Abstract Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are behavioral programs, often involving practices like meditation, that aim to cultivate mindfulness , the nonjudgmental awareness of present-moment experience. A growing body of evidence suggests that they are effective for treating a range of physical and mental health conditions. Critics, however, argue that much of this evidence is biased,...
Abstract The extended mind thesis (EXT) has profoundly reshaped debates about the nature and boundaries of cognition. Yet its ethical and political implications remain underexplored. While much of the literature emphasizes the therapeutic and enhancement promises of cognitive technologies, less attention has been paid to the structural risks associated with technological dependence, including...
Abstract This paper takes a broadly pragmatist, rather than metaphysical, approach to collective attention. So, I ask not whether collective attention really exists and what it is, but whether and how we should ascribe attention to collectives. Focusing on the attribution of attention to whole societies, I argue that certain collective-level phenomena are analogous to aspects of individual...
SyntheseAugust 26, 2026Fabio Patrone, Giuseppe Spolaore
Abstract The Extended Mind Thesis (EM) claims that cognitive processes can extend beyond the body into the environment. While EM has often been taken to support the Extended Self Thesis, its implications for personhood, personal identity, and personal composition have rarely been explored in a systematic way. This paper aims to fill the gap by connecting EM with the rich metaphysical debate on...
Abstract This article develops the concept of minimal self-sentience to extend the phenomenological notion of minimal self-awareness to non-human animals. Drawing on the phenomenological account of minimal pre-reflective self-awareness (e.g., Zahavi), and on the view that such a minimal form of self-experience can be attributed to non-human animals (e.g., Strawson), we propose to deepen the...
Abstract The hard problem of consciousness, introduced by Chalmers (1995, 2017), reveals that merely dispositional and relational physical properties cannot ground phenomenal properties. Panpsychism attempts to address this problem by positing that micro-objects possess phenomenal properties that ground our phenomenal properties. However, Nagasawa (2021) has argued that panpsychism faces the...
This article develops a metaphilosophical account of the constitution of selfhood by situating contemporary debates on the minimal and the narrative self within Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the manifest and the scientific images. I argue that neither a minimal nor a narrative conception of the self straightforwardly entails a commitment to either image. Rather, depending on how they...
Abstract This article makes the case that, in the Lacanian sense, Large Language Models (LLMs) should be viewed as superior masters of the Symbolic. Thanks to their vast training data and disembodied architecture, LLMs achieve hyper-efficient mastery of the chain of signifiers, outperforming most humans in linguistic, discursive, and inferential tasks. However, precisely because they operate...
Abstract The phenomenological concept of minimal selfhood (understood as the pre-reflective dimension of ‘for-me-ness’ or ‘mineness’ that is constitutive of the first-personal character of experience) is often treated as so formal and abstract that it remains neutral regarding embodiment. This paper challenges that view through a neurophenomenological approach that circulates between empirical...
Say you undergo an ankle sprain, or you take a bite of your favourite dessert. In the ankle case, you’re prompted to take a painkiller to eliminate the painfulness. In the dessert case, you’re prompted to continue eating the dessert to get more pleasure. These sorts of experience-directed actions suggest three things. First, that experiences have affective qualities (e.g. unpleasantness and...
The minimal self hypothesis holds that the inherent sense of “for-me-ness” or “mineness” in every plain conscious experience provides a basic solution to the problem of self-individuation: namely, how to establish intrasubjective unity and intersubjective boundary. I advance two objections to this account. First, the minimal self hypothesis fails to present the most parsimonious conception of...
Abstract Descartes’ cogito ergo sum emerges as an answer to an epistemological crisis: the search for an indubitable foundation in a world vulnerable to error, dreaming, and deception. In the contemporary landscape, however, cognitive activities once experienced as “internal” (reasoning, planning, remembering, writing) are increasingly delegated to artificial intelligence systems. This paper...
Abstract Radical Enactive Cognition challenges teleosemantic representationalism while proposing a naturalistic, content-free account of basic intentionality – “Ur-intentionality” – based solely on teleofunctional resources such as information-as-covariance and natural selection, a view known as Teleosemiotics. This paper argues that this appropriation is insufficient to ground content-free...
Abstract Longstanding philosophical debates about the nature of perception revolve around a clash between Direct Realist and Indirect Realist conceptions of vision. These deny and affirm, respectively, that vision involves awareness of mental images which represent the physical objects of sight. The assumption that ‘the’ common-sense conception of vision is Direct Realist shapes these debates....
Abstract Our experience is pervaded with affect—positive or negative felt valence. Affect is thought to play a crucial role not just in emotions and moods, but also in perception, cognition, and decision-making. What might happen, then, if affect is disrupted? Subjects suffering from depersonalization give us an idea. There is significant evidence that depersonalization is in part an affective...
A central question in discussions about artificial consciousness is whether biological properties are necessary for consciousness. In this context, biological properties are often divided between two types: biological substrates as opposed to biological functions. In this paper, I argue that the prospects of convincingly ruling out consciousness in (conventional) AI by appealing to a biological...
Debates on selfhood typically locate its basis either in the minimal experiential structure of consciousness or in the representational mechanisms underlying de se thought. Both approaches treat selfhood as a matter of content—phenomenal or conceptual—and thus overlook the organizational conditions that make such content possible. I argue that neither the lived “for-me-ness” emphasized in...
Abstract The flow state has historically been a source of mystery and, at times, mysticism. Whereas some accounts of flow allude to the flowing individual’s conscious absorption and focus, others imply that the individual is, in fact, not conscious. If we take this latter model seriously, our intuition that those in flow ought to be creditable for their acts becomes deeply threatened. However,...
Abstract A topic of interest in the philosophy of perception concerns similarities and differences between the senses. One way of approaching this issue is to focus on structural differences. An interesting question in this respect concerns whether, and in what respect, perceptual modalities other than vision might possess a spatial field which is in some respects similar to the visual field....
Abstract A recurring finding in psychedelic-assisted therapy is that the subjective intensity and quality of the psychedelic experience contribute more to therapeutic outcomes than the administered dose. To explain why such experiences are therapeutic, many have appealed to what these may reveal or enable, such as the types of mental representations that can be acquired, the expansion of what...
Psychedelics are being investigated as therapies for major depression and other mood disorders, but the “tripping” experience remains poorly understood. This paper argues that the epistemic dimensions of psychedelic experience should be considered more carefully, both to characterize better the psychedelic state and to develop and explain therapeutic approaches. I propose a tripartite framework...
The Fading Qualia Argument is perhaps the strongest argument supporting the view that in order for a system to be conscious, it does not need to be made of anything in particular, so long as its internal parts have the right causal relations to each other and to the system’s inputs and outputs. I show how the argument can be resisted given two key assumptions: that consciousness is associated...
This paper deals with the impact of the extended mind thesis on relational egalitarianism: the now-dominant view on (the politically relevant form of) equality within contemporary political philosophy. If proponents of the extended mind thesis are right, I argue, persons have two core interests that arise from their relationships with elements of the external environment: an interest in an...
Abstract This paper outlines an approach to analysing minimal cognition that brings out its social and historical dimensions. It proposes a model, the coordinated systems approach (CSA), which understands cognition as a coordinated coalition of loosely autonomous processes responsible for goal-directedness in a system. On this view, even individual cognition has something of a social flavour to...
Phenomenal structuralism is the view that understanding consciousness requires describing its relational and structural properties, a perspective that can have implications for both explaining why experiences feel the way they do and identifying the neural correlates of consciousness. Phenomenal structuralism has gained considerable traction in recent years, with proponents advocating for its...