This conceptual article isolates an unresolved transition in the cognitive and philosophical study of mortality and afterlife belief. It distinguishes three propositions that are frequently conflated: the desire for more embodied life, the representation of the experiential subject as continuing after biological death, and the assignment of that continuation to a consciousness or agency of...
This conceptual article examines a neglected asymmetry in the philosophical-zombie thought experiment. A Chalmersian zombie, being physically and functionally identical to a conscious person, can produce the same verbal questions, reports, and judgments about consciousness. The paper therefore distinguishes three senses of asking: the production of an interrogative token, functional inquiry,...
This theoretical manuscript develops an energetic formalization of Antonio Damasio’s architecture of selfhood. Damasio’s distinctions among the proto-self, core self, and autobiographical self are converted from a descriptive taxonomy into a conditional and falsifiable model of functional endurance. For each functional layer, usable free-energy delivery is compared with time-dependent...
This paper proposes that the Damasian hierarchy tracks a structural property of the underlying neural architecture — the degree to which a layer’s function depends on integration across distributed networks, as opposed to localized or reflexive processing. Stated explicitly, this converts a descriptive clinical taxonomy into a framework yielding specific, falsifiable predictions. The paper...