ISSN 1355-8250
117 papers in the library · 108 citations · publishing 2021-2026
Journal of Consciousness Studies August 1, 2026 Justin Tiehen, Ariela Tubert
We explore and argue for the view that intelligence beyond a certain threshold is negatively correlated with consciousness, so that the more intelligent a system is, the less likely it is to be conscious. ‘Intelligence is the enemy of consciousness’, as we put it. This view entails that superintelligent AI models are likely to be zombies. After presenting an initial defence of the view that...
Journal of Consciousness Studies August 1, 2026 Mark Solms, St John Grimbly, Bruce Bassett et al.
Creatures that display ‘hedonic place preference behaviour’ are thought by many scientists to experience feelings, on the assumption that their attraction to pleasure-producing substances which lack nutritional value (e.g. cocaine, morphine) cannot easily be attributed to unconscious instinctual behaviour. In this paper, we discuss how a simple artificial agent that instantiates attributes of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies August 1, 2026 Tim Bayne
Is the problem of artificial consciousness a fundamentally scientific problem, one that we should attempt to address by means of scientific discovery? Although a positive answer to this question is widely assumed, there has been surprisingly little explicit discussion of this question. That neglect is unfortunate, for the issue is central to how we approach the challenge of artificial...
Journal of Consciousness Studies August 1, 2026 Helen Yetter-Chappell
As we construct increasingly complex artificial intelligences, the question of their moral status becomes all the more pressing. But answering this question alone isn’t enough to answer the deeper question of how we ought to treat AIs. To answer this, we need to know about their interests. This, in turn, requires knowing about the contents and valences of their mental states. Focusing on large...
Journal of Consciousness Studies August 1, 2026 Geoffrey Lee
In the current debate about AI consciousness, philosophers tend to agree that the potential for AI consciousness raises profound moral questions — for example, some philosophers think that we may imminently create systems that deserve rights similar to those of humans. But it is also widely agreed that it will be very difficult to tell whether an artificial system is conscious, so we may be...
Journal of Consciousness Studies July 29, 2026 Jonathan Simon
This paper asks: if large language models (LLMs) gave rise to phenomenal consciousness, what would it be like? I argue that if LLMs gave rise to phenomenal consciousness, it would be like being an impartial, improvising playwright rather than a character or a (roleplaying) actor or an author writing a first-personal narrative. My argument has three steps. I first argue that if LLMs give rise to...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Arianne Conty
In this time of ecological crisis, it is essential to recognize the conceptual framework that has facilitated the expropriation of the non-human world. Mind–body dualism must be held accountable for justifying a hierarchy of values that placed the immaterial soul and culture over and against the material body and nature. Today panpsychism is the most promising philosophy to provide a cure for...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Pierre Uzan
This article explores non-local aspects of cognition in two main directions, respectively contradicting the idea that 1) the term ‘cognition’ exclusively refers to the cognitive subject’s intrinsic mental aptitudes and that 2) it is exclusively centred on the subject’s spatial and temporal localization. Following 4E cognition, the first direction mentions quite reasonable externalist and...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Ahmadreza Nourmohammadi, S.M.Hasan A.Shirazi
The term ‘near-death experience’ (NDE) refers to particular encounters reported by individuals who have been revived from the brink of death. The narratives provided by such individuals exhibit a core set of characteristics that are consistent across diverse populations. Although this suggests that NDEs may offer valuable insights into our understanding of the world, many scientists hold the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Tony Nader, Alan R. Madry
This paper contributes to recent efforts to mine Vedanta for a more complete and cogent theory of the nature of consciousness and a solution to the mind–body problem. Various non-dual interpretations of Vedanta share the idea that the sole existent is Consciousness and offer more or less detailed descriptions of the structural dynamics of that Consciousness including how it assumes myriad...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Ramala Sarma
Attaining pure consciousness untainted by material afflictions is the ultimate goal of yoga. It is pursued by stilling mental modifications arising from the false identification of consciousness (self) with non-self. Yoga’s eight limbs aim to free the mind from the sway of materiality, transcending misidentification of self with body. In contrast, perceiving the biological body as inherently...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Claire Petitmengin
Micro-phenomenology, a research method dedicated to the study of lived experience, starts from the observation that a large part of it ordinarily remains invisible, concealed by tensions directed towards its objects. After describing the techniques used by the method to loosen these tensions, the article presents a surprising result: this gesture tends to soften or ‘subtilize’ the structures...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Zhensong Wang
David Chalmers proposed a dual-aspect theory of information to tackle the hard problem of consciousness, aiming for a scientific framework. However, this approach retains elements of Cartesian dualism and its principles — structural coherence and organizational invariance — are insufficiently robust to scientifically ground subjective experiences. Chalmers’ reliance on Shannon’s information...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Michael Huemer
Non-reductive functionalism holds that qualia are distinct, non-physical properties that are caused by functional properties. This view violates the plausible principles that (i) mere dispositional properties lack independent causal relevance, and (ii) convention-dependent properties lack causal relevance. David Chalmers’ main arguments for the view rest on his dancing qualia and fading qualia...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2026 Chang Liu
Integrated information theory (IIT) is celebrated for its formal modelling of consciousness. But drawing on the framework of formal-material ontology, this paper argues that IIT fails to take the qualitative or ‘material’ dimensions of experience into consideration, providing us with a formal skeleton devoid of flesh and blood. Through cases of the natural colour system and the quality space of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies April 1, 2026 Wolfgang Tschacher, Steven Greenwood, Christian Weining et al.
A study of participants attending public concerts that staged classical and contemporary chamber music had the goal to analyse the associations between self-reported experiences and physiological responses, hence addressing a core question of embodied cognition. A sample of 690 participants was recruited, whose physiological signals were recorded with wearable sensors during concerts. After the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies April 1, 2026 Olivier Urbain, Michael Golden
In this article, we engage three fields of study — peacebuilding, musicking, and consciousness — in order to examine potential contributions of these diverse disciplinary perspectives, considered in conjunction, to our understanding of how musicking might contribute to peacebuilding. We first introduce a new, inclusive theory of peacebuilding which links broader concepts from peace studies to...
Journal of Consciousness Studies April 1, 2026 Peter Michael Nielsen, Suraiya Luecke
What is the role of subsonic and low-frequency vibration in consciousness, music, and health? This article draws on neurophysiological, evolutionary, and clinical perspectives to examine the Pacini system — the body's subsonic vibratory perceptual system — and its relation to consciousness studies, music perception, and health and well-being. The Pacini system, while commonly overlooked, is...
Journal of Consciousness Studies April 1, 2026 Steven Jan
Beyond the extra-musical connotations observed in much late eighteenth-century music, pattern recurrence sometimes appears to be associated with a strongly narrative meaning. As an example, certain late works of Beethoven possess a sense of self-'awareness' via self-referentiality. There is the potential for seeing this as the manifestation by music of a degree of independence from the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies April 1, 2026 N. Nielsen
In his recent critique of well-established simplified comparisons between the human mind and AI, Alva Noë encourages us to 'rage against the machine' (Noë, 2024). In this article, I build on Noë's timely encouragement, and sketch perspectives from both music studies and enactivist philosophy in order to interrogate what musicking might add to the debate. As a case study, I explore the recent...
Journal of Consciousness Studies February 1, 2026 Galen Strawson 1 citation
'Consciousness', they say, 'is a mystery'. 'We have no idea what consciousness is.' 'The great intellectual task of our time is to explain the existence of consciousness.' This paper argues that these claims are false. Using 'ψ' to denote consciousness, it argues [1] that we know what ψ is (it's not a mystery); [2] that the idea that we need to explain the existence of ψ begs the question; [3]...
Journal of Consciousness Studies February 1, 2026 Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Assessing theories of consciousness is a challenge. Normative scientific methodology, including falsification and prediction, is notoriously difficult when addressing phenomenal consciousness. For example, it is often less than obvious that the claimed predictions of theories reflect the actual essences of those theories. I suggest two 'orthogonal' approaches that, while not dispositive in...
Journal of Consciousness Studies February 1, 2026 Karen Crowther, Hedda Hassel Mørch
In 'Superpsychism', Susan Schneider and Mark Bailey (this issue) propose that space-time and ordinary (human-level) consciousness both emerge from a fundamental, non-spatio-temporal level of reality consisting of a network of maximally coherent, zero entropy quantum entanglement relations, termed prototime, which also instantiates a fundamental form of consciousness, termed superconsciousness....
Journal of Consciousness Studies February 1, 2026 Barbara Montero
Might the seat of conscious experience exist in 'prototime', a conjectured aspatial, quasi-temporal reality out of which space-time emerges? Schneider and Bailey argue that if space-time is emergent, this might help us to understand the place of consciousness in the physical world. Although I agree that their hypothesis suggests a possible solution to the 'hard problem' of consciousness — the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies February 1, 2026 Sara Ekenstierna
In this article, Schneider and Bailey's prototime interpretation of quantum mechanics is explored in relation to David Bohm's deterministic non-local hidden variables theory, and his later conceptualization of an implicate order, which is a theory of complementarity rather than determinism. Schneider and Bailey argue that quantum entanglement occurs not in space-time but in a fundamental...