Worlds of Consciousness in the Context of Multiverse Conceptions

Human consciousness and animal psyche comprise a plurality of worlds, not merely different states such as sleep, wakefulness, or altered states, but also the interweaving of perception, mental activity, visual thinking, intuition, embodied and situational determination, individual phenomenal experience, environmental affordances, intersubjectivity, empathic experience of self as other, and meaning-making in cognition and creativity. Drawing on enactivism, philosophical phenomenology, and complexity theory, the article argues that epistemological constructivism further supports the idea that the external and internal are cyclically determined and not sharply distinguishable, blurring the lines between perceived, conceivable, partly fictitious, and real.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The article discusses the idea of the plurality of worlds of human consciousness and animal psyche from the perspective of the conception of enactivism, philo­sophical phenomenology and complexity theory. It is shown that the multiversal­ity of consciousness can be associated not only with its different states (sleep, wakefulness, extreme and altered states, personal and transpersonal experience), but also with the interweaving of perceptual and mental activity, the work of vi­sual thinking and various types of intuition, embodied and situational determina­tion of consciousness, the individual coloring of the phenomenal experience of consciousness, the ways of embedding individual cognitive worlds into an en­vironment that provides certain opportunities (affordances), the pairing of indi­vidual worlds with the emergence of intersubjectivity, the empathic experience of oneself as another (others), with the recognition and creation of meanings in cognitive and creative activity. The currently popular position of epistemolo­gical constructivism adds additional emphasis to the justification of the unpre­giveness and cyclical determination of the external and internal for human con­sciousness, the relative indistinguishability of the perceived, conceivable, partly even fictitious and the real.