Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 5, 2025
Joshua R. Ortega, Madeleine E. Gross, Jonathan W. Schooler
1 citation
People who are highly fantasy-prone, absorptive, or hypnotizable often have waking thoughts that feel bizarre or dreamlike, suggesting a continuity between dreaming and waking thoughts that may vary by individual. The personality trait transliminality—linked to heightened awareness of subliminal material—was hypothesized to predict this continuity. In a week-long experience-sampling study of undergraduates, transliminality did not predict overall continuity of thought. Exploratory analyses indicated it predicted greater continuity in bizarreness, but this did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Transliminality was positively associated with waking thoughts that were more bizarre, interesting, and novel. The findings advance understanding of how personality relates to thought phenomenology and suggest avenues for research on well-being, creativity, and behavior.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 19, 2024
Denis Perrin, Michael Barkasi
1 citation
A common view holds that episodic remembering allows us to relive many features of a past perceptual experience, but not its sense of presence. This paper challenges that view by distinguishing two kinds of presence in perception: temporal presence and locative presence, the latter having objective and subjective sides. While temporal and objective locative presence cannot be relived in remembering, the authors argue that subjective locative presence—the feeling of being immersed in a scene—can be. They identify self-projection, imaginative pretence, and attentional focus as mechanisms underlying subjective locative presence in quasi-perceptual imagination, and note that these same mechanisms underpin episodic remembering. They conclude that episodic remembering can indeed relive subjective locative presence, a position they call 'mnemonic immersivism,' with implications for understanding memory, imagination, and the phenomenology of remembering.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 2, 2022
Chiara Caporuscio, Sascha Benjamin Fink
1 citation
A book symposium on Chris Letheby's Philosophy of Psychedelics (2021) examines the tension between psychedelic therapy and philosophical naturalism. The special issue opens with an introduction by Matthew Johnson, followed by Letheby's overview of his main arguments. Seven contributions either critique or expand on Letheby's proposed mechanism for psychedelic therapy or discuss its epistemic implications. The symposium concludes with Letheby's responses to the commentaries.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 13, 2026
Ali Yousefi Heris
Emotions are natural kinds not because they share an invariant essence, but because they are produced by stable internal causal mechanisms—distributed patterns of neural, cognitive, physiological, and behavioral coordination. The common framing of the debate as a choice between biologically fixed kinds with essences and culturally constructed categories is too restrictive. Four positions arise from cross-classifying views on what fixes emotion concepts (externalist vs. internalist) and what unifies natural kinds (essentialist vs. causalist). Externalist-essentialism fails because public markers like facial expressions lack invariant criteria; internalist-essentialism demands sharp boundaries that prototype effects and neural degeneracy do not support; externalist-causalism identifies emotions through folk causal roles rather than generative mechanisms. Only internalist-causalism meets empirical and metaphysical constraints, preserving scientific realism while accommodating cultural and individual variation.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 6, 2026
Richard Brown
Higher-order theories of consciousness are empirical conjectures that can be tested and potentially falsified. The author examines what these theories imply about infant consciousness, focusing on Ned Block's argument that infants aged 6–11 months have conscious color experiences without possessing color concepts. The author contends that Block's argument does not disprove higher-order theories but instead raises empirical questions that could help distinguish between different versions of the theory or determine whether the approach is viable.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 6, 2026
Niccolò Negro
Analogical abduction combines analogical reasoning with inference to the best explanation to justify claims about consciousness in others. This paper applies that method to fetuses at the end of the second trimester, using a three-step recipe. Given the best minimal model of adult human consciousness and current evidence on fetal brain architecture, the argument supports the conclusion that these fetuses are probably not conscious. The work also shows both the strengths and limits of analogical abduction as a theory-light tool for detecting consciousness across different populations.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 6, 2026
Jacob Berger, Lori M. Curtindale
A method for determining whether nonverbal organisms like human infants are conscious, called the marker methodology, has gained attention but is fundamentally flawed. This approach uses markers thought to correlate with consciousness instead of relying on theories of consciousness. The authors argue that this method is unlike other scientific investigations because its markers are derived neither from theory nor from commonsense conceptions of the target phenomenon. They contend the marker method should be abandoned and propose using commonsense markers instead to explore infant and other forms of consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
June 25, 2026
Wim Pouw
Iconicity is the informative relation between an utterance's form and its meaning, but defining it formally is difficult. Researchers often base iconicity on resemblances, yet philosophical critiques of depiction raise fundamental issues against resemblance-based accounts. Recent work argues that iconicity should abandon objective resemblances and instead be understood as in the eye of the beholder, reflecting a struggle between iconicity as a property of mind versus environment. This paper proposes an alternative relational ontology informed by 4E cognition approaches, which view iconicity as arising from a niche-constructed organism-environment system. The account offers a philosophical ontology and working definition that keeps iconicity verifiable and context-dependent without reducing it to either objective resemblances or subjective mental states.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 27, 2026
Vivian Mizrahi
Smell and taste, unlike vision, touch, and hearing, are directly oriented toward stuffs rather than individual objects. Stuff constitutes an irreducible ontological category distinct from both individuals and universals. Chemistry itself is best understood as a science of stuffs rather than of atoms or molecules. The distinctive phenomenology of smell and taste—including mixture, concentration, and the sense of presence—is best explained by a stuff theory of their proper objects. This view has implications for how to individuate the senses of smell and taste.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 13, 2026
Brandon Ashby
Philosophers often consider hypothetical beings that are physically identical to us but lack conscious experience (zombies) or have reversed experiences (inverts). This paper introduces a new hypothetical being, the phenomenal smuggler, which is physically identical to us but has more kinds of conscious experiences. These smugglers raise novel questions about what limits exist on the number or types of extra experiences such a being could conceivably have. The author appeals to five structural features of consciousness—dimensional, precision, combinatorial, syntactic, and integration—to clarify and answer questions about the conceivable upper bounds of consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 11, 2026
Jeffrey Yoshimi, Jason A Ford
The authors propose a structuralist account of conscious experience by examining the parts that compose the minimal sense of self. Using a variational method, they argue that the feeling of agency, the feeling of privacy, and the feeling of “me-ness” are separable components that can be dissociated in various combinations, as supported by empirical and clinical cases. Removing or altering any of these components changes the whole experience in a holistic but determinate way, much like altering an instrument in a symphony alters the overall sound.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 9, 2026
Sascha Benjamin Fink, Andrew Y. Lee
Conscious experiences have many structural features, such as color experiences varying in hue, saturation, and brightness, decreasing visual acuity from the center to the periphery of the visual field, pain experiences in different magnitudes, and temporal experience flowing as a continuous stream. Structuralism, broadly defined, is an approach to consciousness research focused on investigating these structures. Varieties include methodological structuralism, which holds that scientific methods yield knowledge only of structural features, and ontic structuralism, which claims consciousness is nothing but structure. This special volume collects articles on the structures of conscious experiences and their role in research, aiming to establish a foundation and agenda for a structuralist research program in the science of consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 31, 2026
Alexander F G Maier, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
A structural approach to studying consciousness maps mathematical descriptions of qualia—the qualitative aspects of conscious experience—onto mathematical structures derived from brain activity and neuronal connectivity, aiming for general mappings akin to physical laws like E=mc². This review surveys literature from psychophysics and the neuroscience of consciousness, critically examines classical models such as Shepard's pitch helix and visual color space, and explores the structure of their neuronal correlates. It extends analysis to visual similarity spaces, including face space and general image spaces, and suggests that exact experimental comparisons yield an enriched psychophysics that expands single-valued measures into richer scientific exploration.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 30, 2026
Johannes Kleiner
The Newman problem threatens structural assumptions and theories across philosophy and science. In consciousness science, it undermines structuralist approaches and theories of consciousness if not properly addressed. However, when phenomenal spaces and mathematical structures of conscious experience are correctly understood, the Newman problem does not arise. Consciousness science must carefully choose which definition of structure to adopt; doing so makes the problem disappear.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 5, 2026
Jennifer Windt, Manuela Kirberg, Tomas Andrillon
This special issue brings together theoretical and empirical work on dreaming and waking mind wandering, two areas with growing attention in cognitive neuroscience and psychology but limited philosophical exploration. Despite being studied separately, phenomenological and neurophysiological overlaps between waking mind wandering and sleep-related experiences indicate they are closely linked. These connections prompt questions about the nature and functions of spontaneous mental phenomena, their relationship to wakefulness and sleep, and implications for theories of attention, action, and consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 22, 2025
M. Päßler, Adrien Doerig
Conscious experiences are defined by their relationships to one another, and these relationships are mirrored by brain structures. However, simply matching brain patterns to mental patterns is not enough to explain what a conscious experience is about. The brain's downstream processes must actively use those patterns in a way that preserves their structure and influences behavior. Purely anatomical or overly broad causal brain structures fail this test, but activation patterns can succeed when embedded in the right computational context. This means that local structuralist theories, which ignore how brain activity is used by subsequent processing, are incomplete. Any adequate structuralist account of consciousness must incorporate computational context.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
November 5, 2025
Valerie Bernard
Jean-Paul Sartre argues that the feeling of phenomenal presence—the sense that what one experiences is actually there—accompanies only perception, not imagination or dreaming. This puts him against contemporary philosophers like Amy Kind, who holds that imagination provides a sense of “presence in absence,” and Jennifer Windt and Michael Barkasi, who claim that dreaming involves immersion in a spatiotemporal dreamscape. The paper explains how Sartre’s theory of perception shares key objectives with contemporary naïve realism, and that his rejection of imaginative presence is consistent with why a naïve realist would also reject it. It contrasts Sartre’s view of why a dreamer lacks true immersion with the views of Windt and Barkasi.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
November 3, 2025
Miguel Ángel Sebastián
Phenomenal structuralism argues that what makes a conscious experience what it is depends on the relationships among its qualities, not on any intrinsic features of those qualities. This view, while illuminating, creates serious problems for comparing experiences across different people or even within the same person over time. If experiences are individuated only by their relational structure, it becomes doubtful that two people can ever share the same kind of pain, raising ethical concerns. The approach also fails to explain how different sets of qualities could lead to the same discriminations. The paper suggests representationalism as an alternative that might preserve the strengths of phenomenal structuralism without these problematic consequences.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 23, 2024
Nadine Meertens
This is a book review of Walter Veit's 'A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness,' which argues for a pragmatic, evolutionary approach to studying animal minds. Veit proposes that consciousness is a biological trait that varies across species and can be investigated through comparative methods, avoiding anthropocentric biases. The review discusses the book's main arguments, including its call for a more inclusive science of consciousness that considers diverse animal taxa. It highlights Veit's synthesis of philosophical analysis with empirical research, aiming to bridge gaps between disciplines. The review evaluates the book's contributions and limitations, noting its relevance for researchers in philosophy, biology, and psychology.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
April 19, 2022
Matthew Johnson
A review of Chris Letheby's 2021 book 'Philosophy of Psychedelics' highlights its role as a foundational work for understanding the modern therapeutic science of psychedelics. The book explores key philosophical topics that are likely to shape the future of psychedelic therapy, including how philosophical inquiry can deepen insights into therapeutic mechanisms and ethical considerations. The review emphasizes that philosophy will become increasingly important in the psychedelic therapy renaissance, and Letheby's work is positioned to influence responsible development and treatment advancement. The text recommends the book to both the public and academics seeking a deeper understanding of psychedelic medicine.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 7, 2025
Teresa Campillo-Ferrer, Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez, S. Torres-Platas
Lucid sleep, the ability to remain critically self-aware during sleep, extends beyond lucid dreaming to include out-of-body experiences, sleep paralysis, and witnessing-sleep described in Indian philosophy. In a case series, four individuals reported lucid sleep episodes in a laboratory after a novel induction method combining pre-sleep meditation and visual stimulation. Five episodes were captured: one lucid dreamless sleep, one out-of-body-like experience, and three lucid dreams. Sleep was monitored with wearable EEG and submental EMG. Experiences occurred during both REM and non-REM sleep. The protocol may guide future research on lucid sleep and altered states of consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 20, 2024
Elly Vintiadis
The author argues that Lisa Bortolotti's book, Why Delusions Matter, provides a novel approach to countering a key criticism of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy known as the Comforting Delusions Objection. This objection suggests that the benefits of such therapy may rely on comforting but false beliefs. Bortolotti's work is presented as offering a framework to address this concern.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
October 5, 2022
J. Bruineberg, R. Fabry
Everyday smartphone use is often unrelated to any specific cognitive task, a phenomenon captured in psychological research as absent-minded use or inattentiveness. The authors argue that such task-unrelated smartphone use shares many features with mind-wandering and propose the concept of 'extended mind-wandering' by integrating second-wave extended cognition theory with mind-wandering research. They suggest that this conceptual framework can accommodate the functional and phenomenological characteristics of these common cases and can enrich current work on digitally extended cognition by specifying how the attention economy influences our cognitive dynamics.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
June 3, 2022
Ishan Singhal, Ramya Mudumba, N. Srinivasan
Integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness claims an identity between its causal structure and phenomenology, aiming to explain consciousness by prioritizing first-person experience. However, this critique argues that IIT's phenomenological analysis is incomplete because it overlooks temporality. The theory takes a non-identical illusionist stance towards experiences of continuity, flow, and extent, and isolates temporal grains to a single timescale, missing the multi-scale nested nature of temporal phenomena. The authors contend that IIT needs an axiom for time to refine its causal structure and account for temporal experiences, proposing such an axiom and discussing potential revisions to the theory.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 19, 2021
Sascha Benjamin Fink, Lukas Kob, Holger Lyre
Distinguishing neural correlates that are genuinely tied to conscious experience from those that are merely coincidental requires a principled approach. The authors propose neurophenomenal structuralism, which relies on the fact that phenomenal experiences form structures of similarity and difference. By using these structures to individuate experiences in neuroscience and psychophysics, they derive a structural similarity constraint: a neural activation must preserve the structure of the associated phenomenal domain to qualify as a neural correlate of consciousness proper. An example from Brouwer and Heeger illustrates the constraint. This approach aims to refine the search for neural correlates by filtering out merely statistical associations.