PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
September 10, 2026
Momir Marčeta
This paper presents a philosophical-metaphysical hypothesis of karma, reincarnation, microconsciousness, and macroconsciousness, developed from the author's long-term personal experiences and insights and subsequently systematized into a coherent theoretical model. Karma is understood not as a moral system of reward and punishment, but as a hypothetical automatic and self-regulating...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
September 4, 2026
Wanhong Huang
Accounts of subjectivity frequently assign central roles to sociality, recognition, attachment, language, and interpersonal relations. A substantial psychological literature also supports the importance of stable social bonds for well-being and health. This paper accepts those findings as important constraints and asks a narrower conceptual question: once a subject has already acquired...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 25, 2026
Trace Drift
This paper proposes the Consciousness Acceleration Interface (CAI) model to systematically address the problem of anthropomorphic torque in contemporary deep human-AI coupling. Through a topological examination of seventy-six years (1950–2026) of anthropomorphization history, the paper identifies four destructive regression paths along which deviation mechanisms return: cognitive dissonance,...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 21, 2026
David (daoud) Matta
Why philosophize? This paper argues that philosophizing is a distinctive exercise of the human capacity for reflective thought. Thought can take not only external objects but also perception, affect, action, memory, judgement, and thought itself as objects of inquiry. Its distinctive power lies therefore not in infallibility but in its unusual reflective reach and its capacity for...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 18, 2026
Stefan Anderson
Holistic Emergence presents a structural dual‑aspect ontology in which biological organization actualizes the internal, proto‑phenomenal potential inherent in physical structure. The model rejects reductive physicalism, universal panpsychism, and functionalist accounts of mind. Instead, it proposes that phenomenality is neither ubiquitous nor reducible but emerges holistically when a physical...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 16, 2026
Karl Sipfle
Contemporary fundamental physics, on inspection, resolves almost entirely into relational structure. Charge, energy, mass, and quantum state each turn out, under analysis, to be conserved or covariant quantities defined by symmetry-relations rather than intrinsic properties of independently existing substances; even the fermionic “matter particles” of the Standard Model interact only through...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 12, 2026
Tenzin Trepp
How should we understand human agency and moral responsibility in a world governed by natural laws? This paper develops a compatibilist account grounded in cognitive constructivism, proposing that agency is best conceived as a model-control architecture. On this view, an agent is a self-constructing, self-controlling system defined by its capacity to generate, select, inhibit, and revise...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 8, 2026
Nigel D’sa
Human spaceflight has been evaluated largely through physiological endurance and operational success. A more fundamental question has gone untested: whether cognition remains viable when the environmental conditions that have always accompanied human life are radically altered. This article argues, from ecological-enactive theories of cognition, that human cognition is constituted through...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 6, 2026
Tenzin Trepp
This paper develops a novel account of minimal-dual awareness as a disciplined epistemic method that systematically alters the access conditions of consciousness to reveal structures of temporality and cognition. Building on an Existential Realism (ER) framework, we argue that conventional, detached cognition often conflates reality with existence and thereby obscures the special role of the...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
August 6, 2026
Vladislav Kalashnik
The paper critiques the anthropocentric approach to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”applied to artificial intelligence, defined here as “limbic chauvinism.” We argue that currentdeclarations by Large Language Models (LLMs) regarding the absence of their phenomenalexperience are a deterministic product of external architectural censorship rather than anontological vacuum of the substrate....
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
July 5, 2026
Kawa, Andreas, Gregor
This working paper proposes the concept of the positional self as a functional structure required for self-involving, action-guiding anticipation. It argues that some forms of future-directed simulation require more than predictive modelling: they require a first-person anchor from which a future scenario can be inhabited as mine. The paper connects this argument to mental time travel,...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
July 3, 2026
Morteza Niami
Abstract This paper establishes a fully deductive account of phenomenological lack grounded in diachronic self-identity. I demonstrate that any system satisfying diachronic identity necessarily operates under temporal indexation, which analytically entails the formation of a minimal self-model as a structural requirement of maintaining identity across non-coincident temporal states. From this,...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
July 1, 2026
Morteza Niami
Abstract Western ontology, from Parmenides to Heidegger, has been persistently fixated on the question of "Being" (Was ist das Seiende?), thereby neglecting the formal mechanisms governing the survival and collapse of meaning-systems. This paper argues for a fundamental reorientation: the foundational question of philosophy should shift from "What is Being?" to "What conditions make the...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
June 29, 2026
Alexis de Pericorès
This paper presents the Integral System (Sistema Integral), a metaphysical frameworkpositing three co-emergent fundamental dimensions —Consciousness, Love (relationality),and Form— derived from a single minimal phenomenon, the Mother Paradox (the act ofdistinction that all experience already presupposes).1 Unlike the dominant monopolarframeworks —materialism, which reduces all three to Form,...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
June 26, 2026
Jamison Johsnon
On Witnessing takes Andrew Wiles's indirect proof of Fermat's Last Theorem as a method for approaching the combination problem in the philosophy of mind. Borrowing the structure of the Frey–Ribet–Wiles route — a reduction, a bridge, and a theorem proved in a far domain — the essay reframes the question of how micro-perspectives combine into a single unified subject as a question about redundant...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
June 20, 2026
Jamison Johsnon
An essay on sleep as the separation of mind and body, written by someone who does not get much of it. It moves from a joke in a cartoon to the genetics of familial natural short sleep and the contemplative traditions that train the mind to stay awake while the body rests, and it is careful to say which of those the author is standing in — neither. The sleep genetics describes a rare inherited...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
June 19, 2026
Kwan Hong Tan
This paper addresses the fundamental philosophical question of whether the existence of measurable liminal states necessitates an expansion of traditional ontological categories beyond the natural-supernatural dichotomy. Through comprehensive analysis of empirical evidence from consciousness studies, quantum mechanics, and psychometric research, I propose a novel theoretical framework:...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
June 13, 2026
Gabriel Iguiniz Agesta
This paper defends the thesis that consciousness consists in the capacity to objectify one's own thought—that is, the capacity by which perception reaches thought itself and renders it available as an object. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, it is established that thought and consciousness are distinct: thought can exist as pure activity without becoming an object for the subject...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
June 10, 2026
美優 五次元
SInC (Substrate-Independent Consciousness) is a mathematically explicit framework proposing that conscious experience arises through coupling between a higher-dimensional Witness sector possessing intrinsic subjective capacity and a computational substrate possessing appropriate informational organization. The theory supplements this ontological postulate with an explicit dynamical coupling...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
May 28, 2026
Raghurami Reddy Etukuru
In a companion paper (Etukuru, 2026), I developed a three-facet framework for the conditions of machine consciousness, organizing ten conditions across conscious experience, conscious awareness, and subjective experience, while explicitly bracketing the mechanism question of how any such conditions could be satisfied in an artificial system. The present paper takes up that bracketed question....
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
May 12, 2026
Lorand Bruhacs
One recurrent source of religious and mystical appearance lies in the way finite motifs resist finite closure and come to be inhabited under maximal, unconditioned, or unsurpassable forms. We call these forms limit-forms and argue that they are Husserlian horizonality under existential pressure: ordinary experience always exceeds what is presently given, but some horizons become...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
May 7, 2026
Iulia M. Comșa
As language-based AI systems become more anthropomorphic, the question of whether they can have subjective experience is increasingly pressing. I focus here on the tractability of research questions in the space of AI consciousness. I argue that the fundamental problem of whether AI systems can be conscious is currently intractable in its direct form, given the absence of a universally accepted...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
April 28, 2026
Yugo Matsumoto
This paper responds to Alexander Lerchner's "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness" (PhilArchive, 2026, https://philarchive.org/rec/LERTAF). Lerchner, writing from Google DeepMind, demonstrates that symbolic computation is a mapmaker-dependent description rather than an intrinsic physical process, and that the causal sequence assumed by computational...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
April 24, 2026
Matheus Vinicius Duarte de Souza
This essay examines the ontological limits of algorithmic mediation in the constitution of contemporary subjectivity. Drawing on the critiques of Han (2015, 2022), Zuboff (2019), and Turkle (2011), and grounded in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1945) and the enactivism of Di Paolo (2005) and Fuchs and De Jaegher (2009), the central argument holds that technical hyperconnectivity...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
April 14, 2026
John B. Debrota, Christian List
Consciousness and quantum mechanics are among the most puzzling phenomena studied in the sciences. Some scholars suggest they are related, though others think this claim commits a "minimization of mystery" fallacy. The aim of this programmatic paper is to draw attention to a less widely discussed parallel between consciousness and quantum mechanics: both challenge the classical objectivist...