Philosophies
April 3, 2019
Tom Froese, Shigeru Taguchi
44 citations
The essay critically evaluates progress on the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence and robotics, remaining skeptical that deep neural networks or cognitive robotics fundamentally address it. It agrees with the enactive approach that things appear meaningful for living beings due to their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals, but notes this approach fails to explain how meaning could influence an agent's behavior. If life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, meaning cannot play a causal role. The authors argue this impotence of meaning can be resolved by revising the concept of nature so that the macroscopic scale of the living involves physical indeterminacy, and they consider implications for synthetic approaches.
Philosophies
July 16, 2019
Riccardo Manzotti
23 citations
Embodied cognition (EC) has offered artificial intelligence an alternative to traditional computationalism, splitting into weak and strong versions. The weak version borders on functionalism, while the strong version claims body–world interactions constitute cognition. However, the notion of constitution is ontologically problematic and offers no clear empirical or technical benefits. This paper examines ontological issues in both approaches—circularity, epiphenomenalism, mentalism, and disguised dualism—and proposes a more radical alternative called mind-object identity, briefly compared with sensorimotor direct realism and embodied identity theory.
Philosophies
July 4, 2022
Alvaro David Monterroza-Rios, Carlos Mario Gutiérrez-aguilar
18 citations
Culture is often defined as shared knowledge, beliefs, and norms that individuals acquire as group members. Some anthropologists view culture as abstract information or behavioral controls, but critics argue these perspectives fail to explain how enculturation actually occurs beyond metaphors of transfer or internalization. Embodied cognitive theories, particularly enactivism, offer an alternative through participatory sense-making within material environments. This essay discusses what an enactive view of culture might look like, its potential advantages, and the challenges and weaknesses it faces in explaining cultural learning processes.
Philosophies
August 24, 2023
Nuno Azevedo, Miguel Oliveira Da Silva, Luís Madeira
11 citations
Psychedelics, which produce powerful mental effects by activating 5HT-2A receptors in the brain, were researched in the 1950s and 1960s until their criminalization. Their renewed clinical investigation as therapeutic tools for psychiatric disorders raises deontological ethical questions for clinicians, patients, and society. A review of 42 articles from 2017 to 2022 concludes that psychedelics must be culturally contextualized, epistemic harm minimized and represented to ensure informed consent. Open data and commissions are needed to guarantee safe and equal distribution.
Philosophies
October 3, 2023
Anna Shutaleva
6 citations
This article examines the epistemic challenges in neurophenomenology, which studies the relationship between consciousness, cognition, and neural processes. The subjective nature of conscious experiences, influenced by personal beliefs, emotions, and culture, makes it difficult to determine the reliability of knowledge in this field. Scientific knowledge aims for universal truths based on empirical observations, while subjective experiences vary individually. Reconciling these subjective and objective realms is a significant challenge. The article highlights that understanding neural correlates of subjective experiences can provide insight into the ontological nature of consciousness and how subjective experiences relate to objective reality.
Philosophies
April 25, 2025
Federico Divino
5 citations
Archaic Buddhism, as recorded in the Pāli Canon, contains a well-articulated theory of knowledge that includes a sophisticated view on language and its role in perception and cognition. The paper argues that Buddhist considerations on language are comparable to Saussure's early linguistic theories and address fundamental issues in the philosophy of perception and theories of cognition. This comparison offers a technical approach to the problem of consciousness, aiming to structure a systematic dialogue between the philosophy of mind and language, cognitive sciences, and linguistics, thereby providing an original perspective on these topics through Buddhist thought.
Philosophies
July 27, 2023
E. C. Garrido Merchán, Sara Lumbreras
3 citations
Consciousness and intelligence are not necessarily linked. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been used to argue that machines capable of human-like problem solving might be conscious, but this analogy has troubling social implications, such as potentially granting machines more rights than people with disabilities who cannot solve the same problems. The authors argue that problem-solving does not imply consciousness and that phenomenal consciousness cannot be modeled by computational intelligence. They propose an objective measure of computational intelligence across humans, animals, and machines, and treat phenomenal consciousness as a dichotomous variable to show it is absent in machines.
Philosophies
February 26, 2026
Pavel Straňák
2 citations
Contemporary artificial intelligence excels at data processing and text generation but appears to lack consciousness, autonomous motivation, and genuine understanding. This article uses the metaphor of a motorcycle and a horse to argue that technological progress may obscure deeper principles of life and mind. Drawing on abduction, tacit knowledge, phenomenal consciousness, and autopoiesis, the paper contends that current approaches to Artificial General Intelligence may overlook organizational principles only partially understood in biological systems. It calls for a new paradigm that asks not just how to build smarter machines, but what intelligence, life, and consciousness fundamentally are, acknowledging their relation to computability remains an open question.
Philosophies
August 27, 2025
Federico Divino
2 citations
Buddhist thought and Peircean semiotics share a concern with how signs shape perception and cognition. From its earliest formulations, Buddhism adopted contemplative practice as a means of liberation from the effects of semiosis—the continuous process of sign interpretation. This article hypothesizes that the Buddhist concept of nāmarūpa (name-and-form) represents this semiosic process. After examining perceptual and sensory processes underlying nāmarūpa, the paper analyzes occurrences of this term, proposes its semiosic functions, and explores how contemplative practice aims to disengage from the power of signs.
Philosophies
December 30, 2023
Stefan Paulus
1 citation
Psychedelic experiences are often forced into either a biological determinism that ignores subjective experience or a mystical/spiritual framework. This article analyzes those experiences through Deleuze and Guattari's pharmaco-analysis and Laruelle's non-philosophical philo-fictions, which allow for contradictory assumptions and hyperspeculations. The aim is to connect philo-fictions with psychedelic experiences and discuss them alongside models from information science, quantum mechanics, new materialism, and the philosophy of immanence. The result is an open synthesis that invites further reflection on agency, immanence, and the wholeness of matter.
Philosophies
July 21, 2023
Márk Losoncz
1 citation
This article defines spiritual anarchism as openness to what transcends the ego and our limited perspective, arguing that the self can become an unjustifiable source of authority and a constraint on freedom. It critically reviews prior overviews of spiritual anarchism and proposes including neglected traditions. The article then reverses the typical approach by examining how spiritual practices—such as meditation, psychedelic experiences, and mystical experiences—can be made more anarchistic.
Philosophies
July 20, 2026
D.H. Lange
Before asking whether an AI system could be conscious, we must first ask what internal organization would make that question meaningful. This paper proposes three jointly necessary conditions: the system must maintain persistent internal context, have differentiated internal possibilities, and operate in a closed loop where outputs feed back into processing. These conditions mark when a system's processing unfolds from an internal standpoint rather than as a chain of local transitions. Simple feedback controllers clearly lack this organization; standard transformer inference is at most a bounded near-case; world-model architectures are more serious candidates. The paper makes no claim that such systems are conscious, but clarifies when consciousness-oriented inquiry has a determinate architectural target.
Philosophies
July 14, 2026
Diego Gonzalez-Rodriguez
Cognitive science often fails to capture the first-person quality of experience because of its physicalist focus on neural and computational processes. This paper argues that Śaiva-Śākta phenomenology, a non-Western tradition, offers systematic practices—such as visualization and ritual enactment—that actively reshape attentional, mnemonic, and perceptual processes, thereby reconfiguring the experiential structure of self and world. Drawing on predictive processing and enactive cognitive science, the authors propose that such practices enact rather than merely represent ontology, supporting a model of ontological pluralism where different experiential worlds correspond to stabilized cognitive modes. This perspective suggests that non-Western traditions provide alternative phenomenological pathways for exploring embodied cognition and expanding cognitive science's methodological and ontological horizons.
Philosophies
March 13, 2026
Tina Röck
Reality is best understood as fundamentally dynamic and interdependent, or processual, by bringing together process thought, phenomenology, and the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. This view shapes how we speak about, investigate, and understand the natural world. A phenomenological reading of process is brought into dialogue with Buddhist thought. Key points of convergence between phenomenologically clarified process philosophy and Madhyamaka are mapped, and the epistemological and practical consequences of viewing reality as impermanent and dependently arising are considered through Whitehead's and Nāgārjuna's views.
Philosophies
January 12, 2026
Federico Divino
In Pāli Buddhist texts, language and cognition are deeply intertwined: signs structure cognitive processes and semiosis drives the proliferation of concepts and percepts, organizing a shared yet partly subjective world. Drawing on linguistics, semiotics, and biosemiotics, the paper provides a vocabulary for understanding Buddhist reflections on these issues and offers a genealogical inquiry into why language holds a pivotal role in Pāli Buddhism.
Philosophies
May 19, 2025
Joykrishna Sarkar
Practicing Buddhist non-attachment as a layperson creates a dilemma because it requires becoming free of desires, yet forming and maintaining friendships and pursuing beneficial goals are necessary for a meaningful life in a competitive world. This tension makes it challenging to reconcile Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy with everyday worldly existence without potentially abandoning the path to enlightenment.
Philosophies
June 26, 2024
Sophie Grace Chappell
Phenomenal socialism holds that what people directly perceive is primarily instances of high-level phenomenal properties, not low-level sensory data. This paper defends the weaker, 'primarily' version of that view. It first presents a recognitionalist manifesto and situates it within debates about naturalism, perception, the metaphysics of value, and theory versus anti-theory in ethics. It then reviews two familiar positions on perceptual content—phenomenal conservatism and liberalism—and introduces two neglected alternatives: phenomenal socialism and phenomenal nihilism. The paper defends a watered-down form of phenomenal socialism against four objections. Finally, it connects the view to the epistemology of modality and the role of imagination.
Philosophies
October 18, 2023
Andrea Hurst
Happiness is often linked to self-transcendence, but Freud asked why it is so hard to achieve. Examining three psychoanalytic texts—Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and Maslow's The Farther Reaches of Human Nature—the author distinguishes two opposing forms of self-transcendence: ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution. Each text articulates the relation between self-transcendence and happiness in different but unsatisfactory ways, dominated by an ideological framing that prioritises the present and positive while ignoring the absent and negative. Drawing on Lacanian ideas, the author argues that unhappiness plays a role in producing happiness, challenging the traditional view that happiness requires perfect self-transcendence. Instead, happiness becomes attainable here and now by ordinary individuals through resistance to self-transcendence as self-perfection.
Philosophies
July 8, 2026
O. Varypaiev
Working with large language models risks normalizing a practice where a machine-generated text is accepted as a justified claim before the user has checked its sources or taken responsibility for it. This crisis of rationality stems not from a technical flaw but from a shift in how justification works: fluent textual coherence is mistaken for genuine understanding and rational judgment. Drawing on 4E cognition and postphenomenology, the analysis frames LLMs as multistable moral-epistemic mediators, not as rational subjects or neutral tools. A four-cluster protocol for attributing rationality is proposed, introducing an epistemic pause between a generated formulation and its acceptance as a claim. The core danger is not machine consciousness but the normalization of accepting ready-made text as a ground.
Philosophies
June 25, 2026
Abraham Meidan
It is possible, in principle, to build machines that think they are conscious and think they choose freely, in the same way humans do. The paper identifies functional requirements for such systems, including subjective self-report, opacity of underlying mechanisms, semantic competence, memory-based self-models, deliberation among alternatives, counterfactual reasoning, and practical unpredictability. Preliminary computational architectures show how these capacities could be realized using existing or foreseeable technologies through the integration of components into a unified, self-referential system.
Philosophies
June 25, 2026
Pavel Straňák
Rather than asking whether large language models (LLMs) themselves are conscious, this paper argues that the backend orchestrating layer—the collection of mechanisms managing context, retrieval, evaluation, planning, and tool-use control—performs a function analogous to consciousness in the human brain: it stabilizes generative processes, directs attention, maintains context, and mitigates the entropic disintegration of thought. In humans, consciousness fulfills this function through a phenomenal layer of qualia creating a subjective inner canvas; the backend does so algorithmically without phenomenal quality. Computation is informationally conservative, obeying Shannon's Data Processing Inequality, so it cannot increase information, only recombine it. The author proposes that consciousness is orthogonal to computation—not an emergent property of complexity but a qualitative leap into a different dimension.
Philosophies
February 26, 2026
Graziosa Luppi
A systematic critique of two competing paradigms in the philosophy of mind—Naturalist–Externalist Research Program (NERP) and Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program (PIRP)—focuses on Uriah Kriegel’s attempt to reconcile them. Naturalist accounts derive mental content from brain activity and environmental interaction, while phenomenological theories hold that mental states present an internal semblance to the subject. Kriegel tries to naturalize mental content within a Same Order theory, but this limits his ability to ground intentionality in consciousness as PIRP requires. The idea that mind arises from manipulating representations is challenged by dynamical approaches to cognitive science, though advanced representational models persist by simulating phenomenological qualities through internal data organization. The approach is comparative and reconstructive, examining structural tensions between the paradigms.
Philosophies
August 28, 2024
Hong Wang
Communication studies often overlook how meaning emerges from nothing into something, focusing on messages rather than communicators and ignoring how yet-to-be signs acquire meaning in communicative moments. Using communicology as theory and methodology, the author traces the semiotic path by which a blank paper, a nonconventional sign, acquires signness in a specified communicative event. The paper then examines the relation of consciousness and embodiment, arguing that communication is a life-world moment wherein non-expression is collectively constituted as a form of expression.
Philosophies
May 27, 2024
A. Shutaleva
correction
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Philosophies
December 22, 2023
Javier A. Galadí
Philosophy should destroy certain inherited ontological concepts and everyday word meanings that tradition transmits but also conceals. Tradition induces self-evidence, blocking access to the origin of concepts and making us believe no return is needed. Making tradition transparent dissolves these concealments. Applied to the mind–body problem, this reveals occultations originating from Descartes himself. A new framework for consciousness research emerges: as an individual cognitive being, one cannot avoid splitting reality into what one is and what one is not, extending this individual duality into a collective, culturally transmitted error.