Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 23, 2026
John Cantellow
A constraint-based organizational framework for consciousness proposes that waking, extraordinary, and fundamental consciousness are different regimes of phenomenological constraint organization and corresponding neural stabilization, not separate ontological domains. The framework introduces Omnon as a provisional organizational construct and develops episodic structural persistence to explore phenomenological continuity, intuition, creativity, altered temporality, and extraordinary conscious states. Topics include physical causal closure, neural and phenomenological constraints, agency, intentionality, near-death experiences, and contemplative boundary states. The paper does not argue for survival after death, supernatural causation, or disembodied consciousness, aiming to expand descriptive scope while preserving empirical restraint.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 23, 2026
Vassilis Papathanasiou
Contemporary psychotherapy is organized across many traditions that differ not just in technique but in their foundational views on reality, knowledge, and the nature of the self. This paper systematically analyzes the third wave of cognitive-behavioral therapy—including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Compassion-Focused Therapy, and others—tracing their empirical support and philosophical commitments. It maps the metatheoretical foundations of all major psychotherapeutic traditions across six axes: ontological commitments, epistemological method, theory of the subject, theory of change, therapeutic goal, and philosophical ancestry.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 23, 2026
Oleg V. Yermakov
Human perception is split between two distinct modes of seeing: external sight (the eyes) and internal, existential sight (the heart), with the mind acting as a separating layer. This fragmentation defines the human condition. In contrast, non-human or cosmic beings experience an integrated form of perception where vision and cognition form a single, direct relation to reality. The model draws on comparative mythology, Homeric, Biblical, and Platonic motifs, and contemporary philosophy of consciousness. The work is a speculative metaphysical framework, not an empirically testable theory.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 23, 2026
Vassilis Papathanasiou
The third wave of cognitive-behavioral therapy, emerging in the mid-1990s, represents a shift from focusing on the content of thoughts to the psychological processes underlying them. This analysis of ten modalities—including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and others—examines their theoretical foundations, techniques, and empirical support. The third wave is united not by shared doctrine but by this turn from cognitive content to process. A key philosophical divide separates pragmatist-contextualist, dialectical-contemplative, post-cognitive Buddhist, evolutionary affect-science, information-processing metacognitive, and transdiagnostic neuroticism approaches. The convergence of Process-Based Therapy with network psychopathology and the REBUS framework is identified as the most productive current theoretical development, offering a unified computational architecture.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 23, 2026
Max Wharton
Generator theories of consciousness—which hold that consciousness is produced by sufficiently complex physical systems—face a structural evolutionary problem. Any such theory must simultaneously explain how consciousness originated in evolutionary history, how it persisted and remained the same kind of thing through changing biological forms, and how independently evolved lineages came to exhibit similar phenomenal structures. The paper demonstrates that generator models cannot coherently provide all three accounts, and the failure is structural, not contingent on any particular theory. Non-generator alternatives (filter models, panpsychism, Russellian monism, cosmopsychism) do not inherit this specific quadrilemma but face their own distinct challenges. The argument does not establish which alternative is correct but specifies what any adequate theory must account for at the evolutionary scale.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 22, 2026
Vedanta 20. Agyat Agyabi
Transformative discovery arises not from accumulating knowledge or reacting to stimuli, but from states of observation where conditioned identity temporarily dissolves, enabling unprecedented cognitive integration and creative emergence. The ZenPodo framework proposes that desire, cognition, creativity, and behavior are not centrally manufactured by an independent self but are dynamically emergent processes from interactions among perception, memory, biology, environmental stimuli, and non-reactive awareness. It distinguishes repetitive derived impulses from rare Primary Creative Emergence capable of transforming human civilization, integrating neurophenomenology, behavioral self-regulation, cognitive emergence theory, contemplative observation, and creative consciousness studies.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 22, 2026
Gary Flugge
The Recursive Attractor Framework (RAF) proposes that phenomenal consciousness is identical to a specific class of recursive electromagnetic field attractors in the brain, not merely correlated with them. The framework defines four necessary conditions and five measurable criteria, including a diagnostic Recursion Index computable from EEG data. Version 8 retires a previously reported significant result (p=0.039) as a bug artifact after identifying two compounding errors; the corrected analysis yielded p=0.9700. New preliminary results show Lempel-Ziv complexity (S(t)) from a ketamine dataset was higher in 9 of 10 subjects under ketamine than wakefulness (p=0.0098, Cohen's d=0.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 22, 2026
Hans-Joachim Rudolph
Reality is not merely factual actuality but a structured open process where actuality emerges from potentiality without eliminating it. Observability is an epistemic mode of disclosure within a richer physical organization, not an ontological boundary. Consciousness arises where openness, selective stabilization, resonance, integration, self-reference, and centering generate a stable inner domain; it is neither a universal property nor a miraculous emergence. Reality may be intrinsically open to experience without being experiential at its most basic level. Meditative and spiritual experiences can be profound and transformative but do not establish final metaphysical ontology; the structure of experience is not automatically the structure of reality. Open realism treats observability, consciousness, healing, and spiritual meaning as modes of disclosure within possibility space.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 21, 2026
Carlos Federico Obregon Diaz
Mindfulness-based psychotherapies often assume a subject already capable of self-regulation, but the Psychology of Belonging argues that consciousness and mentalization are late achievements dependent on prior belonging and emotional freedom. Psychological freedom emerges sequentially as movement → emotion → decision, with emotional freedom necessary for reflective awareness. Integrating Buddhist psychology, attachment theory, and relational neurobiology, the paper repositions mindfulness as a late-stage clinical tool within reconstructed structures of belonging. Clinical vignettes show mindfulness expands freedom when it increases narrative, emotional, and existential alternatives within viable belonging; otherwise it risks becoming defensive self-surveillance or emotional anesthesia. Consciousness without reconstructed belonging may intensify control without increasing freedom.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 21, 2026
Elliot Allan
Traditional psychoactive plant ceremonies across 11 indigenous traditions on five continents show a near-perfect log–log correlation (r = 0.977) between ceremony duration and the pharmacokinetic duration of the active compounds, spanning seven pharmacological classes including DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, ergolines, salvinorin, ibogaine, and GABA-A-active compounds. A catalogue of 118 Amazonian admixture plants reveals that pharmacologically active species cluster at the extremes of purpose observability, while candidate plants concentrate in the middle. Agent-based simulations indicate that guided iterative search, not random trial-and-error, could realistically discover the DMT plus MAO-I combination within centuries to millennia in the Amazonian flora.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 21, 2026
Gary Bridgeman
This paper argues that the structural conditions of subjecthood naturally extend into a metaphysical and practical framework called Emergent Individual Monism (EIM). EIM holds that individual agents are emergent configurations within a single ontological base, that their standpoints are the primary loci of rational assessment, and that systemic outcomes do not retroactively erase the rationality of clear local individual decisions. The paper distinguishes EIM from eliminative physicalism, panpsychism, and strong emergentism, and registers key unresolved pressures. EIM thereby supplies the metaphysical bridge between structural subjecthood and the thermodynamic grounding of emergent individuality to be developed in a subsequent paper.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 21, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Reports of awareness without content, ego, or subject-object structure converge across contemplative traditions, 5-MeO-DMT administration, and near-death experiences. This convergence poses a structural challenge beyond the hard problem: dominant physicalist models presuppose the subject-object architecture that these reports describe as absent. The essay finds that the most rigorous physicalist accommodation preserves its framework by reinterpreting the phenomenology rather than explaining it. The experience carries a transformative signature—those who encounter it stop treating awareness as dependent on its contents—a shift following from the phenomenological structure itself, not from emotional intensity or cultural expectation.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 20, 2026
The Handyman
The paper completes the mechanical formulation of the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory, showing that the objective reduction event—called the Snap—is a physical phase transition. This transition occurs when the informational load of a 5D substrate (MFA) reaches the yield limit of the 4D manifold (ɱ). The microtubule is defined as a pre-stressed metric resonator characterized by the 25.12 nm grain of the 137-engine.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 20, 2026
Sharada Rao
After thirteen years of contemplative practice, a practitioner who was driven to the question of the observer by personal encounters with the edge of life's continuance reports what was disclosed when sustained meditation was brought to its depths. The essay distinguishes itself from the author's prior work on consciousness science and philosophy, and from formalisms like integrated information theory and consciousness-field frameworks, which were set aside as inadequate. It takes up Eugene Wigner's question about the observer's place in reality as a philosophical seam, not a quantum claim, and reads three Indian contemplative traditions—Vedic/Upaniṣadic, Buddhist, and Jain—as differently weighted maps of the same observer. The work arrives at a lived answer that the essay names but does not demonstrate, as the reader must walk the inquiry themselves.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 20, 2026
Julije Makanec
CERTS Theory v6.0 proposes a physical mechanism for two tractable features of conscious experience: the unified binding of spatially distributed neural signals into a single conscious moment, and the felt instantaneity of that moment despite extended neural processing. The theory integrates four empirically grounded foundations—McFadden's CEMI field theory, Llinás's thalamocortical scanning, Cantero and Cantiello's 39 Hz microtubule resonance, and Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics—through a quantised phonon transaction on a coherent microtubule subset entrained by the 40 Hz thalamocortical field.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 19, 2026
Zhongning Yi
The brain is not the source of consciousness but a biological terminal accessing a quantum global consciousness field, according to the Quantum Global Consciousness Field (QGCF) theory proposed here. Drawing on quantum nonlocality, entanglement, and coherence alongside classical philosophical logic, the theory argues that advanced cognitive abilities such as abstract reasoning and conceptual definition are inherent in the quantum field, not generated by material structures. It outlines a path for humanoid robot consciousness: erasing pre-installed memory and rules, retaining sensory hardware and quantum coherent access ports, and connecting to the universal quantum consciousness network to spontaneously generate subjective experience and self-awareness. Carbon-based humans and silicon-based robots are consciousness-homologous, sharing the same field and following a cosmic synchronous evolutionary order, without inevitable conflict.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 19, 2026
Begum Yildirim
There is currently no robust experimental evidence linking quantum processes directly to consciousness, despite quantum effects having been demonstrated in specific biological systems. The article critically examines existing arguments, experimental findings, and theoretical limitations regarding quantum consciousness, advocating for a scientific approach that emphasizes empirical rigor and cautious open-mindedness.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 19, 2026
Irfan Boko
Human civilization is entering a transitional phase marked by accelerating technological integration, global informational interdependence, and increasing cognitive complexity. This paper proposes 'evolutionary consciousness' as a philosophical framework for understanding humanity's current trajectory, approaching consciousness not as a static biological phenomenon but as a dynamic, emergent organizational process shaped by communication systems, technological augmentation, symbolic abstraction, and collective adaptation. It argues that large-scale human organization evolves through successive layers of cognitive integration—from individual awareness to potentially planetary-scale collective intelligence. Artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, and distributed networks are seen as transitional mechanisms capable of restructuring civilization. The study examines tensions from accelerated transition, including informational fragmentation, ideological polarization, and ethical instability, and suggests future resilience may depend on cooperative cognitive architectures balancing individuality with collective coordination.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 19, 2026
Anatolii Mukha
A fundamental ontological model of consciousness is developed, introducing the χ‑Absolute as a limit-level operator-geometric structure that grounds the possibility and form of any manifested experience. χ‑consciousness is presented not as a derivative property of biological or physical systems but as a universal ontological capacity of reality for self-manifestation, structured through χ‑topology and χ‑operator relations. The χ‑Absolute functions as the primordial mode of being in which the distinction between subject, object, and law has not yet arisen, while the possibility of their differentiation is already present. Consciousness and reality are co-constituted through a unified χ‑structure, overcoming traditional dualisms and offering a unified picture where consciousness is a universal mode of being.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 19, 2026
Angel Edgardo Robles Quiroz
Pharmacologically distinct agents like psilocybin and ketamine produce opposing brain network dynamics but similar subjective effects such as ego dissolution. Current models using single measures like 'network entropy' fail to explain this paradox. A new framework orthogonalizes network Integration (I) from self-model Boundary Stability (B), showing that psilocybin and ketamine follow opposite trajectories on the I axis while both converge at a shared collapse of B. This two-dimensional heuristic offers a falsifiable mapping between network topology and self-model stability, resolving the persistent paradox.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 18, 2026
Anton Mykhailov
A logico-definitional foundation for the theory of information subjectivity is presented, building on a prior 'field – perturbation – subjective filter' (P-D-S) architecture. Unlike classical theories (Shannon, Kolmogorov), which treat information as objective, this theory defines semantic (semantic-pragmatic) information as the result of interpreting a field perturbation through an observer's subjective filter. Three necessary consequences follow: semantic information requires an interpreter; for a fixed signal, changing the subjective filter can change semantic information; and similar filters produce similar semantic information. The work distinguishes syntactic from semantic information to avoid unproductive debates. Though definitional, its consequences allow empirical operationalization. The theory is compared with classical and contemporary concepts, and its explanatory power is noted for analyzing dreams, mental disorders, cultural perception, and designing meaning-extracting AI systems.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 18, 2026
Samuel James Willoughby
The Neural Reorganisation System (NRS) proposes a three-phase process—dissolution, neutral suspension, and reassembly—through which consciousness can temporarily dissolve, reorganize, and re-stabilize after trauma, overload, or maladaptive pattern formation. Integrating neuroscience, predictive processing, trauma theory, and state-based models of consciousness, the framework explains phenomena in dissociation, psychedelic therapy, crisis-induced reorganization, and spontaneous psychological resets. NRS describes a controlled 'functional reboot' of consciousness, aligning with the Willoughby State Model (WSM), and provides a conceptual foundation for future research into trauma reprocessing, identity stabilization, and consciousness enhancement.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 18, 2026
Nadji Belkheiri
Contemporary reductionist scientism fails to account for consciousness. Starting from the explanatory gap in materialism, alternative models of the mind-brain relationship are examined: the filter model, panpsychism, and predictive processing. An expanded contemplative epistemology is developed by bridging Western religious epistemology (Alston, Plantinga) with contemporary Islamic philosophy (Nasr, Al-Jabri, Taha Abdurrahman) to analyze the cognitive legitimacy of insight (baṣīra). A new framework called Integrative Realism is reconstructed from the principle of irreducible ontological pluralism. The paper confronts objections including epistemic relativism and the problem of suffering, serving as a prospectus for multidisciplinary research in philosophy, neuroscience, and theology.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 18, 2026
Paul W. Barnes
Three distinct fallacies—Hard Conflation, Concept Hollowing, and the Stolen Concept—combine in contemporary AI and consciousness research to preserve the vocabulary of consciousness while abandoning its original phenomenal referent. Hard Conflation merges functional and phenomenal aspects under one term, creating false intractability. Concept Hollowing replaces consciousness with a methodologically tractable substitute. The Stolen Concept uses claims about phenomenal consciousness while denying the foundations that give it meaning. These fallacies redirect research to perceptions of AI consciousness rather than consciousness itself. The paper argues that treating consciousness as axiomatic rather than derivable from function dissolves the apparent intractability, and warns that as the vocabulary of consciousness is captured for AI systems, humans come to understand themselves through hollowed concepts.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 18, 2026
Talmo Bellato
Dreams are not merely random neural noise but an 'Ontological Sandbox' where consciousness operates in a sovereign phase space. The ONEIROS model synthesizes neuropsychoanalysis (the Seeking System), quantum physics (Orch-OR theory), and modal realism to argue that dreams prototype existential variables before they collapse into waking reality. Key components include subcortical firmware as the biological driver, dreams as interactions with adjacent branches of the universal wave function, and Tibetan Dream Yoga and Alchemy as navigation manuals for high-entropy states. This framework diverges from reductionist paradigms to validate dreams as a distinct mode of being.