These two cases highlight the utility of a focused, structured clinical phenomenological interview in measuring treatment effectiveness in subjective experience. Two male patients, aged 35 and 27, of Serbian ethnicity with treatment-resistant depression were treated with nasal esketamine, with clinical progress monitored using both the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) and the...
Psychopharmacology is currently plagued by reductionism since it is understood as the treatment of biological and behavioural symptoms of mental disorders without taking into account the subjective life of the self in relation to others. Psychopharmacological interventions, such as antidepressants and antipsychotics, must be situated and discussed within the embodied context of the...
The aim of this paper is to show how a monastic environment can be regarded as providing shelter for individuals with autism spectrum condition in the Middle Ages. By drawing on the recent literature in the history of medicine that traces the signs and symptoms of ASC in Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess from the twelfth century, we will turn to her invented language Lingua Ignota as a...
The mind-body problem has posed the questions: can we defend mental causation, or is there causal relevance of mental qua mental over and above physical in human behaviour? This would mean that conscious experience is not a physical phenomenon, though it has causal relevance in the world. The problem is understanding how something non-physical, mental or phenomenal could be causally relevant in...
ABSTRACT Recently, an information-theoretic structural realist theory of the self and consciousness has been put forward (Beni, M. D. 2019. Structuring the Self, Series New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan). The theory is presented as a form of panpsychism. I argue against this interpretation and show that Beni’s structuralist theory runs into the hard problem...
A combination problem in Russelian panpsychism arises when we try to understand how macroexperience comes from microexperience. I will argue that panpsychists could avoid the combination problem if they endorse an intelligible form of emergence. They should endorse Shoemaker’s account of emergence or realization which states that there are “micro-latent” powers beside “micro-manifest” ones and...
I investigate the status of subjectivity in Integrated Information Theory. This leads me to examine if Integrated Information Theory can answer the hard problem of consciousness. On itself, Integrated Information Theory does not seem to constitute an answer to the hard problem, but could be combined with panpsychism to yield a more satisfying theory of consciousness. I will show, that even if...