This paper presents a structural account of soul, authenticity, grief, vocation, creativity, and AI-era simulation. Instead of treating soul as a mystical substance, it defines soul as the depth-dimension of human life that exceeds current roles, identities, and narratives while remaining answerable to what is most deeply true in a person’s life. The paper introduces the ideas of the invisible...
This preprint is a theoretical companion to the cECT-SWB benchmark, “Homeostatic Self-World Boundary as an Admissible Task: A cECT Benchmark Toward Minimal Consciousness.” It does not introduce new computational results. Its purpose is to clarify why the admission of a homeostatic self-world-boundary task differs from, and can complement, a Fristonian Markov-blanket account of...
This paper examines two symmetrical fallacies that shape much of the discourse on nondual experience. The first does not consist simply in giving nondual experience a metaphysical interpretation. Rather, it consists in treating a transformation of the experiential field—especially the suspension of the subject–object distinction and the weakening of perspectival self-centering—as if it directly...
We study the application of Baar’s Global Workspace Theory (GWT) to large language model (LLM)-based systems. Specifically, we are interested in the joint behavior of two metrics - system coherence and system diversity. LLM-based systems are chosen since they mimic the human mind. We construct an architecture in which multiple specialist modules compete for access to a shared workspace. By...
Prediction Ledger v0.2 expands the original seed ledger into a broader role-typed evidence update. It preserves the original machine-readable CSV schema, retains the initial seed rows, and adds recent 2024–2026 evidence rows across latent content, access/recruitment topology, no-report paradigms, measurement/report confounds, matched-performance dissociations, and disorders-of-consciousness...
Throughout intellectual history, the relationship between the immaterial aspects of human existence and the physical body has been conceptualized under various guises: the soul-body, mind-body, and most contemporarily, the consciousness-brain problem—symbolized as the psi-phi (ψ-φ) problem. This paper argues that while historical discourse framed the debate in terms of a soul inhabiting a body,...
This speculative paper develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework for the "Why am I me?" problem. It proposes that a unique phenomenal first-person perspective (PFPP) is not generated de novo by the brain, but is a primitive property that accompanies a single, continuous physical history: a spacetime worldline. Neural processes, particularly those of the hindbrain responsible for timing,...
The "hard problem" of consciousness, explaining how physical processes give rise to subjective experience, often leads to speculations beyond empirical science. This article suggests a framework that reinterprets consciousness not as a singular entity but as an emergent, narrativized self-model constructed by the brain. We argue that through the interplay of abstract and inner thought,...
Artificial consciousness is often discussed as if consciousness were the endpoint of increasing cognitive sophistication: more language, more reasoning, more planning, and more self-report. This article develops a different hypothesis. It argues that the most elementary form of consciousness is not discursive thought but affective valuation: the felt significance of a system's own state as...
Debates about consciousness, artificial intelligence, animal minds, and moral status often conflate distinct questions that require different standards of explanation and assessment. This article distinguishes four such questions: subjectivity, moral patiency, personhood, and autonomous will. It argues that current work has made progress on two tasks—functional and phenomenological...
Objectives. This work develops a structural-architectural engagement between Buddhist Psychology and Process-Based Therapy (PBT), including its Extended Evolutionary Meta-Model (EEMM). PBT has incorporated specific Buddhist contemplative practices; the analysis here contributes architectural-level engagement between Buddhist Psychology as a theoretical tradition and the PBT framework. Methods....
A common argumentative move in contemporary philosophy of mind holds that because an artificial system's behavior might reflect mere pattern-matching rather than genuine cognition, observers cannot legitimately attribute consciousness to such systems on the basis of behavioral evidence alone. This paper argues that this move, when examined carefully, collapses into one of two untenable...
in: Antoine Faivre & Wouter J. Hanegraaff (eds.), Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion: Selected Papers presented at the 17th Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Mexico City 1995 (Gnostica 2) Peeters: Louvain 1998., vii-xvii.
in: Wouter J. Hanegraaff & Jeffrey J. Kripal (eds.), Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, Brill: Leiden / Boston 2008 [U.S. Paperback edition: Fordham University Press: New York 2011, ix-xxii.
This paper presents the general framework of a research program in the ontology of coherence. It articulates three distinct levels - physical coherence, living coherence, reflexive coherence - around a central thesis: the real is not given as a set of objects with intrinsic properties, but as a space of configurations, some of which hold and others dissolve. This shift makes it possible to...
in: Antoine Faivre & Wouter J. Hanegraaff (eds.), Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion: Selected Papers presented at the 17th Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Mexico City 1995 (Gnostica 2) Peeters: Louvain 1998., 11-61.
This paper does not offer a total theory of understanding, but rather a thesis about a strong form of it — experiential understanding — and derives its consequences for the contemporary debate on consciousness in artificial systems. The central thesis holds that experiential understanding of a sign does not consist in manipulating its formal structure or relating it to correlated data, but in...
Abstract The present work proposes an extension of the REBUS model (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019) through the introduction of the concept of native entropy: a stable neural configuration characterized by reduced predictive filtering, dominance of bottom-up information flow, and chronic operation near the critical point. It is hypothesized that certain high-cognitive-potential and...
Abstract:The present study explores yoga as articulated within classical Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) and examines its neuro-psychological substrates in the domains of cognitive functioning and emotional regulation. Drawing upon primary sources including the Patanjala Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, and Upanishadic literature, this work delineates the theoretical architecture of yogic...
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness is integrated information, quantified by a measure called Phi, with the proposal developed across four major versions (Tononi, 2004; Tononi, 2008; Oizumi, Albantakis, & Tononi, 2014; Albantakis et al., 2023). The variants share the central commitment that consciousness is identical with integrated information measured by Phi. This...
This paper proposes an architectural model of subjectivity in which consciousness and will are treated as emergent properties of a system combining a living core with a set of conflicting drives, embodiment, stochasticity and a predictive “Big Model” of the world and self. Instead of searching for a “magic step” from neural or computational processes to qualia, the focus is shifted towards the...
This article aims to investigate the perdurable presence of shamanic archetypes across world literatures with a particular emphasis on English and Turkic narrative traditions. As a manifestation of the primordial spiritual practice, shamanism provides a solid framework for understanding the tenacious engagement of humanity with transcendental experiences, healing rituals, the search for...
Silence is often treated as a communicative void, a suspension of meaning, or a disruption of social connection. This dissertation challenges that assumption through an ethnographic study of zazen (seated meditation) at the Bristol Zen Dojo, where silence is not the absence of sociality but its medium. Through sensory ethnography and phenomenological analysis, the findings reveal that shared...