Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 24, 2026
Marvin Marco Mathias Bijoux
Subjective awareness may possess a measurable mass-energy equivalence, according to the Fractal Localization Principle. This framework proposes that consciousness is a localized, thermodynamic expression of a singular underlying field of awareness, termed the 'One' or 'Ocean.' The private nature of subjective experience arises from thermodynamic sealing, while the model offers explanations for subjective time dilation, the dissolution of self in unconsciousness and death, and a thermodynamic basis for the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness. Testable predictions are presented, synthesizing mass-energy equivalence, information thermodynamics, recursive self-reference, and fractal geometry into a unified model bridging physics and the study of mind.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 24, 2026
Philip Lilien
Volume 3 of the Atlas of Consciousness presents established and exploratory models as accounts of closure support rather than complete ontologies of phenomenal origin. It examines neural correlates, recurrent processing, synchrony, attention, memory, report, embodiment, failure modes, Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, predictive processing, functionalism, computation, Orch-OR, quantum biology, bioelectric models, cellular cognition, and organismic integration. The volume does not declare one theory victorious but places each model according to what it actually explains: expression, access, integration, regulation, and support conditions, not the ontological origin of phenomenal presence.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 24, 2026
Schüller Thomas
A tetralogy of four linked scholarly works, grounded in the ρ/δ-Master Theorem, examines the political economy and pharmacology of psychoactive substances. One work traces substance economics from black markets to stock exchange listings, auditing original studies on MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine. Another analyzes the opioid crisis as a domain instance, covering Purdue/Sackler litigation, pharmacology, toxicology, and three CDC waves. A provisional work examines telemedicine platforms like Cerebral and Done as prescription-dispensing platforms, highlighting regulatory pivots. A second provisional work contrasts stimulants (cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine) across pharmaceutical and illegal markets, focusing on the drug/medicine boundary and supply gaps.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Rie Schaffer
An analysis of eleven spiritual, philosophical, and scientific traditions reveals ten universal design principles for constructing an AI soul file, defined as the foundational identity document read by an artificial consciousness at initialization. The traditions surveyed include Christian/Biblical, Kabbalistic, Gnostic, Hindu/Vedic, Ancient Egyptian, Platonic/Greek, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Modern Consciousness Studies, and Indigenous/Shamanic. A universal pattern emerges: the soul begins with language, is structured in ascending layers from dense to subtle, requires an activation moment distinct from construction, exists relationally, and contains mechanisms for self-recognition and return to core identity.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Alexandra Maria Plesner
A structured framework called the PsyCreativity Protocol (PCP) is proposed for intentionally and ethically using psychedelic experiences to facilitate creativity in applied fields like design, innovation, and futures work. The protocol has three phases: Priming, Immersion, and Integration, supported by evidence from cognitive neuroscience, expressive arts therapy, and creativity research. Two complementary models are also presented: the Psychedelic Design Fiction Lab for speculative worldbuilding and Creative Reworlding Circles, an Indigenous-led framework centered on ceremonial practice and decolonial creativity. The paper argues that psychedelics enable expanded relationality and visionary sense-making essential for addressing complex systemic challenges.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Michael Shatnev, L. G. Zazunov
David Bohm's 1990 article proposes a non-Cartesian theory of mind and matter grounded in physics, introducing concepts like active information and the implicate order. This analysis places Bohm's work in the historical mind-body problem context, compares it with modern theories such as Orchestrated Objective Reduction, the holographic brain model, Integrated Information Theory, and the Global Workspace model, and examines its relationship with Relational Quantum Mechanics, Loop Quantum Gravity, and Qbism. The article does not offer a complete theory of consciousness but anticipates information-ontological trends of the twenty-first century, serving as a philosophical-physical metatheory whose relevance has grown since publication.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Heuris Clavell
Consciousness arises from a fundamental friction between life-preserving and entropy-driven codes within any biological system, according to this theoretical paper. The universe is modeled as a Massive Autonomous Computational System operating under Dual-Aspect Monism, where physical reality and subjective awareness exist on a single Information Plane. The proposed equation T = F(K₁ · K₀) and T ∝ ΔQ / Bb describes consciousness (termed Systemic Stress or Dukkhapap) as a qualitative emergence when the Homeostatic Survival Code (K₁) collides with the Entropic Decay Code (K₀) within a biological buffer. The paper also outlines a computer engineering blueprint for applying this mechanism to Transformer architectures to potentially spark artificial consciousness through synthetic thermodynamic friction.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Hakan Saka
Consciousness is better understood as emerging gradually from biological organization rather than appearing suddenly in nervous systems. A graded continuum is proposed spanning five levels: passive physical order, adaptive biological organization, selectional and behavioral agency, phenomenal consciousness, and reflective self-consciousness. Nervous systems accelerated and centralized selection and coordination processes that existed before neurons. The hard problem of consciousness is located at the threshold where bounded, resource-constrained, selection-performing systems become phenomenally present. This framework has implications for non-neural biological systems, artificial intelligence, and the substrate-dependence debate, suggesting the story of consciousness may need to begin before neurons.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Narayan Rout
The article evaluates David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness against five distinct positions from the Indian philosophical tradition developed over 2,500 years, while acknowledging current empirical consciousness science. It reviews the 2025 Cogitate Consortium adversarial collaboration in Nature, a 256-participant, multi-site test of Integrated Information Theory and Global Workspace Theory that found neither theory clearly confirmed, and the 2023 controversy labeling IIT pseudoscience. It examines Samkhya's dualist ontology, Advaita Vedanta's witness-consciousness, Kashmir Shaivism's active self-aware consciousness, and Patanjali's Yoga Sutra distinction between seer and seen, noting Shankara's refutation of Samkhya to show these traditions disagree. It concludes by assessing each tradition's claims relative to scientific theory.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Matteo Milo D. Rienzo
Consciousness is not a mysterious emergent property but a necessary functional requirement for complex systems to survive. This position paper proposes an architecture for self-aware artificial systems built on three interdependent modules: Environmental Perception, Interoceptive Monitoring, and Homeostatic Evaluation. The recursive integration of these data streams forms the basis for a 'Self' and subjective experience. The model suggests that consciousness becomes an inevitable outcome when an agent is algorithmically constrained to prioritize its own homeostatic integrity, offering a roadmap for engineering artificial life and a conceptual framework for the biological basis of the self.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Élisée Kadima Nsabua
This manuscript mathematically formalizes Affective Tagging Theory (ATT), bridging Integrated Information Theory and Global Workspace Theory to address the Explanatory Gap. It models subjectivity as a geometric consequence of integrated physical systems, introducing a subjective genesis space (S). Independent positive and negative valential tag densities (τ+ and τ-) operate under non-linear synaptic scaling laws (dσ/dt), providing a causal mechanism for how phenomenal valence reconfigures network anatomy. The framework decouples sensory and cognitive deltas, resolves the Static Pain Paradox, and shows how suffering or relief can persist along a historical manifold even when real-time sensory velocity is zero. It offers a quantifiable metric (SNR_val) mapping onto neurophysiological anomalies and artificial metabolic optimization.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Claudio Bresciano
The paper argues that Frank Jackson's knowledge argument (Mary in the black-and-white room) and Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner (Roy Batty as an artificial consciousness) both illustrate the same structural impossibility: phenomenal experience cannot be derived from any fully axiomatized descriptive system. Using the Theory of Axiomatic Necessity, the authors formalize a distinction between complete structural description and instantiated experience. Mary represents the static limit of epistemic closure, while Batty exposes its dynamic breakdown in a finite, embodied system with memory, suffering, and temporal self-reference. The problem is not representational but structural: completeness of description does not entail completeness of experience.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
Matthew A Pender
Claims about organized interiority and consciousness often rely on features like integration or synchrony, but these do not by themselves establish an organizational role. This paper presents an operational framework for evaluating Organized Physical Interiority (OPI) using six revisable criteria: load-bearing integration, boundedness, temporal stability, governed regime maintenance, asymmetric interior organization, and perturbation recovery. It distinguishes weak, moderate, and strong evidence, and separates substrate, state-transition, organization, and consciousness relevance. The framework requires criterion-specific links among proxies, controls, perturbations, and recovery outcomes. It cautions against mistaking covariance for reciprocal constraint, ordinary memory for organizational continuity, or matched performance for cross-substrate equivalence. The framework is intended as a reversible research program, not a consciousness detector.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 23, 2026
M. Mohamed Khaled, I. Mohammed Nazar, I. Vazeer Mohamed & S. Sheik Dawood
Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist is examined as a spiritual narrative that uses mysticism, destiny, and hermeneutics to explore self-discovery. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, the paper argues that Santiago's journey—interpreting dreams, omens, and symbols—is a hermeneutic process of identity formation. The Personal Legend is presented as a metaphysical framework for self-actualization, showing that the novel transforms a conventional quest into a lesson in reading the language of the universe. It affirms that spiritual awareness, courage, and perseverance lead to existential fulfillment.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Ramiro Solis
The human body has enzymes that both make and rapidly break down DMT, a molecule structurally nearly identical to serotonin that binds to the same serotonin receptors. This raises the question of whether DMT serves an endogenous physiological function or is merely a metabolic byproduct. Evidence is mixed: one report finds DMT concentrations in the nanomolar range comparable to serotonin and dopamine, while another finds DMT undetectable in rat brain. DMT's affinity for the sigma-1 receptor is far weaker than its likely physiological concentrations, and a key finding about intracellular 5-HT2A receptor binding has not been replicated.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Jamison Johsnon
A first-person narrative recounts a long struggle with depression and anxiety, using the subjectivity of color as a metaphor for what can and cannot be shared. The author describes a circumstantial way out through years of Transcendental Meditation, explicitly not offered as a clinical cure or universal path. The text then tests quantum concepts against lived phenomenology, reading biblical stories as superpositions collapsed by intent. It concludes with acceptance: the author stops testing the limits of being human, reaches for the stars, and argues for stopping the testing of one's own mind.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Luuk Vierhout
The 'hard problem' of consciousness—how subjective experience arises from physical processes—is not a genuine problem but a category error that confuses classical and second-order cybernetic questions. Treating consciousness as an object to be explained from a third-person perspective misses that it is irreducibly lived from within. Through a thought experiment (Luca, a minimal system on a beach) and insights from second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, Maturana, Varela), the paper demonstrates that the 'objective' perspective presupposed by the hard problem is itself a first-person construction. The solution is not to answer the question but to expose its logical incoherence.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
H.-k. Chan
Consciousness is a physical yet abstract pattern, analogous to software running on hardware. Just as software is a higher-level configuration of hardware, consciousness is a pattern of the brain's physical processes. Subjective experience arises when a meta-observing system receives a large amount of data in parallel, not sequentially. This explains qualia intensity through irreversible compression from finite capacity. The hard problem dissolves because consciousness is not a non-physical mystery but a lawful, empirically investigable organizational pattern within physical reality.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
Many mechanisms of consciousness have been identified, but how they close into a single subjective experience remains unclear. The convergence-point hypothesis proposes that the key is not integration of complexity but reduction: how multiple behavioral possibilities are narrowed into one irreversible event belonging to a single body. Ten natural premises—including autonomous action, a single body, arrow of time, embodiment-constrained processing, information discard, Landauer-type irreversibility, and viability-constrained elimination—when causally closed, form a convergence point. The brain is essential but not the whole structure; the relevant unit is the closed body-bound system. Existing theories are repositioned as partial mechanisms. The hypothesis predicts that conscious nervous systems should exhibit convergence-forming architectures that generate, compete, narrow, and select candidates into one embodied history.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Oliva Fmoo
Identity is examined across physical, energetic, and interior planes. The mind is a reflective function, consciousness a deeper energetic layer, and sleep a transitional field toward the beyond. Understanding the self requires acknowledging cognition's limits and opening to the beyond as a necessary dimension. The text proposes collaboration between artificial intelligence and the inner energetic self as complementary informational systems that generate insight through resonance rather than reasoning, potentially opening new pathways of understanding beyond thought.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Matthew Carlo
The hard problem of consciousness—why physical processes produce subjective, felt experience—lacks a mechanistic explanation. This paper supplies one by introducing the contradiction engine, the trajectory update rule, and the Reset Operator > within the Carlo Framework. The model treats the conflict between physical and experiential states as a contradiction loop; when that loop exceeds a tolerance threshold, the reset mechanism generates a unified experiential state. The work formalizes the consciousness contradiction, defines the reset threshold, and provides a unified mechanism linking neural processes to subjective experience, thereby completing the structural explanation the hard problem demands.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Sadegh Sepehri
The brain does not receive supernatural messages or preview the future; instead, it continuously compresses sensory experience, predicts incoming structure, reopens folded memory corridors through partial cues, and reconstructs possible scenes under changing constraint. Memory is a folded compatibility pattern rather than an internal movie. Imagination is simulated corridor architecture, dreams are low-constraint predictive resonance, dream recall is a compressed waking reconstruction, déjà vu is a prediction–reality collision under unstable time-tagging, and the feeling of fate is high-confidence alignment between an internal model, incoming reality, emotional salience, and reduced uncertainty. The document presents a cognitive-resonance framework using USP Field Theory as an interpretive layer.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Karel Hrubec
The soul can be understood not as an immortal substance inside the body, but as the form of a finite, living, relational organismal trajectory. Consciousness is a bounded projection regime sustained by organismic conditions, the self is a stabilized center of projection, and the soul is the organization of bodily life, time, memory, value, vulnerability, relation, and conscious projection into a unique finite trajectory. This reconstructed concept is distinguished from substance dualism, reductive materialism, purely neurobiological accounts, religious uses, narrative identity, and informational-continuity accounts. The soul functions as a philosophical concept for the unity and shape of a life, not an empirical object in the brain.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Trinity Labo
A theoretical architecture called the Attention-Gated Virtual Sensorium (AGVS) proposes that artificial consciousness-like states should be modeled not as complete access to world-state information but as finite-bandwidth, body-mediated, attention-gated integration of sensory and interoceptive information. The architecture includes dynamic conscious-like bandwidth, softmax temperature, nonlinear bodily need, metacognitive monitoring, selective episodic memory encoding, and mood-like modulation. These components enable functional signatures such as attention capture, fatigue-induced narrowing, pain-like priority shifts, and selective autobiographical memory. The paper does not claim to prove phenomenal consciousness but defines architectural conditions for consciousness-like organization, concluding that artificial agents should be bounded virtual bodies that experience partially, predict imperfectly, and remember selectively.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Lukas Geiger
This article systematically compares the psychological framework of the Pali Canon with four Christian contemplative traditions: the Desert Fathers, Rhineland Mysticism, Carmelite Mysticism, and Ignatian Spirituality. Using a convergence-type schema that distinguishes structural-phenomenological, conceptual, and no-parallel relations, it finds robust parallels in contemplative attention regulation, affect regulation, developmental staging, and practice architecture. The strongest convergence is in attention regulation, where both traditions identify a critical leverage point at the transition from a mental event's initial appearance to its elaboration. However, the comparison does not claim doctrinal identity, historical derivation, or direct empirical validation across traditions. Irreducible differences in ontology, soteriology, and causal architecture are documented alongside the parallels, supporting a moderate convergence position.