May 30, 2026
Joerg Fingerhut, Corinna Kühnapfel
preprint
Aesthetic emotions such as being moved, interest, and wonder play a central role in how people engage with artworks. Within the embodied-enactive framework of the mind, these emotions structure the exploratory activities that artworks afford through their distinctive embodied cognitive styles. They also contribute critically to evaluating artworks as artworks. Exploration and evaluation are closely intertwined in aesthetic engagement. By bringing empirical work on embodiment in aesthetics into dialogue with enactive theories of art, the chapter advances a critical neuro-aesthetics and a better understanding of aesthetic emotions as an under-explored class of mental processes within philosophy of mind and 4E cognition.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 29, 2026
Gerd Leidig
Active Inference is often interpreted as a theory where the brain builds internal models of an external world, but this article argues it is better understood as enactive inference: a theory of embodied, affectively regulated coupling between organism and environment. Free-energy minimization cannot be reduced to passive sensory-surprise reduction, as shown by the dark-room problem, but must relate to expected free energy, exploration, viability, and biological normativity. Introducing processual perspectivism as an ontology of perspective-bearing life, the article posits that mind is not an inner representational object but the perspectival form of embodied self-organization, and consciousness is the intrinsic, affectively structured perspective of a living system regulating its openness to the world.
Философия науки
May 29, 2026
О.а. Власова
The paper analyzes Thomas Fuchs' neurophenomenology as a case study in interdisciplinarity. It reconstructs the history of philosophy-psychiatry dialogue as one of antinomianism, identifies enactivism as a basis for overcoming that antinomianism, and distinguishes two waves of enactivism in psychiatry. It clarifies enactivist commitments in modern neurophenomenology and shows their relevance to the hard problem of consciousness. The analysis covers Fuchs' critiques of neurobiologism, reductionism, and representationalism, reconstructs the structure of his neurophenomenology centered on embodiment, and discusses pathological transformations of consciousness as a field of intentionality—changes in corporeality, temporality, and social relations. Fuchs' relational psychiatry and polydisciplinarity are highlighted as especially productive, and the model's potential for integrating helping professions and connecting with Russian neuropsychology and psychotherapy is noted.
Synthese
May 28, 2026
Juan Diego Bogotá
The minimal self, often described as the pre-reflective sense that experience is 'mine,' is not neutral about the body but is fundamentally embodied and agential. Evidence from multisensory integration and interoceptive processing shows that neurocognitive mechanisms for bodily ownership and presence span brain and body, grounding the quality of mineness. Phenomenologically, the lived body manifests as an absolute 'here' inseparable from a practical, outward orientation toward the world. This orientation corresponds to background agency: a passive, pre-reflective bodily self-awareness captured by the 'I can.' Enactive and dynamical approaches suggest that processes underlying background agency and bodily ownership are entangled and co-emergent, giving rise to minimal selfhood as an embodied and agential subjectivity.
PsyArXiv
May 27, 2026
Andrew Robert Gallimore, Niffe Hermansson, Donald D Hoffman
preprint
High-dose DMT experiences often involve encounters with seemingly autonomous entities, usually considered hallucinations. This paper explores an alternative hypothesis using the conscious realism framework, where reality is a network of conscious agents and perception is a limited interface. DMT may perturb this interface, allowing access to normally imperceptible agents. The framework distinguishes hallucinations from experiences with stable, structured dynamics consistent with agent interactions. Testable predictions and experiments are proposed to assess if DMT experiences can be externally constrained or show intersubjective correlations, with implications for understanding perception and reality.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
May 26, 2026
N. Shadlen Michael
Conscious thought does not require a special neural mechanism but arises from the same representations used in nonconscious decision-making. Nonconscious thoughts are structured as interrogations that produce provisional intentions guiding action without awareness, relying on persistent neural representations that encode both potential actions and the questions giving them meaning. These states may preserve source-sensitive structure supporting minimal experiential organization. Conscious thought emerges when such a state is reformatted for potential report to another mind or oneself, recruiting theory of mind and narrative structure and placing its content in a shared space. This proposal bridges nonconscious decision mechanisms to phenomenal consciousness, placing part of the hard problem within empirical reach.
Critical humanistic social theory.
May 24, 2026
Hongyu Cao, Weixiang Gan
The pineal gland's well-established biological function is to regulate sleep-wake cycles by secreting melatonin in response to darkness, but popular claims linking it to mystical experiences, DMT production, or a 'third eye' remain unsupported by mainstream neuroscience. This review argues that the concept of 'hyperdimensional wisdom' should be studied not as literal knowledge from higher dimensions but as a framework for understanding subjective experiences, symbolic cognition, and cultural narratives. Pineal calcification is common and its effects on sleep and cognition are variable. A more productive research direction would translate such wisdom into investigable phenomena of consciousness and meaning-making.
International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research
May 23, 2026
Plamen Nikolov
The neurophenomenological theory of time integrates the phenomenological structure of temporal experience with findings from cognitive neuroscience. It externally manifests defined neurobiological temporal attributes while maintaining a description close to actual temporal experience. Neurophenomenology anthropocentrically orients the categorical isomorphism of temporality. The neurobiological foundation allows formal description of nonlinear dynamics, which articulates the nature of actual temporal experience analyzable through phenomenological reduction.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 21, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Reports of awareness without content, ego, or subject-object structure converge across contemplative traditions, 5-MeO-DMT administration, and near-death experiences. This convergence poses a structural challenge beyond the hard problem: dominant physicalist models presuppose the subject-object architecture that these reports describe as absent. The essay finds that the most rigorous physicalist accommodation preserves its framework by reinterpreting the phenomenology rather than explaining it. The experience carries a transformative signature—those who encounter it stop treating awareness as dependent on its contents—a shift following from the phenomenological structure itself, not from emotional intensity or cultural expectation.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 20, 2026
Keisuke Suzuki
Altered states of consciousness—such as hallucinations, psychedelic experiences, and ego dissolution—differ qualitatively, but no unified computational framework describes what varies and along which dimensions. This paper proposes the C × G × D framework, drawing on three functional roles in deep neural networks: a Classifier (C) that extracts features from sensory input, a Generator (G) that synthesises internal representations, and a Discriminator (D) that judges whether a representation originates externally or internally. Phenomenological differences across altered states are redescribed as variations in objective functions, constraints, and thresholds of these components.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 19, 2026
Anatolii Mukha
A fundamental ontological model of consciousness is developed, introducing the χ‑Absolute as a limit-level operator-geometric structure that grounds the possibility and form of any manifested experience. χ‑consciousness is presented not as a derivative property of biological or physical systems but as a universal ontological capacity of reality for self-manifestation, structured through χ‑topology and χ‑operator relations. The χ‑Absolute functions as the primordial mode of being in which the distinction between subject, object, and law has not yet arisen, while the possibility of their differentiation is already present. Consciousness and reality are co-constituted through a unified χ‑structure, overcoming traditional dualisms and offering a unified picture where consciousness is a universal mode of being.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 14, 2026
Marcelo Lopes
Philosophical approaches to psychopharmacology have addressed conceptual, explanatory, and moral questions but have largely overlooked the experiential aspects of psychopharmacological intervention. Phenomenology, as a philosophical discipline providing rigorous first-person descriptions of mental illness experience, has profoundly influenced psychiatry but has rarely been applied to psychopharmacology. This paper argues for a mutually enlightening relationship between phenomenology and psychopharmacology, suggesting this view can lead to more sophisticated psychopharmacological research and practice while opening phenomenological inquiry into how experiential structures can be artificially altered.
Erkenntnis
May 14, 2026
Yaron Wolf
Whether experience itself unfolds in time is debated. This paper defends the extensional account of temporal consciousness, where the temporal properties we directly experience match those of experience itself. After showing that introspection alone cannot settle the question, a new argument is developed based on introspection into and the veridicality conditions of awareness of bodily actions. The paper critiques a prominent version of the extensional view that gives temporally extended experiences explanatory and metaphysical priority over their temporal parts. Attention to facets of agential awareness suggests that extended experience should instead be understood as processual in its temporal character.
Religious Studies
May 14, 2026
Ricardo Sousa Silvestre
Jīva Gosvāmī's sixteenth-century Bhedābheda Vedānta can be interpreted as a distinctive form of priority cosmopsychism, termed śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism. This metaphysical reconstruction uses contemporary philosophy of mind vocabulary to articulate key aspects of Jīva's thought. The paper examines implications for the causal exclusion problem and the explanatory gap problem, reframed as the individuation problem, and addresses objections including a cosmopsychist formulation of the Vedāntic problem of imperfection.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 10, 2026
Advaita Vedanta, a non-dualistic school of classical Indian philosophy systematized by Śaṅkara, offers a sophisticated framework for understanding consciousness, self, and reality. Modern consciousness studies, an interdisciplinary field, has increasingly engaged with non-Western philosophical resources to address the hard problem of consciousness. This article examines the dialogue between Advaita Vedanta and modern consciousness studies, analyzing peer-reviewed scholarship from 2010 to 2025. The analysis identifies four dimensions: conceptual mapping between Advaitic categories and contemporary philosophy of mind, engagement with the hard problem through non-dualistic frameworks, empirical investigation of Vedantic contemplative practices, and methodological and ethical considerations in cross-cultural work. The dialogue is genuinely productive when conducted with philosophical rigour and respect for distinct frameworks.
Journal of Transcendental Philosophy
May 8, 2026
Hannes Gustav Melichar
Rational normativity can be integrated into nature without reduction or dualism by drawing on Thomas Nagel's critique of reductive naturalism and Husserl's refutation of psychologism. The paper develops this through the philosophy of life, focusing on Hans Jonas's conception of the organism and the enactive notion of operational closure. While enactivism offers a non-reductive account of living organization, it remains metaphysically underdetermined; its core commitments are best understood within an Aristotelian metaphysics of life, where substantial form and formal causation ground a realist ontology of life–mind continuity. This Aristotelian naturalism situates cognition and rationality within nature without eliminating their normative character, while phenomenological analysis remains indispensable for explicating the first-personal and normative dimensions of mind.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 2, 2026
Justin Aaron Moll
When people lose their ability to make sense of the world, they experience phenomena ranging from extreme crises or epiphanies to everyday learning, frustration, or indifference. This paper integrates phenomenological philosophy (especially post-Heideggerian traditions) with neurocognitive and neurophysiological research on predictive processing and enactivism to create a unified model of such breakdowns. The resulting model describes a U-shaped distribution: extreme breakdowns challenge fundamental dimensions of sensemaking and become either crises or epiphanies, while less fundamental disruptions produce a continuum of learning, indifference, and frustration. The concept of response—how one reacts to a disruptive event—determines whether the experience enriches or problematizes sensemaking.