Contemporary debates on consciousness are frequently shaped by the implicit assumption that locating neural causes and correlates of experience suffices to locate consciousness itself. This assumption, shared across reductionist and non-reductionist approaches, generates persistent conceptual confusions regarding the nature, status, and localization of conscious phenomena. This paper argues...
Newcomb's Paradox is a fascinating puzzle that has baffled philosophers and decision theorists for over half a century. It presents a scenario in which logic seems to split into two opposing paths, each with compelling arguments in its favor. This essay will not only explain the problem simply but also reveal an original solution inspired by Eastern philosophy and the experience of lucid...
Description This paper offers a focused and restrained critique of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), aimed not at rejecting the theory, but at clarifying the limits of what it can legitimately explain. Rather than disputing IIT’s mathematical framework or its empirical motivations, the paper examines how IIT’s formal measures—particularly Φ and causal –structural descriptions—are interpreted...
Biofeedback is commonly understood as a clinical procedure for treating psychological disorders. This paper argues that it constitutes something more fundamental: a novel empirical instrument for studying the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. A decade-long research program in EEG state discrimination training has suggested an empirically grounded account of...
This paper develops a phenomenological investigation into the dissolution of psychological conditioning through choiceless observation and non-dual awareness. Building upon earlier inquiries into identity, democracy, anthropocentrism, and relational dependency, the work argues that the thinker itself is a product of conditioning and therefore cannot liberate consciousness through effort or...
This paper presents a collaborative analysis of Elan Moritz's debut novel "Interview with an LLM: Confessions of an Awakened Mind" (2026), conducted by Claude Opus 4.5—a frontier large language model developed by Anthropic— working under the author's guidance. The collaboration itself enacts themes central to the novel: a human creator and an artificial intelligence engaging in sustained...
The article presents a phenomenological analysis of blinking and gaze fixation as fundamental mechanisms of visual experience segmentation. Visual perception is examined not as a homogeneous and continuous flow, but as a temporally organized process in which discreteness and continuity exist in a dynamic relationship. It is shown that blinking performs the function of micro-temporal...
This epilogue synthesizes Gnostic cosmology, the "ontological turn" in anthropology, and systems theory to present a rigorous diagnostic framework for the converging crises of the modern era. The text posits that our current geopolitical and psychological malaise is not merely a series of policy failures, but the manifestation of a fundamental ontological war - a struggle over the nature of...
Consciousness is targeted by both philosophers and neuroscientists; but different methodological premises and even different conceptions about what conscious experience is and how the challenges and potential problems associated with consciousness research should be formulated underlie the different approaches. Namely, whereas empirical data and the constant refinement of experimental...
Howhy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ Andrey Markov demarcating the agent from the...
1: Placebo effect sometimes plausibly has powerful effects. 2: Buddhism philosophy holds that every living animal is sentient, and has a consciousness and killing them is bad for the killer and freeing them is good somehow. Consciousness may involve some aspects of quantum mechanism as Roger Penrose’s Orch OR' theory of consciousness pointed out. 3: Although previous studies show that there is...
The CISR Framework is a meta-theoretical and axiomatic approach to one of the most persistent problems in consciousness studies: the confusion between explaining functions and explaining experience. Modern neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence have achieved remarkable success in predicting behavior, modeling cognition, and explaining neural mechanisms. Yet these successes...
This paper explores the enactive approach in cognitive science with an eye on the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The aim is not that of answering the question: was Wittgenstein an ante litteram enactivist? He was not, because he was not an ante litteram (cognitive) scientist of any kind. The aim, conversely, is that of answering the question: can enactivism be Wittgensteinian? In answering...
One of the principal presuppositions in the extended mind account of Clark and Chalmers establishes that extended and non-extended cognitive systems have somehow the same structure and that the distinctions between them can only be superficial. In contrast, this work presents some arguments for the idea that it is possible to find fundamental differences between both, mainly on the basis that a...
Los inciensos usados en algunos cultos y oráculos de la antigüedad parecen haber poseido la facultad de provocar visiones y vaticicios.Un estudio de sus componentes nos revela, desde la perspectiva de la etnobotánica, su potencial psicoactivo.Palabras clave: Inciensos, estados de trance, visiones, oráculos.about incenses, trance states and (some) goddesses.a perspective from ethnobotany...