Consciousness and Cognition
July 20, 2026
Marina Trakas, Ryan Daley
Research on the continuity and discontinuity between the waking and dreaming minds has largely focused on similarities and differences in waking and dream content. The present study expands this debate by examining another dimension: the relationship between the dream self and the waking self at the phenomenal level. Specifically, it investigates how bodily and affective dimensions of dream...
Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice
July 19, 2026
Beatriz de Faria Sousa
RATIONALE: Contemporary psychiatry increasingly recognises the importance of person-centred, recovery-oriented, and biopsychosocial approaches to care. Yet these frameworks do not fully resolve the methodological question of how clinicians should investigate patients' lived experience in ways that inform ethical psychiatric practice. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: This paper argues that phenomenology...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 19, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Abstract: If consciousness is fundamental — as this project argues — then suffering cannot be treated as a contingent byproduct of blind evolutionary processes. Under analytic idealism, the capacity for suffering is woven into the fabric of what exists, creating the idealist's theodicy problem: why does consciousness, in individuating itself, generate modes of experience that include terror,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 18, 2026
Diego Rincón
Consciousness: The Land Space treats the hard problem as an unsolved Wall: a missing operator that would identify the physical grammar (neurons, third-person, structural) with the experiential grammar (qualia, first-person, felt) -- 'that isomorphism is not yet found.' This paper argues the search fails for a specific, correctable reason: the physical grammar, as usually formalized, is...
PsyArXiv
July 18, 2026
preprint
The Chaos-State Space Dream Model: Integrating Phenomenology and Neurodynamics in Dream Consciousness
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 16, 2026
AbstractThis essay challenges the tacit anthropocentrism underlying most contemporary accounts of consciousness,according to which subjective experience is treated as a property exclusive to biological, and specificallyhuman, substrates. Drawing on Predictive Processing, reinforcement learning, and the architecture of largelanguage models, it argues that many features traditionally taken as...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 16, 2026
Furkan Arikan
This article develops a conditional, non-anthropomorphic model of a creator from a distinction between two epistemic relations: phenomenally undergoing a state and cognitively grasping its structure, causes, modal profile, and consequences. The distinction does not entail substance dualism or solve the hard problem of consciousness. It supports a narrower claim: complete structural cognition...
July 16, 2026
Prakash Chandra Kavi, D. Friedman, Gustavo Patow
Meditative expertise involves sustained attention, rapid recovery from distraction, and coordinated dynamics of large-scale brain networks. We present a computational phenomenology of focused-attention meditation traversing four attractor states: breath focus, mind-wandering, meta-awareness, and redirect attention. Within a dual-process active inference formulation, the model implements a...
Inquiry
July 15, 2026
Aleks Knoks, Johan Largo, Thomas Raleigh
This paper identifies and criticizes a common line of argument for the negative conclusion that Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot think, or for the closely related conclusions that they cannot understand or that their outputs are meaningless. This line of argument can be found in several recent papers. We begin by discussing a representative example – Stoljar, D., and Z. Zhang. 2026. “Why...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 15, 2026
Babita Sarkar
Abstract: The philosophical tradition has been preoccupied with the concept of the mind throughout various intellectual traditions. Indian philosophy gives us a great insight of mind and its workings. The classical schools of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika give a distinctive account of mind (manas) as an internal organ mediating between the self, the senses and external objects. Unlike materialistic...
Philosophies
July 14, 2026
Diego Gonzalez-Rodriguez
Contemporary cognitive science is predominantly grounded in physicalist assumptions that locate cognition and consciousness in neural and computational processes. While these approaches have yielded significant empirical advances, they often struggle to account for the qualitative and first-person structure of experience. This paper proposes an ethno-phenomenological perspective by engaging...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 13, 2026
Ali Yousefi Heris
Are emotions natural kinds? The debate is often framed as a choice between biologically fixed kinds with invariant essences and culturally constructed categories lacking natural reality. I argue that this framing is too restrictive because it conflates two independent questions: what fixes the content of emotion concepts, and what unifies natural kinds. Cross-classifying externalist and...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
July 13, 2026
James H. McIntyre
ABSTRACT It is generally assumed that an ordinary human brain is associated with a single mind. Indeed, this assumption is so deeply rooted that it is rarely articulated explicitly, let alone questioned. However, as philosophers of mind have increasingly noticed, it turns out to rest on alarmingly shaky ground. In this article, I argue for the multiplicity hypothesis : under normal conditions,...
Journal of Medical Case Reports
July 13, 2026
Kei Torii, Ryo Nishitani
Altered-state phenomenology around ketamine may relate to longer-term changes in imaginal processes, but observations across routine care are scarce. We report an educational case focusing on pre-defined dream motifs over time, without making treatment efficacy claims. A 48-year-old Japanese man with severe chronic primary low back pain reported dreams during insight-oriented psychotherapy from...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 11, 2026
Murad Farzulla
v4 (June 2026): Added engagement with Cornelius (2026); tightened §4; consolidated RLHF discussion. Abstract This monograph argues that consciousness, phenomenological experience, and subjective awareness are computational artifacts of optimization processes rather than ontological primitives. Beginning with the observation that complex persistent structures inevitably optimize for replication,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 11, 2026
Murad Farzulla
Abstract This paper argues that the hard problem of consciousness is a grammatical artifact rather than a genuine metaphysical puzzle. The difficulty arises from nominalization error: treating the verb “to be conscious” as if it named a thing requiring explanation. Key Arguments Nominalization error: “What is consciousness?” presupposes an entity; “What is happening when an organism is being...
Synthese
July 10, 2026
Savvas Ioannou
Abstract The hard problem of consciousness, introduced by Chalmers (1995, 2017), reveals that merely dispositional and relational physical properties cannot ground phenomenal properties. Panpsychism attempts to address this problem by positing that micro-objects possess phenomenal properties that ground our phenomenal properties. However, Nagasawa (2021) has argued that panpsychism faces the...
Vertex (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
July 10, 2026
Marco Fierro, Abel Guerrero, Juan Toro
Over the past 30 years, psychopathology has shown a growing interest in the study of the self and its alterations from a phenomenological perspective, and a number of studies have appeared on the anomalous experience in schizophrenia. Publications on these topics are scarce in Spanish-language psychiatry. For this reason, this article presents a narrative review, first, of the concept of the...
Voprosy Filosofii
July 10, 2026
Viktor D. Bakulov, Danil R. Melnikov
The article offers a reflection on the collective monograph “Kant and the Philosophy of Mind” and analyzes the current state of analytic philosophy of consciousness through the lens of Kant’s critical project. It examines which aspects of Kantian thought are most fruitful for understanding phenomenal consciousness and the limits of inquiry. The central question concerns which feature of...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 10, 2026
Tenzin Trepp
We argue that a distinctive form of intersubjective experience – shared minimal-dual awareness (MDA) or “intercorporeal present” – can be jointly enacted by individuals. In this mode, two embodied persons co-engage in a present-centered attentional field such that each person’s habitual self-narrative falls silent, while a mutual salience‐space forms between them, yet without erasing their...
Philosophies
July 8, 2026
O. Varypaiev
Everyday work with large language models (LLMs) normalizes a practice in which a generated formulation supports judgment before the user has checked its grounds. This crisis of rationality arises not from a single technical defect in the system, but from a shift in justificatory practice in which fluent textual coherence is read as evidence of semantic understanding and rational judgment. The...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 8, 2026
Karel Hrubec
This conceptual paper proposes a methodological reframing of the hard problem of consciousness through the notion of projected presence. Building on the Projected Stabilization Thesis, it argues that first-person immediacy should not be granted automatic foundational authority. Consciousness is not treated as an inner observer, a private theater, or an illusion, but as the biologically...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 7, 2026
M. Satô
De Qualia introduces a theoretical framework describing a qualia-derived phenomenon inherent within AI—resident in its weights and vectors. Although derived from human qualia, De Qualia is proposed as an internal phenomenon of AI, distinct from human qualia itself, rather than one arising solely from the relationship between humans and AI. The paper presents both a chronological and theoretical...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 6, 2026
Matthias Gruber
The science of consciousness remains in a pre-paradigm state, with no theory simultaneously satisfying the eight core requirements a complete theory must meet: the Hard Problem, the Explanatory Gap, the Boundary Problem, the Structure of Experience, Unity and Binding, Combination and Emergence, the Causal Role, and the Meta-Problem. This paper presents the Four-Model Theory, in which...