Conscious experiences have many structural features. Consider how your color experiences have dimensions of variation corresponding to hue, saturation, and brightness, how your visual acuity decreases in precision from the center of your visual field to the periphery, how your pain experiences come in different magnitudes, or how your temporal experience seems to flow in a continuous stream....
Belief change is crucial to therapeutic benefit in psychedelic-assisted therapy as well as in more traditional forms of therapy. However, the use of psychedelics comes with a few unique challenges that require extra caution. First, drastic belief changes may occur faster than in regular therapy. Facing radical and transformative insights all at once rather than through a gradual process of...
Despite recent criticism, the search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) is still at the core of a contemporary neuroscience of consciousness. One common aim is to distinguish merely statistical correlates from "NCCs proper", i.e., NCCs that are uniquely associated with a conscious experience and lend themselves to a metaphysical interpretation. We should then distinguish between NCCs...
Zusammenfassung Hintergrund In den letzten Jahren wurde die klinische Forschung zu Psychedelika-gestützter Therapie psychischer Störungen wieder aufgenommen, mit einer stetig steigenden Zahl von Studien und Publikationen. Dabei sind viele ethische Fragen aufgekommen, die noch nicht ausreichend untersucht und beantwortet wurden. Ziel Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick zum Stand der klinischen...
This special issue focuses on the Philosophy of Psychedelics (OUP 2021) by Chris Letheby in the form of a book symposium. Introduced by Matthew Johnson (2022), Letheby presents the main claims of this book that explores the apparent conflict between psychedelic therapy and naturalism in a précis (Letheby, 2022a). Seven contributions criticize, expand or comment on Letheby's arguments,...
Chris Letheby argues in Philosophy of Psychedelics that psychedelics and knowledge are compatible. Psychedelics may cause new mental states, some of which can be states of knowledge. But the influence of psychedelics is largely psychological, and not all psychological processes are epistemic. So I want to build on the distinction between processes of discovery and processes of justification to...
An introduction to the second part of the special issue celebrating the neural correlates of consciousness. Here, we focus on progress and paradigms in the science of consciousness from the perspective of philosophy of science.
Researchers on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) need to distinguish mere statistical NCCs from NCCs proper. Some neural events may be co-occurrent, probabilistically coupled, or coincidental with a type of conscious experience but lack any deeper connection to it, while in other cases, the relation between neural states and a type of experience hints at a strong metaphysical...
This special issue celebrates the double anniversary of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs): 30 years since the research programme for finding neural correlates of consciousness was brought back onto the scientific agenda and 20 years since the standard definition of an NCC was published in a seminal anthology. Here, we take up some of the conceptual, methodological, and empirical...
How to model non-egoic experiences – mental events with phenomenal aspects that lack a felt self – has become an interesting research question. The main source of evidence for the existence of such non-egoic experiences are self-ascriptions of non-egoic experiences. In these, a person says about herself that she underwent an episode where she was conscious but lacked a feeling of self. Some...
A main goal of the neuroscience of consciousness is: find the neural correlate to conscious experiences (NCC). When have we achieved this goal? The answer depends on our operationalization of "NCC." Chalmers (2000) shaped the widely accepted operationalization according to which an NCC is a neural system with a state which is minimally sufficient (but not necessary) for an experience. A deeper...