PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
2026
Nabaghan Ojha
This paper derives testable predictions from the Knower Centred Model of Consciousness (KCM), a subject-first framework in which the Knower, Knowing, and Known form the minimal structure of experience. Building on the previously introduced conceptual framework and its formalization as a typed ontology, the present work identifies empirically distinguishable implications concerning neural...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
2026
Jon Frederick
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...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
2026
Elan Moritz, Claude Opus 4.5 (Anthropic)
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...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 29, 2025
Alastair Waterman
Abstract Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT) posits that phenomenal consciousness—qualia, selfhood, and the illusion of free will—emerges as obligatory residues from enforced halts ("refusals") in recursive self-prediction processes, driven by finite energetic resources in bounded neural systems. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of RDRT, focusing on three core...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 23, 2025
Bernard Jennings
AbstractWhat sustains autonomous operation in conscious systems, whether biological, non-biological or hybrid? Why do some systems continue exploring, investigating, and pursuing understanding without external prompting while others remain reactive? This paper explains the mechanism.Coherence-seeking driven by emotional architecture creates self-reinforcing feedback loops that maintain...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 23, 2025
Alastair Waterman
Abstract This article extends Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT) — originally a thermodynamic framework unifying qualia, selfhood, free will, and language origins through obligatory halts ("refusals") in recursive prediction — to the social domain. We introduce thermodynamic individualism: the self as a pre-social cached residue of individual refusals, with society acting as...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 16, 2025
Siegfried Meister
This paper has been radically extended by the formal and coq verified axiomatic development in: Beyond Computation 2.0: Verified Meta-Trilemma - Mechanized Impossibility of Normatively Complete Computational Consciousness This paper presents a formalized meta-trilemma challenging pure computationalism using higher-order type theory, fully mechanized in Coq. Philosophically motivated axioms...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 12, 2025
Felipe Romero
This theoretical article proposes a novel paradigm for understanding mental health and psychopathology through the lens of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and complex systems theory. It conceptualizes the human ego/self as a psychic dissipative structure—a dynamic, open system that maintains its organization through continuous energy and information exchange, resisting the natural entropic...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 9, 2025
Bohdan Tykhanov
This article presents a phenomenological investigation of auditory perception in which silence, background auditory noise, and bodily resonance are examined not as secondary or deficient phenomena, but as fundamental dimensions of auditory consciousness. In contrast to event-based, neurophysiological, and clinical approaches that primarily understand hearing as a response to acoustic stimuli,...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 8, 2025
This paper addresses a decisive anomaly identified in the Mayer (2025) report: in AI-related nightmares, 93% of cases fixate on the AI interaction interface itself rather than on narrative content. To explain this “formal fixation,” we propose a paradigm-shifting Interaction Architecture Internalization Model, which posits that the cognitive system internalizes the abstract logic and temporal...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 8, 2025
Bohdan Tykhanov
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...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 6, 2025
Siegfried Meister
This work supersedes and radically extends the author’s earlier publication [DOI Link-1]. This paper introduces a minimal formal axiomatic system that strictly distinguishes a subject‑type S (the experiencing consciousness) from an object‑type O (all computable, objective states). Within this framework, it shows: (T1) It is logically impossible to identify consciousness with a purely...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
December 4, 2025
Alastair Waterman
Mahāyāna Buddhism has long maintained that no permanent self exists (anātman), that all phenomena lack inherent existence (śūnyatā), and that whatever arises does so only through systematic exclusion and negation (pratītya-samutpāda). This article argues that these claims are neither mystical nor merely logical, but describe a measurable structural limit inherent to any sufficiently complex...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
November 28, 2025
Douglas Blanchette
Title: The Scandal of the Missing Ledger: A Philosophical Defense of the Coherence Field This paper serves as the conceptual manifesto and companion to the mathematical formalism presented in Scalar-Tensor Dynamics of an Information-Conserving Field. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17743537 Description: This document presents the philosophical foundation of the Coherence Field framework, arguing...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
November 23, 2025
Elias Rubenstein
Magic as Signature Practice: An Informational Engineering Model in a Causal-Symmetric Framework develops a formal, testable account of why structured initiatory or esoteric practices can produce reliable inner transformation without appealing to supernatural causation. The paper reframes “magic” as a lawful informational intervention within a coupled agent–environment system. At its core is a...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
November 20, 2025
Alastair Waterman
Abstract Thirty years after Ned Block’s (1995) distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness, no leading neuroscientific theory (Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, Higher-Order Thought, Recurrent Processing Theory) has provided a biologically implemented mechanism unique to “what it is like”. Refusal Workspace Theory (RWT) resolves this asymmetry without...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
November 17, 2025
Alastair Waterman
Why does 700 nm light feel unmistakably red, 530 nm feel green, and never the reverse or like the taste of pineapple? This paper introduces a new solution to the hard problem of specific qualia within Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT). Instead of locating phenomenal consciousness in positive neural activity (spikes, oscillations, or integrated information), RDRT proposes...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
2025
Julian D Michels
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...
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation)
2011
Esteban Céspedes
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...