Theories of consciousness are commonly divided into two broad categories: functional and metaphysical. Functional theories seek to explain how cognitive processes generate conscious experience, whereas metaphysical theories attempt to explain why there is something it is like to be a conscious system. These two traditions have largely developed in parallel, rarely intersecting. In this paper, I...
From an epistemological standpoint, attributing sentience to non-human animals poses significant challenges. The apparatus that records the electrical activity of the brain can only demonstrate that a certain specific neurological state is taking place. It is impossible to empirically prove that an organism has subjective, qualitative consciousness. Whether an animal has this kind of...
This article examines how relational environments shape the structure of consciousness in contexts that require the temporary suspension of cognitive control. Through the case of birthing consciousness, conceptualized as an adaptive altered state that may emerge during physiological labor, the article argues that certain forms of consciousness are constitutively relational. While dominant...
1. When it comes to mental states posited by folk psychology, many of us have long had a nagging sense that neither industrial-strength realism nor eliminativism is a satisfactory option. Realists ...
Scholars of religion have had a long-standing interest in the study of mystical experiences (Schmidt, 2003), dating back to the work of William James (James, 1902). James listed ineffability, noeti...
Philosophical PsychologyApril 10, 2026Eric Rundquist, Diego Nicolás Monasterio López, Juan Jonathan Oyarzo Alvarado et al.
This article presents the results of a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of metaphors used in a series of interviews by a single healthy volunteer following four moderate-to-high dosing sessions with psilocybin. The interviews were conducted by members of a human psychedelic research lab in a deep-sampling fMRI and EEG brain imaging study, allowing the participant to recount experiences under the...
Illusionism holds that phenomenal consciousness, understood as the intrinsic qualitative character of experience, is an illusion generated by cognitive systems. While attractive in its parsimony, illusionism is often criticized as imcomplete: it denies qualia without explaining why the appear so compelling. This paper develops the Wet Room model as a constructive extenstion, arguing that...
Standard accounts of object perception force us to choose between the unity of objects and the particularity of objects. The unity of objects is explained in terms of general, repeatable representations and a mental act of predication that binds those representations. The particularity of objects is explained in terms of particular, unrepeatable representations and a pre-predicational mode of...
Şerife Tekin’s Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry argues that mental distress and psychiatric disorder are best understood in relation to the self. This kind of approach confronts the Freud problem and the associated objectivity challenge. In this Commentary, I suggest a way of complementing MuSe that helps address both the Freud problem and the associated objectivity challenge. I argue that...
The Higher-Order Theory (HOT) of consciousness holds that mental states become conscious when they are represented by another mental state. Most HOT theorists maintain that it is the higher-order, rather than the lower-order, state that supplies the content of conscious experience. This view entails that, for a state to become conscious, its content must be represented in the brain regions that...
We argue that the powerful transformative effects of mystical-type experiences can be understood using the same machinery that underlies insight problem solving, and that both mystical experiences and insight are species of a genus of “realization experiences”: experiences wherein some phenomenon or piece of information becomes suddenly experienced as real or true. Specifically, we argue that...
A major symptom of “Derealization/Depersonalization Disorder” is derealization. People who experience derealization report a sense of unreality when it comes to their surroundings, yet they still perceive those surroundings. How can this possibly be accommodated by a naive realist theory of experience – a theory on which the real external world is central to explaining the phenomenology of...
ABSTRACT Self-transcendent experiences (STEs) represent profound shifts in cognition and consciousness, possessing significant transformative potential. With growing scientific interest in these phenomena, we propose the cognitive continuum as a unifying framework. Grounded in enactive cognitive science and complex dynamic systems perspectives, this approach takes the embodied person, embedded...
Psychedelic research has shown that the effects of serotonergic substances, such as psilocybin and LSD, are strongly influenced by the interaction of substance, set, and setting. Mystical-type experiences, often induced by psychedelics, are not solely driven by pharmacological mechanisms but emerge from a dynamic interplay between the psychological state (set), external environment (setting),...
Illusionism states that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. While illusionism is controversial, it is a serious contender among theories of consciousness. We argue that it has substantial and non-trivial implications for non-human consciousness research (NHCR), particularly for the study of the distribution of phenomenal consciousness across beings. If...
Mystical experiences are generally considered to be rare and special experiences, characterized by feelings of unity and self-loss. Still, certain researchers have recently proposed that mystical experiences could be placed on a continuum with more common and mundane experiences. In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory study, the goal of which was to identify ordinary...
ABSTRACT This article investigates the neurophysiological basis of autonomously induced mystical states of consciousness (MSCs), with a focus on speculative mysticism, a tradition that centers on intellectual contemplation rather than emotional or sensuous experience. Drawing from historical sources, the paper explores the role of paradox and contradiction in mystical thought. It argues that...
In active inference, mystical experiences (MEs) could be characterized as adaptive learning events, where the ordinary expectations of an agent become challenged or change permanently. In the context of psychedelic-induced MEs, these (temporary) changes in information processing have been attributed to increased brain entropy, the effects of which have been seen to reorganize deep...
According to a venerable phenomenological claim which is still quite authoritative nowadays, our phenomenal field is necessarily unified at a time t . This means that everything we simultaneously experience in the first person is subjectively, representationally or at least phenomenally unified. Against this background, Tim Bayne (2010) provides an insightful overview of the various descriptive...
ABSTRACT This essay considers how best to understand the relation between sacred values and rational reflection in a life of devotion. It focuses on a disagreement between Lisa Tessman (2014) and Paul Katsafanas (2022) concerning whether devotion requires refraining from justificatory reasoning about one’s commitment to a sacred value. After objecting to their accounts, it provides an...
The current revival of interest in classic psychedelics and other psychoactives such as ketamine and MDMA, coupled with changes to their regulatory status in many jurisdictions, necessitates rigorous ethical guidelines both within and beyond clinical and scientific contexts. This paper examines crucial ethical, philosophical, and policy considerations needed to ensure psychedelic use across...
Psychedelic drugs have been used for centuries all around the world for recreational purposes and in religious and healing practices as means to mystical experiences that lead to healing, insight a...
Psychedelics are known to elicit intense and meaningful subjective experiences. These subjective experiences are supposed to play a major role in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. However, not much attention has been paid to the role played by emotions in these experiences. In this paper, we argue that typical psychedelic-induced experiences share many phenomenological features with two...
Could there be 7/8 of a conscious subject, or 1.34 conscious subjects, or an entity indeterminate between being one conscious subject and seventeen? Such possibilities might seem absurd or inconceivable, but our ordinary assumptions on this matter might be radically mistaken. Taking inspiration from Dennett, we argue that, on a wide range of naturalistic views of consciousness, the processes...
ABSTRACT Psychedelic-assisted therapy is an emerging and promising field for the treatment of various psychological disorders. The concept of integration is integral to the success of such interventions. While the term integration is used frequently and in numerous ways within clinical literature, it remains poorly defined, and inconsistency in its use has led to confusion in practice. This...