Open Philosophy
January 1, 2022
Ignas Šatkauskas
1 citation
Viveiros de Castro's concept of comparison as ontology defines the ontological turn in anthropology, requiring philosophy to adopt a comparative strategy. Morten Pedersen interprets this turn as fulfilling an anthropological version of Husserl's phenomenological method, drawing phenomenology into dialogue with its critique by Speculative Realism. Amerindian perspectivism necessitates reconceptualizing perspective as a challenge to established discourses, particularly Kantian perspectivism and its offspring. It proposes cosmological deictics that hold a spatiality of the other's perspective, opposing Kant's system. Phenomenology, as a Kantian offspring, faces a predicament intertwined with the critique of correlationism from Speculative Realisms, but its synthetic character allows flexibility to traverse these charges. The article draws a comparative picture of dynamic co-evolution of recent thought, striving for a synthetic multiplicity permeated by a common perspectival thread.
Open Philosophy
January 1, 2025
Andrej Zwitter
Meaning arises not from individual minds or material objects alone but as an emergent property at the intersection of proto-meaning and epistemic frames. Drawing on Deguchi's relational ontology of the WE-turn and a meta-ontological perspective called Meta-Science, the argument critiques subjectivist and materialist accounts of meaning for their limitations. It introduces the concept of proto-meaning: non-epistemic relational structures underlying experience that bridge the non-epistemic and epistemic realms through interbeing. Meaning proper emerges from irreducible interdependencies between objects and their semblance to non-epistemic archetypal patterns engraved in all relationships. Meaning is thus layered, relational, and conditioned by ontological premises.
Open Philosophy
January 1, 2023
John Ó Maoilearca
The essay connects the mystical concept of "supernothing" with Henri Bergson's idea of nothingness as a movement in the making, using the film The Empty Man as an illustrative case. It argues that nothingness should be understood not as a static void but as a dynamic process of transmitting and receiving images in the brain, aligning with Bergson's theory that the brain does not store images but merely communicates movements. This "nihilistic" view of the brain—lacking positive content—rejects the ego-as-void model of Thomas Metzinger. Instead, it proposes a rethinking of nothingness and nihilism centered on a moving "supernothing," leading to an "ordinary" account of the supernatural: a process of "supernormalisation" that extracts the supernatural by natural means, without exotic or hyperbolic claims.
Open Philosophy
December 2, 2022
Gómez-Emilsson Andrés, Percy Chris
A thought experiment called the "Slicing Problem" challenges substrate-neutral computational theories of consciousness, such as Integrated Information Theory, by imagining a water-based computer whose gates and connections can be cleanly halved to create two identical computers running the same computation, with the slicing reversible via a switch without changing the amount of matter. The problem asks how different theories would count conscious entities as the switch toggles: a token interpretation yields two discrete conscious units, while a type interpretation may yield only one. Both options lead to either allowing consciousness-multiplying exploits or requiring ambiguous boundaries between conscious entities, raising philosophical and ethical questions. The authors discuss resolutions for theorists unwilling to accept such exploits and specify three features that may help physicalist theories navigate these issues.
Open Philosophy
January 1, 2022
W. Wiese
Attention can ground phenomenal unity in conscious experience, not just segregation. Some philosophers worry that attention's foreground-background structure divides experience rather than unifies it. This paper argues that experiencing oneself as controlling the focus of attention can create an experienced connection between foreground and background, thereby producing a form of phenomenal unity. The argument addresses a key objection to attentional accounts of phenomenal unity.
Open Philosophy
October 9, 2020
Atmanspacher Harald
The dual-aspect monist conjecture, originally proposed by Pauli and Jung, is presented in a formal framework to more precisely characterize the relationship between mind and matter. The paper outlines a basic psychophysically neutral reality from which mental and physical aspects derive, along with the correlations connecting these aspects. It compares this framework with other approaches to the mind–matter problem, identifying similarities and differences that may enable cross-fertilization between perspectives.
Open Philosophy
January 31, 2020
Theissen Gerd
Religious philosophy needs criteria for judging religious experience as traditions lose normative power. L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap, in their empirical critique, accepted two forms of religious experience described with optical and acoustic metaphors—denying their cognitive truth but affirming their life value. An extended concept of truth, covering all correspondence between experience and reality, can find truth in experiences of “transparency” and “resonance.” These differ from aesthetic experience in depth and cognitive interpretation, referring what is experienced to a final reality—a “summum ens,” the whole world, or something beyond. This ultimate reality unifies “being” and “value,” making everyday experiences transparent and motivating a resonant life.
Open Philosophy
October 6, 2019
A. Reggia James, E. Katz Garrett, P. Davis Gregory
A framework from recent philosophical work on consciousness, including cognitive phenomenology and mereological analysis, can help guide computational modeling. The authors argue that studying the computational mechanisms of working memory and cognitive control is especially likely to reveal computational correlates of consciousness. They describe their own computational models of human working memory and propose three such correlates: itinerant attractor sequences, top-down gating, and very fast weight changes. Current work tests whether these three correlates can support more complex models involving compositionality and basic causal inference. The authors conclude that computational models of working memory offer a promising path for understanding consciousness generally and for assessing the long-term potential of artificial consciousness.
Open Philosophy
March 3, 2019
Prentner Robert
The hard problem of consciousness—explaining why there is subjective experience—rests on three questionable assumptions about how consciousness is constituted and how it causally relates to the world. By rethinking these phenomena as internally-structured processes, the problem ceases to be an insurmountable obstacle for a science of consciousness. This approach aligns with early 20th-century philosophical projects that preceded contemporary philosophy of mind. The authors translate metaphysical problems of consciousness into mereological language, focusing on part-whole relationships. Although the project is philosophical, it connects to quantum mechanics, systems theory, and embodied cognition.