Over the past 30 years, there has been an increasing scientific and philosophical attention to what contemplative and spiritual traditions for millennia have known as pure consciousness, free from concrete empirical content and egoic self-awareness. The article addresses whether meditation is the best candidate for the research of pure consciousness, as Thomas Metzinger claims in his book The...
Cosmopsychism attributes subjectivity to the universe as a whole. What might that subjectivity be like? There are differing opinions in the philosophical literature, ranging from ?simply a mess? to highly advanced. Mystical experience, if it genuinely brings unity or identity with the universe, could provide some insight. The evidence points to conscious mind of extraordinary quality and...
The rise of science over the past four centuries has undeniably brought with it a wealth of extraordinary intellectual and practical achievements, but it has also arguably contributed to a host of serious and worsening societal problems including destructive commercial exploitation of our planet?s natural resources with its cumulative negative effects on the environment and global climate;...
This prolegomenon sketches issues central to a philosophy of meditation, develops only some of them here, and refers readers to other works where some not covered here are addressed. A complete philosophy of meditation would include accounts of: the differences between meditative practices, states, and traits; religion-based meditative traditions; novel contemporary meditative practices and...
This paper aims to achieve two complementary goals. The first goal is to outline and motivate a general account of spirituality along the lines of the so-called perennial philosophy. From this perspective, the essence of spirituality lies in establishing an orientation towards, and an inspirational connection to, a cosmic consciousness where the latter serves both as the ground of all...
Scholars have argued that we have good reason to defend the Epicurean view of the validity of sensation on the basis of a contextual reading of the content of perception. More specifically, it has been suggested that we can respond to skeptical challenges by acknowledging the contextual character of perceptual content and by linking its truth to the conditions under which it occurs. By...
In the last decades of the 20th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, mature and reach their pinnacles by analysing, each from their own disciplinary perspective, two of the same core phenomena: that of media as the environment, transmitter and creator of stimuli, and that of embodied human mind as the stimuli receiver, interpreter, experiencer, and also how both are...
I will argue that accounts of mineness and pre-reflective self-awareness can be helpful to panpsychists in solving the combination problems. A common strategy in answering the subject combination problem in panpsychism is to deflate the subject, eliminating or reducing subjects to experience. Many modern panpsychist theories are deflationist or endorse deflationist accounts of subjects, such as...