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
Uziel Awret
Physicalists need to explain why consciousness seems to be incompatible with physics. This 'seeming' is attributed to psychological reasons by eliminativists and to conceptual confusion by nonreductive physicalists. However, as a pre-Socratic naturalist, I find the most satisfying possible solution to this 'seeming' to emerge from the 'riches of physics', that is, from discovering physical...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2026
Tam Hunt
Time is the erotic unfolding and re-folding of the universe. This paper presents a metaphysical framework grounded in evolutionary panpsychism and process-relational philosophy that addresses fundamental questions in consciousness studies through a novel synthesis of Whiteheadian metaphysics, Hunt and Schooler’s general resonance theory, and electromagnetic field approaches to consciousness....
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
Garrett Mindt
In a recent paper, Schneider and Bailey (this issue) argue for the view superpsychism by way of their 'prototime interpretation', which argues that entanglement occurs in an aspatial/prototemportal level from which, they argue, space-time and consciousness arise. In this essay, rather than arguing whether superpsychism/the prototime interpretation is correct or preferable to other views in the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2026
Baptiste Le Bihan
Schneider and Bailey's 'Superpsychism' advances the prototime interpretation of quantum mechanics, on which entanglement unfolds in a non-spatio-temporal arena. By locating maximal consciousness at this fundamental level, they aim to gain leverage over both physicalism and cosmopsychism. I argue, however, that the view encounters two issues. First, if the fundamental level is...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2026
Robert Prentner
The interface theory of perception maintains that sensory systems evolved to present agents with an 'adaptive desktop' rather than a veridical picture of the world. Physical reality is an evolutionary construct. By contrast, consciousness and agency are fundamental, irreducible elements not emergent from physics. Building on this framework, the quantum interface theory (QIT) is introduced....
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...
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
December 1, 2025
William S. Robinson
Stimulations of our sense organs are events that cause brain events that cause our experiences, which are also events. The first part of this paper explains commitments required for the best form of dualism that keeps these facts clearly in view. The second part of this paper addresses two matters that may seem to threaten the viability of the view established in the first part: unity of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2025
Jorge Morales
In her book Introspection, Maja Spener urges us to split the study of introspection in two: as a mental capacity and as a scientific method. In this article, I focus on the latter and argue that metacognition in general, and confidence ratings in particular, offer a more promising methodological bridge between subjective experience and objective measurement in consciousness science than Spener...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Anand Vaidya
In a series of papers, Miri Albahari (2019; 2020; 2022; 2024) has articulated and defended perennial idealism (PI), a view she associates with Śakara’s Advaita Vedānta. She argues that PI offers a solution to the hard problem of consciousness (HPC). In this work, I distinguish the HPC, which occupies contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, from the hard problem of the self (HPS), which...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Robert Hopkins
To engage with something aesthetically you must be conscious of it. But can consciousness itself be an object of aesthetic appreciation? Is consciousness aesthetically interesting? If it is, there may be room for a theory of how this can be: of what is interesting about consciousness (or some particular form of it), from an aesthetic point of view, and what our relations to it must be for us to...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Uriah Kriegel
This paper defends four main theses. First, at least some conscious experiences are aesthetically valuable. Second, phenomenal consciousness as a whole – as a general phenomenon – is plausibly an aesthetically valuable addition to the universe. Third, the fact that something like phenomenal consciousness exists in a world otherwise consisting in particles mindlessly buzzing in mostly empty...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Jerome R. Busemeyer, Meijuan Lu
Quantum consciousness concerns both the possible role that quantum mechanics has for understanding consciousness as well as the role that consciousness has for interpreting quantum physics. Quantum brain theories hypothesize that quantum physical processes occur within and between the neurons of the brain and have important effects on cognition as well as consciousness. Quantum cognition is a...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Chris Percy, Alfredo Parra-Hinojosa
Many modern theories of consciousness seek to be consistent with prevailing scientific theories of the physical. While ontological flexibilities and current uncertainties in physical laws permit many options, it remains valuable to monitor evolving scientific thinking, generating new constraints and ideas for consciousness research. A structured literature review identifies 24 distinct...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Enrico Terrone
One can either take consciousness as the absolute focus of appreciation or rather focus on the contribution of consciousness to the aesthetic appreciation of another item. This paper focuses on a specific item to which consciousness might give a significant aesthetic contribution, namely, the universe. First, I will explain in which sense the universe can be an object of aesthetic appreciation....
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Anna Giustina
In recent years, interest in the value of consciousness has gained momentum. Much of the debate has focused on the epistemic and ethical value of consciousness. At least in principle, there is a third kind of value that may be attributed to consciousness: aesthetic value. The question of the aesthetic value of consciousness concerns not (or not just) whether consciousness is a necessary...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
Uriah Kriegel
Josh Weisberg develops a form of physicalism which attempts to (a) show why there is no ultima facie explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical world, while (b) making us see why there nonetheless is a prima facie explanatory gap. The former constitutes a solution to the problem of consciousness, the latter a proposal regarding the meta-problem of consciousness (the problem,...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
William Hunt
This paper presents an explanation of how Guilio Tononi’s integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) can be used to justify libertarian free will. His theory places emphasis on the intrinsic power of the conscious state, and the existence of such a power provides the libertarian with the means needed to defend their position in the face of sustained criticism, be it a priori or...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
Martyna Iwanicka-Kabat
Anomalous experiences are of particular interest to phenomenology. Such experiences include both psychopathological and mystical phenomena. Phenomenological concepts serve as valuable interpretative tools in analysing these cases. In particular, intentionality proves to be a powerful analytic framework, providing promising insights into mystical unions with the divine. In this article, I...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
Amy Kind
In Explanatory Optimism about the Hard Problem of Consciousness, Josh Weisberg attempts to debunk the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem arises from the thought that consciousness has exceptional properties inexplicable by science. Defending what he calls the automated compression theory (ACT), Weisberg argues that we have an easy explanation of consciousness that does not require...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2025
Charles K. Fink
The sense of self is a ubiquitous feature of consciousness experience, but it is also notoriously elusive. It is elusive, I argue, because although I experience myself as a being in the world, this is not what I am. But how can it be that I exist even though there is nothing that I am? This is the paradox of self-identity and, in this paper, I explore how the paradox is solved by Advaita...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2025
P. Pylkkänen
Perhaps more so than any other twentieth-century physicist, David Bohm was trying to develop an ontological interpretation for quantum theory, i.e. an interpretation which tells us what quantum theory says about the nature of reality. He is best known for presenting in 1952 an improved version of de Broglie’s ‘pilot-wave’ theory, which says that an electron is a particle always accompanied by a...