Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2023
Ben Schermbrucker
Panpsychism is often criticized as being unable to generate evidence or predictions, a problem rooted in its commitment to brute physicalism. Organismic panpsychism (OP) retains that commitment yet can be empirical in principle. The paper defends OP against objections concerning its metaphysics, its reliance on string theory, and its appeal to future science. It also discusses how OP avoids a troubling consequence of Russellian panpsychism.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2023
Ede Frecska, Ágnes Birtalan, Michael Winkelman
Belief in multiple souls is common across human cultures, especially in pre-modern traditions. This essay examines how a three-fold soul structure appears in Mongolian shamanistic traditions. Accounts of the three souls among various Mongolian ethnic groups diverge, particularly in consciousness-related attributes, likely due to cultural bias of data collectors, inconsistencies between informants, and evolution of concepts from historical events, socio-economic changes, and external influences. Despite these confounding effects, Mongolian shamanism's pluralistic soul concept resembles beliefs in many other cultures. Mongolian Indigenous concepts reveal key elements of consciousness and, though evoking spiritual interpretations, reflect an innately-disposed mindset that extends conceptualizations of consciousness beyond mind-body dualism.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2023
C. Pérez, Giuseppina Marsico
Mapuche thinking (rakizuam) is a form of reflexivity that recognizes the interdependence of people with natural and spiritual entities, representing a relational ontology distinct from individualistic Western approaches. The mind-body distinction is not central in Mapuche culture, but these dimensions can be explored through life-cycle processes such as socialization, illness, and death. The paper draws on cultural psychology and Indigenous psychology to address the interplay between culture and the human psyche.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 30, 2023
Mette Leonard Høeg
The paper argues that integrating literary studies into consciousness research can add an ethical and existential dimension often missing from empirical work. It contends that fictional narratives, particularly those rejecting essentialist ideas of self and agency, can help normalize reductionist scientific explanations of consciousness by presenting them in emotionally and experientially accessible forms. Using Virginia Woolf's The Waves as an example, the author shows how the novel's non-anthropocentric and non-essentialist portrayal of selfhood overlaps with materialist theories in neuroscience and philosophy, but frames them in poetic terms that highlight their emancipatory potential, allowing readers to relate to these ideas on a personal level.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
M. Cavaglià, E. A. Zizzi, S. Dombrowski et al.
General anaesthesia has been used since the mid-nineteenth century, but its pharmacological mechanism remains unclear. Investigations probe smaller scales to understand how anaesthetics disrupt neural activity, causing loss of consciousness. Advances in neuroscience and molecular biology allow study from behavioral to molecular levels. This multiscale approach links molecular domain to general anaesthesia and consciousness, and how anaesthetics affect postoperative behavioral changes. This review discusses current knowledge on consciousness and general anaesthesia using pharmacokinetics, molecular biology, and advanced imaging (EEG, fMRI, PET, MEG). Understanding anaesthetic mechanisms may help solve the mystery of consciousness, and understanding consciousness could lead to new anaesthetic agents and technologies to controllably turn consciousness on and off, generating new concepts in neurocognitive pathophysiology disorders.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
Harry Cleeveley
The zombie argument against physicalism holds that if philosophical zombies—beings identical to humans but lacking conscious experience—are possible, then physicalism is false, and either zombies are possible or panpsychism is true. Giberman (2015) argues that the mere possibility of panpsychism rules out the possibility of zombies, thereby defeating the zombie argument. This paper contends that Giberman's argument fails because it confuses two senses of possibility. Using two-dimensional semantics, the zombie argument requires zombies to be possible in a specific sense (2-possible), which is incompatible with panpsychism being possible in that same sense. However, Giberman only shows panpsychism is possible in a different sense (1-possible), which does not conflict with the relevant possibility of zombies. Thus, the anti-zombie argument does not succeed.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
Philip Woodward
The author reviews three longstanding objections to artificial intelligence: that machines lack consciousness, cannot solve fully general problems, and operate without genuine semantic understanding. The argument connects these problems through the concept of non-syntactic inferences—inferences based on insight into rational relationships among thought-contents. Such insight, the author contends, is only possible through phenomenal consciousness, and it alone gives epistemic justification to those inferences. Until artificial systems can execute inferences guided by conscious states, they cannot be considered intelligent in a literal sense.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
A. Crump, Jonathan Birch
The relationship between neural and behavioral evidence for animal consciousness is examined by critically reviewing two recent studies. One study on crows found different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus was reported as seen or unseen, but this implicates neural activity in consciousness only if a specific conditioned behavior is assumed to be a report of conscious experience. Another study on macaques recorded behaviors strikingly similar to patterns of conscious and unconscious perception in humans, yet confounds were only ruled out in human subjects, presupposing substantial neural similarity between humans and macaques.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
Jonathan Birch, D. Broom, Heather Browning et al.
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and its own body, a concept easiest to grasp with vision, as Ernst Mach illustrated by drawing his own visual perspective. However, subjective experience encompasses far more than vision, including sounds, odors, tastes, and tactile sensations—a complete sensory world. The text argues that these sensory experiences constitute a full subjective point of view, extending beyond any single sense to shape a person's entire conscious experience of reality.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Lionel Naccache
The author agrees with Solms that consciousness is rooted in the brainstem's affective systems, but diverges from Solms' view that the cortex is merely a cognitive elaboration of these affects. The author proposes integrating Solms' key concepts—such as the role of the brainstem's ascending reticular activating system and the distinction between affective and cognitive consciousness—into the global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT). This integration would allow GNWT to account for both the felt, affective dimension of consciousness and the informational, cognitive processes that GNWT traditionally emphasizes.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Michael Barkasi
Many scientists and philosophers assume that what we perceive is identical to what our brain's neural activity represents. This paper challenges that assumption by examining type-2 blindsight, a condition where people can respond to visual stimuli without consciously seeing them. The author argues that in such cases, the person's experience does not have the same content as the neural correlates—the brain represents the stimulus properties, but the person does not experience them. This suggests that the relationship between experience and neural content is more complex than simple identity, even if a deep connection exists.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
Marina Cortês, L. Smolin
Four deep problems in science—foundational issues in quantum theory, quantum gravity, the role of qualia and conscious awareness, and the nature of time—may share a common resolution. The authors propose that a quantum event is a process where an indefinite aspect of the world becomes definite. From this, they build an architecture where qualia are real and consequential, and time is active, fundamental, and irreversible.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
A. Morán
The paper argues that the problem of consciousness is a specific instance of a broader problem: grounding the qualitative features of reality. It claims that a satisfactory solution should address this general problem, not just consciousness, and that panpsychism fails to provide such a solution. The author suggests that other forms of Russellian monism may avoid this difficulty, and that a neo-Aristotelian or ground-theoretical physicalism might be equally or more successful.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
S. Ritchie
Panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter, may offer a metaphysical framework for interpreting psychedelic experiences as genuinely revelatory rather than merely illusory. Psychedelics research reliably produces transformative experiences, enabling neuroscientific and psychological study while also attracting philosophical and theological work on their epistemic and metaphysical implications. The article maps a mutually reinforcing relationship between panpsychism and the possibility that psychedelic states can be veridical, suggesting this congruence has implications for research on spiritual flourishing. This flourishing need not be theological but is consistent with some naturalistic theological frameworks, and the article aims to map the conceptual terrain for conversations about spiritual flourishing, psychedelics, and panpsychism.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
L. Roelofs
Panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter, is often criticized as unscientific. This commentary argues that panpsychism is not a scientific hypothesis itself but is not in conflict with science either. The author agrees with Goff that panpsychism is a scientific worldview in the sense that it accords with and embraces what science reveals. The paper explores what it means to 'accord with and embrace' science, a point of dispute, and attempts to untangle the different threads in both academic and popular discourse about what counts as scientific or unscientific.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
A. Harris
Consciousness may be a fundamental, field-like aspect of the universe rather than something tied to individual subjects. The paper argues that the 'combination problem' in panpsychism—how micro-consciousnesses combine into macro-consciousness—dissolves if the concept of a subject is an illusion. By rethinking consciousness as a pervasive field, the need to combine separate conscious subjects disappears. The work supports panpsychism as a valid scientific approach to the hard problem of consciousness and urges pursuing the question of whether consciousness is more fundamental than typically assumed.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
R.S. Weir
This philosophical paper argues that Philip Goff's proposed post-Galilean science of consciousness, which aims to reject dualism, actually entails a form of substance dualism. The author contends that Goff's arguments are compatible with and logically lead to dualism in an important sense, suggesting that the revolution Goff advocates might instead be a restoration of older views. The paper does not claim this is problematic for Goff's project but clarifies the philosophical implications.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
C. Rovelli
Twentieth-century physics reveals a pervasive relational aspect of the physical world, which is relevant to panpsychism. This relationality can be seen as supporting the panpsychist idea of a monist continuity where aspects of consciousness's perspectivalism are universal. However, it may also undermine motivations for more marked forms of panpsychism.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
Damian Aleksiev
Panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the physical world, faces a new challenge: it cannot explain the existence of certain physical entities, such as space-time, the quantum state, and quantum gravitational entities. This is called the missing entities problem. The author argues that proponents of a popular form of panpsychism must solve all instances of this problem for panpsychism to be a viable theory of consciousness. The paper poses three explanatory gaps as examples, showing that panpsychism fails to account for these physical entities.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
January 1, 2021
C. Koch
Integrated information theory (IIT) shares with panpsychism the view that consciousness is an intrinsic, fundamental property of reality that is graded and present in small amounts in simple physical systems. However, IIT improves on panpsychism by clearly specifying which systems are conscious and which are not, thereby resolving panpsychism's combination problem, and by explaining why consciousness can be adaptive. The fundamental weakness of panpsychism and other -isms is that they fail to provide a sustained conceptual or empirical research program that generates novel insights or proposes new experiments. Without such a program, progress on the mind–body problem will not occur.