring questions. What do we experience as the self? How do mind and consciousness differ? And what does contemporary science reveal about these mysteries? 

Ilia: We have with us Dr. Abre Fournier, who has been a leader in the study of the transformation of consciousness. Very interesting work, it's really at the cutting edge of where we are today, especially in an age of artificial intelligence and the huge planetary shifts that we find ourselves in. So, Abre, welcome to this conversation. 

Abre: Hello, Ilia. Thank you for having me. 

Ilia: Yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you coming from, where were you brought up? What brought you to this work? 

Abre: Right, so a little bit of background. So as a philosopher, researcher, facilitator of consciousness development, I put an emphasis on applied practice and I'm deeply interested in theory as well. but what also drives me is an understanding of how transformation actually works and works in lived experience and how we can facilitate it. This began with my own intensive contemplative practices over many years, an investigation across various wisdom traditions, and primarily Asian traditions. I mean, I come from France and I grew up I was born Catholic and I looked into the venue, but somehow it's there wasn't a good fit there. 

And so with these Asian traditions, and those practices, I experienced what some of these tradition called awakened awareness, awakening. And there were multiple shifts during that journey, but there was one in particular which made all the difference. And that involved a profound transformation in the sense of self, my sense of being, I felt was profoundly transformed. And this wasn't temporary peak experience. I mean, I had a lot of peak experience, a lot of extraordinary experience, But that was a definite shift in the baseline of my being, right? And I really saw it as a structural reorganization of consciousness itself, right? And truly experienced it as a genuine paradigm shift. I never used that word paradigm for any of the other shifts, but that one I did. Something I could not imagine. 

So that became my topic of research and my focus working with others. So the Buddhist non-self theory is something that I gave a lot of attention to, but not just that, and really not just rooted in ancient teachings. In fact, when I came to the U.S. in my early 20s and being in New York, I really getting involved in so many different programs available. You know, not only you could read all kinds of books in English, not translated in French, but you could also meet the authors which was pretty amazing. So at that time, all forms of human development, personal development, but the core was really the meditation practices and self-inquiry practices. I mean, that was the core of my work. So what happened is that I needed to understand, well, I needed to understand what had actually happened with this. 

And I needed to make sense of it with 21st century knowledge of mind. That was my interest because my interest in the nature of mind and our potential as human beings, I did not feel that was adequately addressed in all of my research of impersonal development. So I really wanted to understand with the knowledge that we have today, how can I explain this transformation? And also importantly, how can I help others navigate this territory? So this led me to philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, cognitive science, physics, and principally in the study of the self and human experience. I mean, that became central to my work because for me, that's where I started and that's where it starts at the level of the person. 

Ilia: I just want to just kind of clarify things here because you put a lot to your own background here is it it's in Buddhism. So your first initial, is that right, your first experience? 

Abre: I mean I did Hindu practices that were very powerful at a young age, very powerful with extraordinary states of mind. It's just that I would meditate intensely, intense concentrations, morning, evening, even lunchtime at a young age. So, and there were extraordinary experiences, but it's interesting that I don't put my focus on that. It's when I did the, I know why, I know why I did not put my focus on that. It's because I felt at the time that it was very disconnected from my living experience in the world. I was still anxious in the world. I extraordinary states on the cushion in my meditation, states that sometimes would even leave me in very high bliss for a couple of weeks, two, three weeks, extraordinary experiences. But I was very interested in the experience that is gonna be transformative in my everyday life. That was my focus. 

Ilia: So this interior self, that would be interior, the transformed interior self, was in a sense distinct from your outer self. Is that right? 

Abre: Yes, yes, this is very well put. This is very well put. I was having this great, this non-ordinary state of consciousness, and I could even again be left in a state of bliss. The way that it is described, and I would also get these, what is described as the powers or these other worldly kind of states, but I did not feel that it was translating in everyday life. So there was, yes, this inner kind of experience did not match the outer experience, or the outer experience did not match the inner experience. 

Ilia: And that led you then to want to study. So that kind of experience was the basis of your pursuit of a doctoral work or your- 

Abre: No, no, I continued with other practices. So I was a consciousness explorer. I explored various traditions, various practices. And then I liked Buddhism a lot also because I did not relate to ancient mythology and the worship of the guru and all of these things. I was very, I was more of a, it had to be a wisdom without all of these other, what would be the words, other dimensions that I wasn't relating to personally. What did you study in philosophy? Well, it's the Buddhist study of non-self came around. Well, the Buddhist studies came around and I resonated with that because it was very grounded in practice. was something that was different, that really translated, I felt in the Vipassana practices or other self inquiry, I felt that really translated. I could see the shift in baseline in my own life, in my everyday self. 

So then there was this experience that was beyond all experiences, what I call the paradigm shift, which was a really deep, very deep experience of non-self. That's how I'm going to call it. So this is what led me to wanting to really make sense of that experience. And then I came to philosophy of mind, to cognitive sciences, to wanting to see neuroscience. How can we first, what kind of evidence is there that would be able to describe this experience, be able to explain that experience? So I studied the self, I think from, for the last, like the self, the way it has been represented in the last 2000 years and philosophy of mind, which has great studies of the self of the last 20, 30 years, lots of very, very good work there. And cognitive science. So that's, and then eventually even physics and beyond space time. And all of that came together and spoke to me in a profound way in terms of articulating what had happened, what this experience was. 

Robert: Intuitively, we feel we know what it means to be a self. And yet, the nature of the self remains a subject of deep inquiry and ongoing debate. Ilia then asks Abre how contemporary science is illuminating the study of the self. later how mind and consciousness differ. 

Ilia: What is it when we experience the self? And you use the term the no-self-self the Buddhist idea. So what is it? What is it that we're experiencing or how is this consciousness redounding or playing back on something internal? Like it's hard. I mean, we use this language all the time and we all have self-awareness. I know that I exist. 

Abre: Yes. 

Ilia: But what is the I that knows that it exists? That's really an interesting question that I don't think we really have. Where there's just a million theories of conscious, well, there's not a million, but there are many many theories of consciousness. And there's all sorts of new understandings now on the self or the natural self, the plastic self, the creative self, the self that is constantly forming itself. There's something that we experience. That's at this moment in time. That I exist.  

Abre: So Galen Strawson had a great quote there with the many selves and there were so many really excellent work in the nature of self. And there's [Antonio] Damasio, there's, I mean, there are many people that have done great work on clarifying the self and they categorize it in different ways and the proto-self and this one and the other one. For me, so I've loved studying all of that, but I also like looking at these boundaries of selfhood and the co-emergence of the self because I saw these boundaries transforming. 

So one thing that stood out in my study is with regards to the co-emergence of the self. Are we born with a self? There is the self. Well, actually, no, not so fast, right? So most modern adult experience a clear separation between self and world. There is a clear separation, viewing reality also as pre-existing and external, right? So here I am, and then there is the rest of the world. Here I am, and then there is otherness, and otherness is everybody else, and it's the rest of the world, right? And there is a seeing in that composed, that is composed of permanent, measurable objects that can be analyzed and controlled. Here it is. That's the world we are in. 

So we have this perspective that is deeply embedded in the modern mind, and which I see, which I have learned is shaped by cultural forces that privilege this individual identity that I am over relational being. And it has also been reinforced by centuries of Western philosophy, philosophical thought, although everyday people are not so much into Western philosophical thought, but it's there. And our scientific traditions, right, so, which all emphasize a strict division between mind and world. And of course, something that we know as Cartesian dualism, but it is experience in everyday life. It's not just a nice philosophical kind of statement. So, this conceptual divide framed modern selfhood as we know it in our experience, right? As something that is situated within the individual rather than something relationally constructed. 

Ilia: There's a big difference there. So, and the difference is, just so we're clear, that I think the conceptual formulation of the self, the self-I, the self-isolated I, is a very rational way of thinking about the self. But the relational self, I think we can say that more clearly because we're learning so much more from the sciences about nature itself, that nature being relationship. In other words, relationships are prior to anything that exists. So it's relationships that bring existence into being. 

Abre: Yes, that relationship brings the world forth, but that is not how people think. People think I am, and it's the I-me-mind complex. It's self-identification in every experience. There is self-identification. This is I, this is me. I am the agent. I am the thinker. It's self-identification and it's also self-ownership. I have thoughts. These are my thoughts. The I-me-mind complex is really strong. In recent time, mainstream cognitive science really looked into this. So it's interesting because we have two vastly different views. We have the view of cognitive science reducing selfhood to a brain bound phenomenon. The brain is the self, the brain is the mind. And reinforcing the idea of the sense of safe, the sense of self and agency existing purely within the subject. And then we have a new development in the last 25, 30 years of embodied cognitive science. The mind is embodied, the mind is embedded in the world. The mind is extended in the world. The mind is inactive. The mind acts on the world, is meshed in the world, and the world is acting on the mind. And all of that is the mind. 

Ilia: Let me just, so we're clear, do you distinguish mind from consciousness? 

Abre: Very good question. Very good question. So it depends at which scale we are talking. There's a level of general conversation where we're going to say mind, we're going to say cognition, we're going to say consciousness, and they're all going to be the same. But we need to draw a distinction. There's a level of conversation where we need to draw distinctions. Because if we speak of a planetary mind, what does that mean? Right? Is it like a human mind? No. So distinctions are needed. 

And probably cognition is a good word to use, because cognition, cognizing, knowing, that's something that we can take all the way down to the cellular level, the first cells, all the way down to evolution, even the prebiotic era, you looked at Terence Deacon's work, the self is right there. Before 4 million years ago, we look at these elements that have a self. Or there's Howard Pattee, a great biologist, in order to study the self, it's the same thing. Let's just take one cell here and study the self of the cell, right? But are we seeing consciousness at that level? Maybe cognition, there is a knowing, the cell knows its boundary. It knows what to let in and what is going out. So perhaps cognition is a good word. But when, when it comes to the planetary, I draw some very distinct, some strong distinctions there between we have the global brain, we have the global mind, we have global consciousness, we have collective thoughts, and, and it doesn't matter what we call it, but we really need to define what that means. And I do draw in that dimension. 

Now, in terms of the human person, minds, we can look at mind as all minds processes, all mind processes. They are not all conscious. We can look at consciousness as the entirety of the mind and that's consciousness, right? So there it can be, but there is consciousness that is conscious, the conscious part of consciousness. 

And then there is the self. the self or self consciousness, this aspect of consciousness where we are conscious, this is reported to be maybe 1, 5% of the mind. That's the conscious part of the mind. And then we have this great mind, very powerful where we all have our intuitions and creativity and much more. Like I have a thought now, where does it come from? Right? It comes from that mind. So mind and consciousness, if consciousness is also the non-consciousness, this aspect of mind that is non-conscious, that can all be called consciousness. Some cognitive scientists are going to call all that consciousness. Or we can be more precise and say the conscious mind, that part of the mind that is conscious. 

Ilia: I would draw some distinctions insofar as I think we trace what we're calling consciousness down to the lower levels of material life or physical life. You know, So Teilhard spoke of a within-ness of things. Or what Alfred Whitehead would call an experience, that everything experiences. These are ways of approaching the fact that... And what I take actually as how I might look at mind and consciousness as, I think consciousness might be that realm. It's like a participatory field and there are fields of existing possibilities. And so I think to me, mind is the synthesizing activity of possibilities that are being actualized every moment by everything. So it's the... 

Abre: Activities, yes. So similar to what I call mind processes, would that be...? 

Ilia: Yeah, like a process, like the mind itself is like an ongoing process of this information or this kind of what we call consciousness or experiential information, like the flow, you know? The flow within elements, between elements. And so this is ongoing dynamic activity. And I think the mind is that dynamic activity. And I wondered if the human person, you just say much more advanced like self-rebounded, like this informational flow and this activity is now complexified, brought into these much higher levels. 

Abre: Yes, that's, I mean, what I call the meta-self and the meta-mind at the planetary level is a complexification of the self, of the self that has self-reflexivity. The human self distinguishes itself from other animals in that day's self-reflexivity. Right, in that kind of redounding. Right, the mind can turn around onto itself, mind processes can turn around onto themselves and reflect, right? So I'm seeing the tree, okay, the cat and the dog is seeing the tree as well, however that is translated, right, to them. But they see, they see the tree, I see the tree, that's reflective consciousness. And I can reflect that I'm seeing the tree and I know that I'm aware that I'm seeing the tree. Right? So nowadays, another dimension of self-reflexivity. 

Ilia: Yes. And I like to say you're seeing the tree, but the tree is also seeing you. 

Abre: Absolutely. Absolutely. And maybe we'll come to that in the conversation. Absolutely. There is, it's symmetrical and it's recursive. And I definitely embrace these views there. And I embrace them with science as well. So that we're not just being new-agey where the tree is seeing me and it sounds poetic and it's nice. I mean, particularly in this case, I like Friston a lot, Karl Friston, the neuroscientist psychiatrist at London University and who's developed predictive processing among with others, but he has his particular view. And he would agree with you that looking at the world, you seeing the world, there is the symmetry, the equation, the mathematical equation, where is really also the world seeing you. And I like that very much. 

Ilia: We really couldn't say these things apart from the new physics. You know, that's the whole thing. Like we didn't have the Einsteinian revolution and the big bang puzzles and our new understanding of matter and the way our whole new understanding of quantum entanglement and complexity. So these new understandings of nature help us understand ourselves now as part of nature. And I think where some of the problems come is that sometimes people are speaking about the self. So say if I were to say I am looking at the tree, but the tree is looking at me, a rational explanation would say, that's impossible because the tree does not have consciousness, but you are a rational human person with consciousness. And we're saying, no, I am the tree, like from an evolutionary perspective, all that the tree is, is actually in me, but at a much higher level. 

Abre: Yes. It's the universe looking at itself through my eyes. 

Ilia: I am the train in a sense reflecting on itself. 

Abre: Right. The universe looking at itself through my eyes. 

Ilia: Yes, exactly. I like that. The universe looking at itself through my eyes. That is it, right? You know, this deep connectivity is reflexive in the way we're thinking about our self and the world that we're seem to be part of, but we don't realize that we are the world in its own self-reflection, you know? 

Abre: Right, we are the intelligence of this world, this planetary intelligence. 

Ilia: So interesting, in this particular way, right? We don't exhaust intelligence, we don't exhaust anything, but we're a particular expression of the way this world can manifest itself at this point in time. 

Abre: Right, and so what we're suggesting here is that the self is not an isolated phenomenon, but a process that takes shape in interaction with the world. And the relationality there is very important. 

Ilia: Yes. 

Abre: It's in that relationality that the self arises. 

Ilia: Absolutely, yeah. Relationship's the name of the game. 

Robert: Next time, Abre explores how childhood development shapes the emergence of the self, how our understanding of self is formed by culture, and how AI is already reshaping who we are. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.