Philosophical Psychology
July 30, 2026
Mikołaj Kotuła
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...
Philosophical Psychology
July 7, 2026
Tamás Demeter, Adam Toon
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 ...
Philosophical Psychology
April 27, 2026
Michiel van Elk
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 Psychology
April 10, 2026
Eric 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...
Philosophical Psychology
March 18, 2026
Matthew Cornelius
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...
Philosophical Psychology
March 17, 2026
Kael Mccormack
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...
Philosophical Psychology
February 27, 2026
José M. Araya
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...
Philosophical Psychology
2026
Juensung J. Kim, Kadi Tulver, Jaan Aru et al.
1 citation
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...
Philosophical Psychology
December 19, 2025
Craig French
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...
Philosophical Psychology
December 16, 2025
Hüseyin Beyköylü, John Vervaeke, D. Meling
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...
Philosophical Psychology
November 30, 2025
Julian Kiverstein, Hüseyin Beyköylü, Michiel van Elk
3 citations
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),...
Philosophical Psychology
November 11, 2025
Leonard Dung, François Kammerer
14 citations
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...
Philosophical Psychology
November 6, 2025
Florián Cova, Angela Gaia F. Abatista
1 citation
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...
Philosophical Psychology
November 4, 2025
G. Mariotti
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...
Philosophical Psychology
October 22, 2025
Sonia de Jager
1 citation
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...
Philosophical Psychology
September 26, 2025
Charlotte Gauvry
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...
Philosophical Psychology
September 8, 2025
Mina Caraccio, Katherine Cheung, Sebastian Porsdam Mann et al.
3 citations
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...
Philosophical Psychology
July 10, 2025
Elly Vintiadis
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...
Philosophical Psychology
July 7, 2025
Florián Cova, Federico Seragnoli
2 citations
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...
Philosophical Psychology
June 16, 2025
Eric Schwitzgebel, Sophie R. Nelson
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...
Philosophical Psychology
May 29, 2025
T. Dowie
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...
Philosophical Psychology
May 24, 2025
André Van der Braak
3 citations
This article argues that Latour’s concepts of actor-networks and modes of existence make room for a different participatory approach to mystical experiences (MEs), as well as religious experience more broadly, that interprets them as participatory events rather than as the inner experiences of an isolated subject. This alternative Latourian approach to MEs neither assumes the a priori presence...
Philosophical Psychology
May 8, 2025
Peter Sjöstedt-hughes
4 citations
Pantheism – All is God – is the hidden doctrine behind many reported psychedelic-occasioned experiences, both in the literature and in clinical trials, yet its meaning is little understood in the clinical and therapeutic spheres. This essay therefore seeks to remedy this deficit by offering a fresh outline of Pantheism via the exploration of its etymology and history, the meanings of pan/all...
Philosophical Psychology
December 19, 2024
Paweł Gładziejewski
Our conscious experience seemingly involves the subjective sense or feeling of the passage of time. However, in recent years, several authors have denied that such an aspect or feature of experience can be found. If the experience of the flow of time exists, it remains elusive and intangible. My aim here is to try to pin it down. For this purpose, I will investigate acute disturbances of normal...
Philosophical Psychology
November 25, 2024
Riccardo Miceli Mcmillan, Jack Reynolds, Anthony Vincent Fernandez
3 citations
Current evidence suggests that the efficacy of psychedelic therapy depends, in part, on the character of psychedelic experiences themselves. One pronounced aspect of psychedelic experiences is alterations to the experience of time, including reports of timelessness or transcending time. However, how we should interpret such reports remains unclear, and this lack of clarity has philosophical and...