Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Jerome R. Busemeyer, Meijuan Lu
This article examines three distinct but related approaches to the intersection of quantum mechanics and consciousness: quantum consciousness theories, which explore the role of quantum mechanics in understanding consciousness and vice versa; quantum brain theories, which propose that quantum processes in neurons affect cognition and consciousness; and quantum cognition, a field applying quantum mathematical principles to human judgment and decision-making. The author argues that quantum consciousness theories are more relevant to quantum physics than to psychology, quantum brain theories lack clear implications for complex cognition, and quantum cognition avoids addressing consciousness and remains agnostic about quantum brain hypotheses. The article aims to connect these ideas by linking quantum cognition to the other two topics.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Enrico Terrone
The universe can be an object of aesthetic appreciation, and consciousness may either enhance or diminish its aesthetic value. This paper examines how aesthetic appreciation of the universe changes when consciousness is considered, weighing arguments for and against the idea that consciousness enriches the universe's aesthetic worth.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
Martyna Iwanicka-Kabat
Mystical union experiences, such as feeling at one with the divine, involve specific disturbances in how time is experienced through intentionality. This philosophical analysis identifies four such disturbances in mystical unions and compares them to similar temporal disruptions found in psychopathological conditions like psychosis. The author argues that the process of synthesis—how the mind combines experiences into a coherent whole—is central to shaping the temporal dimension of both mystical and psychotic anomalous experiences. Intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward objects, provides a powerful framework for understanding these phenomena.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
Amy Kind
A commentary challenges Josh Weisberg's attempt to debunk the hard problem of consciousness through his automated compression theory (ACT). Weisberg argues that consciousness appears to have exceptional properties inexplicable by science, but ACT provides an easy explanation showing these properties are illusory. The commentary presents the Goldilocks dilemma: either Weisberg's account fails to capture what makes consciousness seem exceptional, or if it does capture it, then ACT cannot adequately explain why consciousness would appear exceptional if it were not. The dilemma suggests it is difficult for explanatory optimists to find a specification of consciousness's exceptional properties that is neither too small to capture exceptionalness nor too big to be debunked.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2025
Giorgio Gronchi, Marco Raglianti, A. Lazzeri et al.
Integrated information theory (IIT) is a leading formal theory of consciousness, and its Python toolbox PyPhi enables system analysis. Computational and empirical constraints make it difficult to test whether higher integrated information values correspond to higher consciousness levels. Using data from a prior study that applied machine learning techniques to derive transition probability matrices among brain states at different consciousness levels, the authors found that integrated information values were not associated with conditions or brain states characterized by greater consciousness. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2025
William Seager
The paper explores a convergence between William James and David Bohm, both of whom envisioned the world as an undivided whole, beyond categories of thought and perception. While Bohm is known for his 'hidden variables' interpretation of quantum mechanics, his deeper metaphysical vision was of a unitary reality. James, from a philosophical and psychological starting point, arrived at a similar holistic view. This shared vision offers a novel approach to the hard problem of consciousness, addressing it in a way that dissolves traditional dualisms.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
James A. Reggia
Conscious experience may arise from electromagnetic waves propagating through time, not just space. Standard Maxwell's equations are likely incomplete; extending them with complex-valued field components implies that electromagnetic fields extend temporally. Applied to the brain's self-generated fields, this hypothesis accounts for the extended duration of conscious moments and the subjective flow of time—phenomena unexplained by current physics. It also reframes episodic memory: recalling past experiences becomes partly a perceptual re-experiencing process rather than pure retrieval from storage. Complex-valued fields substantially increase the explanatory power of electromagnetic field theories of consciousness.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
Marina Weiler, R. F. Casseb, David J. Acunzo
In a pilot study, three participants who claimed to self-induce out-of-body experiences (OBEs) at will were tested in a laboratory. Two reported successful OBE self-induction. Horizontal eye movements measured with electrooculography (EOG) could potentially serve as a time marker of OBE onset: one participant reported generating the instructed eye movement pattern at OBE onset in all three of her sessions, and this was corroborated by EOG traces. The study identifies room arrangement and environmental factors that facilitate OBE self-induction, opening new avenues for laboratory exploration of the neural mechanisms underlying OBEs.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
Chris Percy
Dissatisfaction with traditional methods like logical deduction and experimental falsification for evaluating theories of consciousness has led to exploration of alternatives, including a method termed 'listed requirements.' A structured literature search and critical review identified five candidate lists, which are a promising but insufficient start. The longest list contains 11 items, but across the five lists 19 unique items appear, and taxonomic analysis surfaces at least 30 potential candidates. Four limitations of the method are discussed, arguing it is best used as one tool within a broader assessment strategy. The conclusion outlines a workplan for a sufficiently complete working taxonomy.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
V. O’Reilly-Shah
The state space theory of consciousness proposes that the cortex processes information by using recurrent neural network engines to embed sensory input into a state space, following Takens' theorem. Consciousness arises at the highest-order engines within a hierarchy of parallel pathways, making it a dynamic process rather than a static neuronal state. This reconciles dualist intuitions with a monist perspective. Each individual's neuronal representations develop uniquely due to history-dependent training, explaining the privacy of qualia, cortical plasticity, and heuristic processing. The theory's non-linear dynamics, sensitive to initial conditions, account for ambiguous figure interpretation and suggest a pathway to free will. It aligns with and expands upon higher-order theories, global workspace theories, and integrated information theory by providing a unifying computational mechanism.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Francis Heylighen, Shima Beigi
Subjective experience functions as a mechanism guiding organisms toward beneficial outcomes. In simple animals, this guidance produces fitness-enhancing responses. Human consciousness offers a range of potential developments allowing free choice, modeled as a local prospect: a field of possibilities centered on the present situation and colored by valence. Building on neural models of global workspace and adaptive resonance, the theory suggests such a prospect could be implemented in the brain as a halo of activation diffusing from, and feeding back into, a core of circulating activation. Using qualia inversion, the theory argues it solves the 'hard problem of consciousness' and explains key characteristics like subjectivity, feeling, free will, agency, transience, continuity, integration, selectivity, intentionality, and 'what it is like'.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Perry Hendricks
Philosophical zombies (p-zombies) are beings physically identical to humans but lacking subjective conscious experience. If p-zombies or inverted qualia (where two people have identical physical states but different color experiences) are possible, this is typically taken to support property dualism—the view that consciousness is not reducible to physical states. This article argues that if such scenarios are actually possible, they entail more radical conclusions than previously thought: either substance dualism (mind and body are separate substances), stronger reasons to reject p-zombies and inverted qualia, eliminativism about selves, or a need for defenders to show a disanalogy between traditional arguments and new ones that lead to substance dualism. The author does not defend any option but presents these four possibilities.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
S. Siddharth, Tejas Bhojraj
Russellian panpsychism holds that all fundamental physical entities have inner experiential properties. A major challenge is the combination problem: how micro-experiences combine into the unified experiences of larger beings like humans. This paper defends a Leibnizian version of panpsychism, which denies that micro-experiences ever combine. The authors address two objections: that denying combination (mereological nihilism) is implausible, and that Leibnizian panpsychism implies human experiences are simple physical entities. They argue both objections can be answered and that this view deserves serious consideration as a theory of consciousness.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire, Tra-Ill Dowie
Third-wave cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has misconstrued mindfulness interventions as cognitive restructuring and behavioral modification because it fails to engage with mindfulness's embodied dimensions. When the mind-body relationship is understood through embodied cognition, mindfulness's process of change becomes clearer. Mindfulness, as a skillful mode of embodied social cognition, cultivates operative intentionality by attending to the lived body and internal representations, allowing intervention in the mind-body system's complex feedback structure to influence cycles of organismic self-regulation. Mindfulness-based exposure therapies are understood not cognitively or behaviorally but through insights from the practitioner's orientation toward internal representations and how these habituated patterns transform their pre-reflective enactment of self and world perception.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2024
Hedda Hassel Mørch
If panpsychism—the view that all things are associated with consciousness—is true, it may imply that egoism, or bias toward what we normally consider the self, is not only immoral but fundamentally irrational or imprudent. The author argues that panpsychism suggests a sense in which 'we are all one,' challenging the rational basis for prioritizing one's own interests over others. This practical or ethical implication extends the philosophical theory beyond the mind–body problem into questions of how we ought to live.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2024
Michael Tye
Phenomenal consciousness—what it is like to have an experience—has no borderline cases: an experience is either conscious or not. The best explanation for this absence of borderline cases is that phenomenal consciousness is irreducible to physical or functional properties. This leads to a paradox that is best resolved by adopting a form of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality. The version of panpsychism developed here explains differences in the phenomenal character of experiences via differences in what the experiences represent. This approach is compatible with representationalist claims about phenomenal consciousness and offers a straightforward solution to the problem of combination—how micro-level conscious experiences combine into macro-level conscious experiences.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2024
A. Hudetz
The debate over whether consciousness is unidimensional or consists of multiple fundamental dimensions is examined. Clinical assessment distinguishes awareness (content) from wakefulness (arousal), but this conflates first-person experience with third-person observation. The state of consciousness is better defined by subjective level and content, which are interdependent, with wakefulness as a predisposing factor. Unidimensional models fail to capture the variety of qualitatively different experiences in normal and altered states. Cognitive and abstract multidimensional models have been proposed but lack axiomatic support. A novel multidimensional characterization based on the brain's macroscale functional geometry offers an alternative, empirically grounded model whose dimensions are defined by neurofunctional attributes, representing the state of consciousness as a point in functional space.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2024
Paul F. Cunningham
Philosophical debates about the 'hard problem' of consciousness—how physical matter gives rise to subjective experience—cannot be resolved by reasoning alone and must be grounded in empirical research on psychosomatic phenomena and exceptional human experiences. The article reviews alternative perspectives on the mind-matter relationship and explains why traditional formulations have been intractable. Evidence that the mind modulates bodily systems challenges the classical quantitative-qualitative distinction and the concept of causal closure. A novel theory combining bottom-up panpsychism and top-down non-theistic panenpsychism is proposed, offering practical implications for rethinking the mind-matter question.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2024
Richard H. Jones
Analytic philosophers have debated whether experiences of 'pure consciousness'—non-intentional, selfless states often associated with mystical experiences—are intelligible. This examination considers their critiques and arguments for and against the coherence of such experiences. It also asks whether neuroscience can determine if these experiences are possible, concluding that philosophical analysis remains central to understanding their nature and possibility.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2024
P. Goff
Panpsychism has recently regained attention as a theory of consciousness that might avoid the problems of physicalism and dualism. Panpsychism comes in two forms: strong emergentist and weak emergentist, each facing challenges similar to those of dualism or physicalism, respectively. This paper develops a new hybrid view where subjects of experience are strongly emergent but their phenomenal properties are weakly emergent. The author argues that this hybrid avoids the difficulties that plague both physicalism and dualism, as well as the analogous challenges undermining standard panpsychist views.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2023
Miriam Kyselo
A non-dualistic epistemology, grounded in Francisco Varela's early work 'Not One, Not Two' (1976), supports the argument that the human self is fundamentally social and co-embodied, not merely individual. The enactive view of the self, which Varela and Evan Thompson developed, treats the self as self-organized and organismically autonomous, but it remains ambiguous whether social interactions are constitutive of the minimal self or only a secondary, shaping factor. Drawing on Varela's epistemology, the author argues that the minimal self-organizational network of the human self inherently includes both individual bodily processes and joint co-embodied processes, making the self constitutively social from the start.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
September 30, 2023
Eric Schwitzgebel, Sophie R. Nelson
The article argues that some possible minds, like the 'ancillary mind' from Ann Leckie's science fiction novel Ancillary Justice, occupy a grey zone between a single mind and a communicating group, making them neither clearly one person nor many. This challenges standard conceptions of personal identity and subject individuation. The authors suggest that if such minds defy discrete countability, some actual minds on Earth might similarly blur the line between introspection and communication. They propose extending Kammerer and Frankish's research programme to study not only possible forms of introspection but also mental activity that lies intermediate between introspection and communication.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2023
T. Cochrane
The motivation-affect system controls a subtype of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness, thereby prioritizing those contents for action. This view fleshes out the global workspace theory of consciousness and explains some phenomenal characteristics of conscious experience.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2023
Natasha Tassell-Matamua, Kiri MacDonald-Nepe Apatu, Te Rā Moriarty et al.
Māori knowledge systems contain understandings of consciousness, soul, and spirit, though no single Māori words directly translate these English concepts. Despite ongoing colonization, these knowledges persist as essential to Māori views of everyday life and reality. The article outlines Māori socio-historical context and cosmogony, then discusses popularized interpretations of consciousness, soul, and spirit from an Indigenous Māori perspective, emphasizing the complexity of translation. The authors present a brief overview rather than an exhaustive account.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2023
Nuria Ciofalo
Indigenous psychologies of the Nahua and Maya peoples of Mexico are grounded in their cosmogonies, philosophies, and spiritual traditions, offering distinct conceptions of consciousness, psyche, spirit, and health that encompass relations with all Earth beings, ancestors, and nature. Colonization imposed foreign cosmologies that threatened these systems, yet these communities continue to use plants, mushrooms, and animals to induce altered states of consciousness in sacred rituals and healing. The paper recommends learning from these knowledge and praxis systems to foster a decolonial psychology that may provide alternatives for addressing contemporary challenges.