Worlds of Consciousness in the Context of Multiverse Conceptions
Voprosy Filosofii July 1, 2024 Helena Knyazeva
Human consciousness and animal psyche comprise a plurality of worlds, not merely different states such as sleep, wakefulness, or altered states, but also the interweaving of perception, mental activity, visual thinking, intuition, embodied and situational determination, individual phenomenal experience, environmental affordances, intersubjectivity, empathic experience of self as other, and meaning-making in cognition and creativity. Drawing on enactivism, philosophical phenomenology, and complexity theory, the article argues that epistemological constructivism further supports the idea that the external and internal are cyclically determined and not sharply distinguishable, blurring the lines between perceived, conceivable, partly fictitious, and real.