Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
Matthew W. Schelke
While many theories focus on consciousness as a feature of individual brains, some instead situate it in a social context as an adaptation for the cognitive demands of human group life. Though these social approaches to consciousness provide an evolutionarily compelling and parsimonious account of its origins, it is less clear how the social basis of consciousness affects the phenomenological...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
James A. Reggia
Electromagnetic field theories of consciousness have generally assumed that Maxwell's equations are complete, while many physicists have long suspected that they are not. Recently it has been shown that Maxwell's equations can be extended successfully by assuming that electromagnetic fields have complex-valued components. This assumption, while speculative, implies that electromagnetic fields...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
Charles Siewert
To include conceptual understanding in the phenomenal character of experience is to say there's no sense in which what it's ordinarily like for you to understand what you read or hear could be held completely constant, while switching off all understanding, or switching out all actual differences in understanding for very different ones. Endorsing this sort of inclusion implies at least partial...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
Marina Weiler, R. F. Casseb, David J Acunzo
An out-of-body experience (OBE) is a phenomenon in which an individual experiences a detachment of their consciousness from their physical body. The neural mechanisms underlying OBEs remain elusive, primarily due to their unpredictable and spontaneous nature, making their study particularly challenging. Using individuals who can self-induce OBEs in a laboratory setting could be a fruitful...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
Angela Mendelovici
David Pitt's The Quality of Thought defends a hardcore version of phenomenal intentionalism, the view that at least the most basic kind of intentionality is nothing over and above phenomenal consciousness. The book is focused on the case of thought, advancing the view, roughly, that thoughts' contents are identical to their phenomenal characters. But the view is meant to apply more broadly to...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
A. Hilton
The term 'cosmic consciousness' is mostly used either as an ontological fundamental in metaphysics or to name a mystical experience (event). It was first popularized as a psychological state, an evolutionary attainment following the event, while extension of the mystical experience over time comprises another state, for which the term is also used. Drawing on a personal journey of discovery...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
Chris Percy
Frustration has been growing with mainstay epistemological methods of logical deduction and experimental falsification for assessing theories of consciousness. This paper explores one among several recent alternatives being explored, captured here under the term 'listed requirements'. This paper conducts a structured literature search and critical review of attempts to develop such lists,...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
P. Craffert
Within the neuroscience of consciousness there are two incompatible views of human beings: you are your brain (neurocentric) and you are not your brain but you have a brain (humanistic). Neurocentric views are trapped in the Cartesian legacy of the mental– physical duality as well as the mind–body dualism that manifests in the mind–brain and brain–body dualisms. A version of physicalism coupled...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
V. O’Reilly-Shah
This paper introduces the state space theory of consciousness, positing that the cortex processes information through delay coordinate embedding operationalized by recurrent neural network engines. This leverages the power of Takens' theorem, giving rise to representations of reality as points within state space. Consciousness is posited to arise at the highest order engines amongst...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Joseph Gottlieb
Birch (2022a) proposes a theory-light methodology for studying whether invertebrates have the capacity for (phenomenal) consciousness. The success of any such methodology turns on the positive markers it proposes, and whether they are genuinely ecumenical. After providing an account of what it is for a marker to be ecumenical, it is argued that one of the more influential set of markers offered...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Perry Hendricks
P-zombies are creatures that are physically (functionally, behaviourally) like you and I and yet lack phenomenal consciousness. If such creatures are possible, it’s (typically) taken to show property dualism is true: phenomenal consciousness isn’t reducible to – nor does it supervene on – physical states. If inverted qualia are possible, it’s possible that you and I have identical physical...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
André R. LeBlanc
The work of Joseph Delb??uf (1831‐1896), a philosopher, psychologist, and mathematician, provides fresh insights on the relationship between agency, consciousness, and evolution. Without agency, Delb??uf argued, the distinction between the self and the external world would be impossible, the function of feelings such as pain and pleasure would be incomprehensible, and consciousness would not...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Charles Aaron Beasley
While the science of animal consciousness has seen a surge of new work, its most basic methodology remains highly disputed. In this paper I identify four candidate norms of inquiry that have been implicitly introduced in the recent literature. I call these (1) expansive theorizing, (2) indirect inquiry, (3) lowering epistemic standards, and (4) inflating epistemic standards. In each section, an...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Francis Heylighen, Shima Beigi
We propose a new theory to explain the nature and function of subjective experience, as a mechanism that guides the organism towards beneficial outcomes. In simple animals, that guidance takes the form of an affect producing a fitness-enhancing response. In human consciousness, there is not a single response, but a range of potential developments allowing a free choice. That range can be...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
S. Siddharth, Tejas Bhojraj
Russellian panpsychism, the view that concrete reality is entirely physical and fundamental physical entities are intrinsically experiential, is faced with the combination problem – the challenge of explaining how the experiences of microphysical entities combine to form the experiences of macro-physical entities such as humans. While such combination is deemed impossible by critics of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Antoine Beaudoin
A fundamental question in the field of consciousness is how and why physical processes in the brain give rise to consciousness, a problem named the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ by David Chalmers. Despite numerous studies, neuroscience has yet to agree on a single account that addresses the hard problem of consciousness. Here, I introduce the energy-information generation (EIG) theory to...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2024
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire, Tra-Ill Dowie
Due to a lack of engagement with the embodied dimensions of mindfulness, third-wave CBT has misleadingly construed mindfulness interventions as cognitive restructuring and behavioural modification agents. When the relationship between the mind and body is understood according to the model of embodied cognition, however, mindfulness’s process of change can be better articulated. We propose a...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2024
S. Medhananda
2 citations
This article defends the cosmopsychist doctrine of the Indian philosopher-mystic Sri Aurobindo, arguing that it has distinct advantages over rival panpsychist positions. After tracing the dialectical trajectory of recent philosophical debates about panpsychism up to the present, I bring Aurobindo into dialogue with Miri Albahari, who has defended a form of panpsychist idealism based on the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2024
Hedda Hassel Mørch
Panpsychism is the view that all things are associated with consciousness. Panpsychism has a number of significant theoretical implications, with respect to the mind–body problem and other problems in metaphysics. Here I will consider one of its potential practical or ethical implications; specifically, whether, if panpsychism is true, it follows that 'we are all one', in a sense that implies...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2024
Michael Tye
This article argues that the best explanation for the absence of borderline cases with respect to phenomenal consciousness is that phenomenal consciousness is irreducible. This, I argue, leads to a paradox, which is best resolved by adopting a form of panpsychism. The version of panpsychism I elaborate explains differences in the phenomenal character of experiences via differences in what the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2024
Anthony G. Hudetz
Whether consciousness is unidimensional with states defined along a single scale or it consists of multiple fundamental dimensions has been debated. Clinical assessment of consciousness distinguishes the content of consciousness (awareness) and the level of consciousness (wakefulness or arousal), which conflates firstperson phenomenal properties with third-person observable properties. The...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2024
Paul F. Cunningham
This article argues that contemporary debates of the 'hard problem' of consciousness (i.e.how does 'mindless' matter produce 'matterless' mind?) cannot be resolved through philosophical analysis alone and need to be anchored to a comprehensive empirical foundation that includes psychophysiological research of psychosomatic phenomena and exceptional human experience. First, alternative...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2024
C. Coseru
This paper defends the persistence of the subjective or selfintimating dimension of experience in non-ordinary and pathological states of consciousness such as non-dual awareness, full absorption, drug-induced ego dissolution, and the minimal conscious state. In considering whether non-ordinary and pathological conscious states display any subjective features, we confront a dilemma. Either they...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2024
Manuela Kirberg, Monima Chadha
This paper aims to contribute to an integrated understanding of what goes missing in adverse meditation experiences and in cases of depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder is characterized by distressing alterations in, and sometimes the complete disappearance of, the 'I'-sense. This paper examines the nature of the 'I'-sense and what it means to lose it from a Buddhist...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2024
P. Goff
There has recently been a revival of interest in panpsychism as a theory of consciousness. The hope of the contemporary proponents of panpsychism is that the view enables us to integrate consciousness into our overall theory of reality in a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague the more conventional options of physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. However,...