Abstract In depersonalization and derealization (DPDR), patients report that the self and the surrounding world feel unreal, remote, or dreamlike, while memory, reasoning, and perception remain intact on objective testing. This presents a paradox: the components of self-experience appear individually preserved, yet the experience as a whole loses its felt reality. Prevailing accounts localize...
Comparisons of minds usually place species on a single scale and so force a biased ranking. This essay proposes instead that minds differ in shape: in how broadly they take in the world, how far their self-models build on one another, and where they put thought once it is formed. Humans store thought in writing, an archive that compounds across time but strips away perspective. Toothed whales...
This essay argues that the stable entities of experience and cosmology are held forms: patterns of relation that have stabilized enough to persist, hold a boundary, and be located. It begins with cases where those anchors loosen: sensory deprivation, long contemplative retreats, near-death experiences, and the involuntary LSD dosing of James "Whitey" Bulger under MK-Ultra. In each, the...