Abstract AbstractThis paper asks whether first-person subjectivity can be adequately explained in purely physical-functional terms. I approach the question through what I call the AI duplication paradox—the ontological difficulty that arises when one and the same computational architecture is instantiated in parallel across multiple substrates—and argue that functionalism cannot account for the...
Abstract Current medical and ethical standards governing organ harvesting under anesthesia rest on an assumption that has never been formally tested: that the absence of behavioral response and narrative consciousness constitutes the absence of all consciousness. This paper argues that this assumption is both scientifically unexamined and potentially incorrect. Drawing on a documented model of...
This essay examines heartfulness as the living reconduction of consciousness to the hṛdaya, understood as the cognitive and ontological axis of contemplative life. It articulates the sādhana of the instant, formal meditative practice, mantra, and Dinacaryā as mutually implicated dimensions of a single movement in which recollection educates life and life, in turn, deepens contemplative...
Independent Scholar working at the intersection of consciousness studies, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, social neuroscience, predictive processing, and participatory sense-making.
Buddhist Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM) also known as Metta Bhāvanā (Benevolent concern and compassion), is a contemplative practice to develop unconditional goodwill, compassion and benevolent concern for both oneself and others. There are increasing indications that LKM can improve emotional functioning, psychological well-being and physiology. This is a theoretical review of the effects of...
The present qualitative study aims to explore the lived experiences of sleep paralysis, a complex phenomenon which caters to physiological, psychological and cultural dimension in a human. Using a qualitative research design, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants to gather an insight on the role of anxiety and supernatural interpretations among young adults...
We examine the claim that a minimal-conceptual, “bare” awareness underlies ordinary experience, and whether this pre-conceptual awareness (PCA, or minimal-dual awareness) should be understood primarily as an earlier, biologically rooted developmental baseline, or as a disclosure of a deeper ontological reality. The Retrieval hypothesis treats PCA as a cognitive–neural default mode that can be...
Abstract This article systematically constructs an Eastern introverted empirical paradigm rooted in Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist traditions, in contrast to the dominant Western extroverted empirical model. While the latter relies on external observation, experimentation and quantitative analysis as standard scientific norms, the Eastern cognitive path centering on self-reflection, mental...
An original cross-tradition concept map (Hekhal Rosetta engine) of architectural cartographies of the contemplative ascent: the seven heavenly heikhalot (palaces) of late-antique Jewish mysticism, the ten Sefirot of the Sefer ha-Bahir, and the seven dwellings (moradas) of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle. The structural parallel across all three is striking; the historical transmission across...
This paper develops an invariant-based organizational framework for extraordinary conscious experiences. Building upon previous work concerning constraint organization and organizational continuity, the analysis shifts attention away from variable experiential contents and toward conserved phenomenological characteristics that may persist across diverse forms of extraordinary experience. Six...
This paper contributes to the literature by proposing the Grounded Narrative Framework, a physicalist account of consciousness that replaces unfalsifiable explanatory-gap arguments with three empirically tractable diagnostic criteria. Unlike existing frameworks — including the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, and Integrated Information Theory — the Grounded Narrative Framework...
Preprint, June 2026. Under journal submission. Also deposited at PhilSci-Archive. This paper articulates the ontology of the Tibetan Dzogchen ("Great Perfection") tradition as four precise postulates and assesses it as a Lakatosian research programme in quantum foundations. The postulates: (P1) there are no absolute observed events — actuality is relative to the systems that register it; (P2)...
This document sets out a theoretical framework — not a finding — for a proposed approach in which a person's own deeply meaningful music serves as the substrate for an intervention intended to extend the positive affective state that music evokes beyond the listening session itself. The framework is pre-empirical: hypotheses are stated to be falsifiable, mechanisms are ranked by evidence, and...
This interdisciplinary research monograph examines a broad range of Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs), including Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), Reincarnation Memories (RMs), Deathbed Visions (DBVs), Terminal Lucidity (TL), Shared Death Experiences (SDEs), and Mystical Consciousness (MC). These phenomena have been reported across cultures and historical periods and continue to attract...
This working paper presents three falsifiable experimental proposals derived from a systematic critical review of consciousness science (companion paper: Oliva, 2026a). Each proposal targets a specific, unaddressed gap at the intersection of brain biomineralization, quantum biology, and established neural correlates of consciousness — gaps that have remained open for 2 to 22 years despite being...
This research paper titled “Rebirth and Near-Death Experiences: A Comparative Study” presents an interdisciplinary analysis of two widely discussed phenomena in consciousness studies. The study examines empirical findings, psychological interpretations, neuroscientific explanations, and survival-based hypotheses related to rebirth reports and near-death experiences (NDEs). Drawing upon...
Von Ethnopharmakologie zur klinischen Psychedelika-Therapie — Christian Rätsch, Stanislav Grof und der Übergang zur evidenzbasierten Forschung billingual
UPDATED 2026-06-09 Corrected dataset attribution from Timmermann et al. (2019) to Pallavicini et al. (2021) UPDATED 2026-01-21 Background: Psychedelic substances produce profound alterations in conscious experience, yet the neural mechanisms underlying phenomenal richness remain poorly understood. Static measures of neural integration and complexity have shown limited success in predicting...
This paper documents a multi-year self-observation project on lucid dreaming, systematically recording and analyzing the characteristics of dream flow, consciousness control, and subjective experience during the lucid dream state. The work provides a first-person phenomenological analysis of lucid dreams, exploring patterns in dream clarity, stability, and volitional control. This paper...
52 validation analyses across 6 datasets, 148 subjects, and 1,267 awakenings. No dataset-stage combination showed evidence of above-chance generalization after bootstrap testing. Dataset identity dominates predictive variance (74.5%). All code and data publicly available.
This paper proposes a phylogenetic theory of consciousness origin: consciousness is not an inherent property of the nervous system, but an evolutionary strategy of global information active mobilization that emerges when core value conflicts cause normative computation to fail, forcing the organism to restore behavioral determinacy from a certainty vacuum. The paper critically re-examines...
Contemporary psychology generally views identification as one of the mechanisms of psychological development, socialization, and personality formation. This paper proceeds from a different assumption. Identification is not a separate psychological mechanism but rather a defective mode of the fundamental mechanism of creative imagination. The central thesis of the paper is that there are not two...
Abstract Why does some monitoring become reportable awareness while other monitoring remains local or behaviour-guiding? Dynamic Integrated Consciousness Theory (DIC) synthesizes evidence from intact, lesioned, perturbed, anaesthetized, sleep-state, and disorders-of-consciousness studies into a mechanistic scaffold for this transition. It separates five typed burdens: organized self-reference...
This paper proposes a perspectival dual-aspect monism: the view that reality is composed of a single class of fundamental events, each of which admits two complete but mutually exclusive descriptions — an interior description in terms of experience and an exterior description in terms of physical structure. The fundamental event is named the Jay and is identified with the actual occasion of...
The paper is the third article in the Pali-Psycho series. It compares the Pali Canon with the Desert Fathers, Rhineland Mysticism, Carmelite Mysticism, and Ignatian Spirituality. The analysis uses the convergence-type schema developed in the preceding integrative article and distinguishes empirical, structural-phenomenological, conceptual, and no-parallel relations. The central result is...