ISSN 1355-8250
150 papers in the library · 172 citations · publishing 2021-2026
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2023 Ben Schermbrucker
It is frequently claimed that panpsychism is unable in principle to generate evidence or predictions. After exploring how this impasse owes to panpsychism's commitment to brute physicalism, I argue that organismic panpsychism (OP) can retain this commitment and yet be empirical in principle. I then explore ways in which OP can be defended against a range of objections. These objections...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2023 C. Pérez, Giuseppina Marsico
The Mapuche people are a native group from the extreme south of Latin America. Their culture is based on the interconnectedness between the cohabitants of the environment, including human and non-human categories of life. The closest concept to consciousness for them would be Mapuche rakizuamor Mapuche thinking, which is defined as a particular kind of reflexivity or state of awareness of the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2023 S. Greenwood
My aim in this article is to further work on building bridges of communication between Indigenous and Western worldviews through 'magical consciousness', a pan-human participatory and analogical orientation of mind. In a bid to overcome the many cultural differences that have justified the discrimination and genocide of Indigenous peoples worldwide, and the near hegemony of a science based...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2023 Nuria Ciofalo
Indigenous psychologies are informed by their cosmogonies and cosmologies, philosophies, spirituality and religions, traditions and customs, and knowledge and praxis systems. This paper reviews some conceptions of consciousness, psyche, spirit, mental and physical health, relations to all Earth Beings (human and nonhuman), ancestors, nature, and altered states of consciousness among the Nahua...
Journal of Consciousness Studies March 31, 2023 Ignacio Cea, David Martínez-pernía 16 citations
In consciousness studies there is a growing tendency to consider experience as (i) fundamentally affective and (ii) deeply interlinked with interoceptive and homeostatic bodily processes. However, this view still needs further development to be part of any rigorous theory of consciousness. To advance in this direction, we ask: (1) is there any affective type that is always present in...
Journal of Consciousness Studies March 31, 2023 Albert Newen, Carlos Montemayor 8 citations
The scientific investigation of consciousness generates new findings at a rapid pace. We argue that we need a novel theoretical framework, which we call the ALARM theory of consciousness, in order to account for all central observations. According to this theory, we need to distinguish two levels of consciousness, namely basic arousal and general alertness. Basic arousal functions as a specific...
Journal of Consciousness Studies March 31, 2023 Pekka Rechardt 1 citation
The dimensional structure of phenomenal space and its relation to the brain have not been widely focused on in brain and consciousness studies. This paper postulates that focusing on the dimensional structures displayed in the relation between phenomenal space and the brain is necessary for understanding the integration of distributed brain events in binding. A related issue is why items and...
Journal of Consciousness Studies March 31, 2023 Lyu Zhou
The specious present (James, 1890/1950) is the phenomenal temporal structure of the representational content of my present experience. This article is a study of the mereological structure of the specious present and what it reveals about the nature of the mind. I argue that the specious present has certain features that cannot be easily explained within the framework of physicalism about the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies January 30, 2023 Alfredo Pereira
The projection of conscious content is a central feature of Max Velmans' theory of consciousness, implying that conscious experiences are built within a conversation of minds and worlds in which they form a 'reflexive' unity – as stated in his reflexive monism theory. What are the neurobiological structures and functions that underpin the experience of conscious contents being located in a...
Journal of Consciousness Studies January 30, 2023 Petr Jedlička, Marek Malůš, Filip Tylš et al.
In this paper we present an exploratory study on the understanding of reality among scientists. The nature of reality has been a conundrum for generations of theologians, philosophers, and scientists as well as the lay public. It also appears as a scientific problem in various disciplines, from physics to psychiatry and neuroscience. For the purpose of our study, we employed Chamber REST...
Journal of Consciousness Studies January 30, 2023 B. Lancaster
In assessing the relevance of Velmans' work for transpersonal psychology, two major features of his reflexive monism are explored. The first is the notion that consciousness is embedded in the external world and in the body, the second is the principle of reflexivity itself. The embeddedness of consciousness in the world underpins transpersonal notions of consciousness as a primary reality of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies January 30, 2023 Mette Leonard Høeg
The paper proposes to integrate literary studies in consciousness research to develop a strong ethical and existential dimension in the field. More specifically, it considers the value of fictional narrative for developing concepts of selfhood and personal identity that cohere with the reductionist explanations of human consciousness and self in modern empirical consciousness research. My...
Journal of Consciousness Studies January 30, 2023 Jeremiah Joven Joaquin
Max Velmans, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, is one of the leading theorists of consciousness studies — an interdisciplinary field of study that deals with questions about the nature of consciousness and how it relates to the physical world. In this interview, we look back at his life and work; in particular, his idea of reflexive monism, which is one of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies December 1, 2022 Adriana Renero, Richard J. E. Brown 2 citations
Higher-order theories of consciousness typically account for introspection in terms of one's higher-order thoughts being conscious, which would require a third-order thought — i.e.a thought about a thought about a mental state. In this work, we offer an alternative account of introspection that builds on the recent HigherOrder Representation of a Representation (HOROR) theory of phenomenal...
Journal of Consciousness Studies December 1, 2022 Kristjan Loorits 2 citations
It has been argued, most famously by David Chalmers, that all objects of the so-called traditional sciences (from physics to neuroscience) are analysable in structural terms, whereas consciousness has qualitative properties that are irreducibly non-structural. From that it has been concluded that consciousness cannot be explained by traditional sciences. Some illusionists have responded by...
Journal of Consciousness Studies December 1, 2022 Nathaniel F. Barrett
When examined closely, our experience of affect presents a special challenge: it seems that there is no common quality that marks the pleasantness of conscious states and feelings. The implications of this finding have been debated by philosophers and psychologists for more than a century, and yet the peculiar phenomenology of affect is rarely discussed within consciousness studies. The purpose...
Journal of Consciousness Studies July 14, 2022 Matthias Michel 35 citations
Is perceptual processing in dedicated sensory areas sufficient for conscious perception? Localists say, 'Yes — given some background conditions.' Prefrontalists say, 'No: conscious perceptual experience requires the involvement of prefrontal structures.' I review the evidence for prefrontalism. I start by presenting correlational evidence. In doing so, I answer the 'report argument', according...
Journal of Consciousness Studies July 14, 2022 Rafael Malach 9 citations
In recent years the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conscious perception has acquired great interest since it became a pivotal issue distinguishing among prevailing neuronal theories of human consciousness. One can identify three major, and conflicting, views of this role. The globalist view proposes that the PFC is a major hub in a global workspace whose activation is a critical...
Journal of Consciousness Studies July 14, 2022 Chris Letheby 2 citations
An emerging body of research suggests that psychedelic experiences can change users' religious or metaphysical beliefs. Here I explore issues concerning psychedelic-induced belief change via a critique of some recent arguments by Wayne Glausser. Two scientific studies seem to show that psychedelic experiences can convert atheists to belief in God, but Glausser holds that academic and popular...
Journal of Consciousness Studies July 14, 2022 Leonard Dung 1 citation
Sensorimotor enactivism is the view that the content and the sensory modality of perceptual experience are determined by implicit knowledge of lawful regularities between bodily movements and patterns of sensory stimulation. A proponent of the explanatory argument for sensorimotor enactivism holds that this view is able to provide an intelligible explanation for why certain material realizers...
Journal of Consciousness Studies July 14, 2022 Marcelino Botin
The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we think there is a hard problem of consciousness. The meta-problem promises to help us solve the hard problem. The phenomenal concept strategy (PCS) promises to solve both problems at once while allowing for a metaphysics of mind that avoids dualism, which is hard to defend, and illusionism, which is hard to accept. I argue...
Journal of Consciousness Studies July 14, 2022 P. Burgess
This paper challenges the conventional methodological tendencies of current monistic treatments of subjective consciousness (SC). I argue that it is highly unlikely that any one position will 'solve' the SC problem, as monism supposes. Instead, I argue for treating theories of SC akin to scientific models, that (like models) theories only apply under certain empirical conditions, where each...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2022 Lena Lindström, Petri Kajonius, Etzel Cardeña 25 citations
In this study, we investigate the phenomenology of selftranscendent experiences, in which the usual sense of self is lost. Based on a taxonomy of nine aspects of self and three types of content of consciousness, we compare ten accounts of such experiences acquired through in-depth interviews. Sense of separateness and identification with body and narrative self were reported as lost in all of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2022 Harry Cleeveley
The zombie argument against physicalism (Chalmers, 1996; 2010), if successful, shows that one of two things must be true: either zombies are possible (and therefore physicalism is false) or some form of panpsychism is true. Moreover, this is generally understood as an exclusive 'or': the truth of panpsychism at the actual world would be incompatible with the possibility of zombies in the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies June 1, 2022 Philip Woodward
I review three problems that have historically motivated pessimism about artificial intelligence: (1) the problem of consciousness, according to which artificial systems lack the conscious oversight that characterizes intelligent agents; (2) the problem of global relevance, according to which artificial systems cannot solve fully general theoretical and practical problems; (3) the problem of...